Artist Simone Fattal on the hope and horror refugees face crossing the sea

The artist talks about the inspirations behind her latest exhibition, running in Venice until November 5

Simone Fattal in her studio in Paris. Photo: Christophe Beauregard

It’s a sunny weekend in Venice where Simone Fattal is showcasing her work alongside artists Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano in a exhibition called Thus Waves Come In Pairs.

Located in an airy deconsecrated church in the Castello district, taken over by the TBA21–Academy in 2019, the title comes from the poem Sea and Fog by her partner, the late poet and painter Etel Adnan.

The exhibition, curated by Barbara Casavecchia, is an exploration of the Mediterranean inspired by a conversation she and Adnan had in their Parisian home in 2021 a few months before Adnan's death.

In this conversation, Syrian artist Fattal and Lebanese-American poet and painter Adnan speak of the history of the Mediterranean and what it means to each of them. For Adnan, there were "many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical ... the personal, the one we swim in".

Fattal, meanwhile, talks about the Mediterranean as a “sea of hope” for those fleeing conflict, but adds that “many times what they find on this journey is risk, rejection, drowning, death”.

Here in the serene and bright baroque Church of San Lorenzo, now known as Ocean Space, it’s hard to conjure up that sense of horror.

“The sea is right there, though, behind this wall,” says Fattal, with a tone of gravity.

In one of the empty niches above the altar, there’s a bright yellow abstract figure of a young boy; in the other stands a mirrored wall and an oval canvas with the exhortation "Know Thyself" in ancient Greek, taken from the Temple of Apollo in Delphi and “linking the church to a former temple”.

On the floor there are a series of pink spheres made of Murano glass, a beautiful interpretation in clay of bricole, the large wooden posts bound together that guide boats through the Venetian lagoon, and two monumental figures in clay representing Mayya and Ghaylan, lovers celebrated in classical Arab poetry and Islamic folklore – in the Arabian Gulf, the pair are known for being involved in the pearl trade. They stand at once separated and united by a ‘golden sea’ of glass tiles.

The four unglazed earthenware posts, or bricole – fired at 1,200°C and then cooled in a wood-fired kiln over several days – are a panoply of brown and red, achieved without any addition of colour.

“The heat brings out the colour of the different elements in the clay – stone, fire, iron – so you have all these different hues,” says Fattal, pointing to the lighter parts of the pieces where the posts were resting in the kiln.

“It’s the same clay, it's just how the heat hits. And this is what’s so interesting about a wood kiln because you don't have these hues when you fire in an electric oven.”

By contrast the pink glass pearls look smooth and pretty from a distance, yet up close, you can see that each features a short segment of a 14th-century poem called Contrasto della Zerbitana (The Conflict with the Woman of Djerba).

This poem speaks of a verbal duel between a sailor and the mother of the woman he has mistreated on the island of Djerba. It is also a poem written in Sabir, a lingua franca, or hybrid language, made up of Italian, Arabic, French and Spanish words that was once spoken by merchants, prisoners, pirates and slaves in all Mediterranean ports between the 11th and 19th centuries.

“I happened to read a book about this and was fascinated because this language linked all the people of the Mediterranean but it's something that’s been forgotten,” says Fattal. Unlike the lingua franca of today – English – which speaks of British colonialism and domination over countless lands, Sabir was a language without a territory.

“Half of the Mediterranean is Arab, from North Africa all the way to Turkey. So Arabs and Europeans live together,” Fattal also points out. It’s this sense of the Mediterranean as both a whole and a fractured geo-politicised entity that Fattal is gently probing here, warning against forgetting communal histories.

Fattal believes people have forgotten this diversity, because they don't read anymore. She, on the other hand, devours books and publishes them through her own independent imprint Post-Apollo Press – finding inspiration for most of her work in the pages of poems and epics. “I am thinking of Socrates, The Epic of Gilgamesh, among others,” she explains.

Despite Fattal having been born in Syria, the birthplace of glass, the Venice show is the first time she has worked with it. “I adore glass,” she says, enthusiastically recalling a friend in Damascus who showed her how it was blown.

But clay is still her great love. “Pottery has been with man from the beginning … it's his counterpart somehow. It comes from the earth.” As a material, clay is “alive and fragile, you are directly in contact with it, kneading it and making it with your hands, whereas glass is one step removed”. Yet, there are commonalities between clay and glass: “Both go through fire. Well clay has two firings, which means you get twice as many possibilities of failing,” she says, with a laugh.

Fattal is disarmingly honest and open. When asked if her home country was always on Adnan’s mind, she replies: “Until her last minute.”

“She would have loved to go back but couldn't travel anymore. She would read the Lebanese newspapers online and get news flashes in the middle of the day and in between she would ask me if things were getting better there...” Fattal tails off and is visibly upset.

Fattal says she has started going again to Lebanon regularly “but that everyone is in a bad situation there. After more than 30 years of problems and war, they are exhausted. They have a new problem every day. It just goes on and goes on.”

Fattal and Adnan left Beirut in 1980 due to the Civil War and moved to California, before Paris, but not before weathering five long years of upheaval and danger.

“I really didn’t want to leave,” she says. “But everything was a challenge. Everything was at your own risk. At any moment you could have been shot and died.”

The title of her contribution to the exhibition – Sempre il mare, uomo libero amerai (Free man, you will love the sea endlessly) – was taken from a Baudelaire poem called L’homme et la mer (Man and the sea).

“I chose it because it spoke of the sea and because it spoke of freedom,” she says. “It is all we want. We want to be free to think, to work and to travel.”

Thus Waves Come In Pairs is showing at Ocean Space, Venice until November 5. For more information, visit: www.tba21.org/thuswavescomeinpairs