marratein, marratein

marratein, marratein is a film about two cities: Detroit and Beirut. It is a film about belonging, diasporas, and the uncertainty of returning to a place to which one has never actually been. Shot on Super 8 to evoke the feeling of home movies, with voice-over excerpts from Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, the film comments on the performance of tradition and the struggle of finding or creating one’s own sense of identity and cultural belonging at a time when such things have taken on renewed political and social significance.

Marratein means “twice” in Arabic, and this film doubles over itself as a palindrome—a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward. It highlights a perspective of Detroit’s Arab American community and speaks to this city’s large immigrant and diaspora populations.

The film is an exploration of affect and inherited trauma that seeks to linger in a fruitful space of uncertainty and unease. It is unclear which footage was shot in which place—Detroit or Beirut, and the two cities are placed in productive tension not to compare them to each other, but rather to meld them in a way that questions the very distinctiveness and specificity of not only place, but our memories and experiences of place.

Date: December 7, 2019
Partner: Arab American National Museum
Location: 13624 Michigan Ave, Dearborn, MI 48126
Coordinates: 42.32216, -83.17657

our thoughts and actions are with beirut

On August 4, two explosions occurred at the port of the city of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The second explosion was extremely powerful, and caused at least 177 deaths, 6,000 injuries, and US$10–15 billion in property damage, leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. The event was linked to about 2,750 tonnes (3,030 short tons; 2,710 long tons) of ammonium nitrate – equivalent to around 1.2 kilotons of TNT (5.0 TJ) – which had been confiscated by the Lebanese government from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus and then stored in the port without proper safety measures for six years.

Thank you to Julia for putting together some opportunities for us to show our support for the people of Beirut including its artist community.

Support the Arab Image Foundation

Want to support other artist orgs in Beirut? This is the GoFundMe link https://gf.me/u/ynxufk

About the Artist

Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist. She received her PhD in media anthropology and critical media practice from Harvard University and an MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her artistic work is grounded in long-term engagements with people and places and is often a critical part of her academic pursuits exploring labor and the body, the materiality of postindustrial urban landscapes, the senses, processes of creative knowledge production, and housing and the built environment. Her audio and video work has shown at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, MoMA PS1, the New York Library for Performing Arts, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico, The International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is a recipient of a Dan David Prize for plastic arts. Yezbick is the founding Editor of Sensate, an online journal for experiments in critical media practice, and co-directs Mothlight Microcinema. She lives and works in Detroit.