‘The Earth Doesn’t Tell its Secrets’ - His father once said

Overview

With an emphasis on text, Noor Abuarafeh works with various mediums, but she considers each to be another form of a novel. In her SB13 project, she mines the unique registers of mendacities, rumour, memory, dream and folklore.
‘The Earth Doesn’t Tell Its Secrets’ - His father once said (2017) is a novel that revolves around the narrator’s fascination with the long-running myth of Palestine’s first museum. After each attempt to visit such a museum ends in failure, each proposal seems to float between fact and fiction. ‘The first Palestinian museum’ has assumed different forms throughout the years—a collection with no space, a temporary room that would hold a single artwork, a museum conceived as an artwork and a museum building with no collection. After all the time spent obsessing over the museum, the narrator comes to see its future in the living rooms of family, friends and acquaintances.
The publication assembles material based on collections found in the houses of people Abuarafeh knows. During visits conducted for the novel’s development, she found the stories people told about their collections more interesting than the objects themselves. The collections described in The Earth Doesn’t Tell Its Secrets are shaped by the artist’s meddling with those she found as well as the creation of new ones inspired by subjective impressions and flights of fancy.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.