Amer Albarzawi
Hybrid Memory - Installation - 2024
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 26
In Hybrid Memory I draw the duality of my existence since my displacement from Damascus in 2010: tangible memory alongside blurry memory within digital worlds. This video installation captures a home that spans multiple time zones — from Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul to Paris — rooted in daily video calls with family. Through a box of disassembled screen filters, viewers gaze into a space of fragmented memories, representing my scattered family, brought together only in this digital abode.
The artwork transforms screens from mere projectors to windows into lives lived in solitude, reflecting the intermittent and sometimes blurred transmissions that connect us. It is a testament to communication across distance and an account of events attended virtually—a wedding, an engagement, the growth of beards, the intense absence of loss.
As technology blurs the lines between the present and the actor, Hybrid Memory raises the question of existence beyond the screen, where my family and I become guardians of a divided but profound reality. This work is an intimate record of digital echoes, an artistic investigation into the medium that supports our fragmented union.
Amer Albarzawi
Amer Al-Barzawi, born in 1987 in Damascus, Syria, explores identity and exile through multimedia art. Starting as a gymnast, he expanded to dance and film, winning awards like the Jury Prize at the Toronto Urban Film Festival. Now at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in France, he develops installations examining the interplay between digital and natural memories in the context of migration.
