Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream

Overview

A film crew disappears in Sharjah while scouting locations for a film based on Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novel, Men in the Sun. All that remains are their photographs of possible sites for the film, and a scream that was voiced in an empty, dimly lit alley.

This project attempts to find the missing through a reconstruction of their journey and the voice that lingers in the alley. Photographs, which were e-mailed to the producer without any further details, are organised on a wall in a timeline chronicling the crew’s movement through the city. While the scream is examined as evidence, no one is certain whose scream it was: that of a member of the crew or one of the many witnesses to their disappearance.

It is said that the crew is still roaming the city, scouting for public spaces, but as soon as they enter public space, they become invisible; this is why they will never be found. Was the scream a cry of fear or was it a demand for visibility? Is the demand for visibility in public space a demand for political existence?


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation