The Salmon Leapt Toward Babel

The title of this work is drawn from the Irish language name of the town of Leixlip in Ireland, where Al-Rawi grew up, and which translates to ‘The Leap of the Salmon’. Every year, salmon battle against the current to swim upstream to spawn at their birthplace. This film combines archive photographs taken by Al-Rawi as a child in Jordan, with 8mm and 16mm film footage from Leixlip. Using vignettes of memories voiced by Al-Rawi in Irish and Arabic which speak of half-remembered moments, the film explores memory, displacement, and identity.

“As the film unfolds, the voiceover continually flips between languages and memories, gesturing toward traumas, while the images traverse two very different locales and times in the artist’s life. Nothing is ever quite still; even the still photographs, refilmed, appear to quiver with movement. The question of the narrator’s identity remains fluid and uncertain throughout… Yet from within the film, a visceral sense of clarity and cohesion pervades, its linguistic displacements do point toward difference, yet ultimately what they achieve is an overall aura of synthesis. Across three languages and two places, it is one human being who speaks.”

Richard Ashrowan, curator of ‘Displacements’, MExIndex 2020 screening programme.