Dear Laila

First shown in May 2022, the origins of this sound-based, interactive installation for one person at a time, lie in a story of an intimate nature. It is that of the Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa who, when asked about his childhood home by his five-year-old daughter, decided to give her an idea of what it looked like by creating a model of the building, situated in the heart of the Yarmouk refugee camp, in Damascus. Dear Laila enables us to share, via the mapping out of a family’s destiny, the experience of displacement and resistance that is part and parcel of life in Palestine. Though it no longer exists, the reconstruction of this house, together with its memories, images and sensory details bring back to life the ordeal of exile and the daily reality of a country at war.