Art Worlds: Venice special

Your pavilion that was at Venice over this year, May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep Over Stones, is an exceptionally evocative and sensitive pavilion.

And you walk into this ground level stretch of ancient decorative clay tiles and their designs have been drawn from an array of sort of damaged and destroyed sites across the Middle East.

And, you know, apart from the sort of beauty of this pavilion, it also has a strikingly heavy feel.

And I thought that that was because you sort of realised that actually many of these designs we will never have actual physical access to again.

Donna, I want to start by asking you how you built up this repertoire of motifs that you've used.

Well, I've been researching kind of the history of destruction across the Arab world and even North Africa for quite a while.

I think since 2019, I was looking at a lot of the archives and the different heritage sites that have been destroyed since the Arab Spring.

And it really started off by looking at non-human violence.

You know, of course, there's all sorts of destruction, especially now with global warming.

You do have you know, flash floods and hurricanes and stuff like that that are destroying monuments.

But for me, I was really looking at this very specific ideology of this cultural cleansing that mounds down towards heritage sites.

And it's something I've been researching for a really long time.

So when we came to making the pavilion, it kind of felt natural to start with that.

And the process of it is quite varied, you know, in places like Syria and Iraq, we do have kind of watchdogs and UNESCO and World Monuments Fund, all these different sort of NGOs that are tracking what is being destroyed.

But then places like Gaza and the West Bank, where you don't really have access to the place, you know, a lot of the research came from social media, people there who are posting or press outlets that have access to it.

it's quite varied and it's always like something you need to verify from different sources.

So then the process from that is really after kind of verifying that these places have either been destroyed or fully destroyed or damaged, then I go into the sort of research into this building itself, looking at the find a different ornamentation, the patterning, the mosaics, the tiling, and all of that.

And it's a deeper dive into every single different site.

Your pavilion that was at Venice over this year, May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep Over Stones, is an exceptionally evocative and sensitive pavilion.

And you walk into this ground level stretch of ancient decorative clay tiles and their designs have been drawn from an array of sort of damaged and destroyed sites across the Middle East.

And, you know, apart from the sort of beauty of this pavilion, it also has a strikingly heavy feel.

And I thought that that was because you sort of realised that actually many of these designs we will never have actual physical access to again.

Donna, I want to start by asking you how you built up this repertoire of motifs that you've used.

Well, I've been researching kind of the history of destruction across the Arab world and even North Africa for quite a while.

I think since 2019, I was looking at a lot of the archives and the different heritage sites that have been destroyed since the Arab Spring.

And it really started off by looking at non-human violence.

You know, of course, there's all sorts of destruction, especially now with global warming.

You do have you know, flash floods and hurricanes and stuff like that that are destroying monuments.

But for me, I was really looking at this very specific ideology of this cultural cleansing that mounds down towards heritage sites.

And it's something I've been researching for a really long time.

So when we came to making the pavilion, it kind of felt natural to start with that.

And the process of it is quite varied, you know, in places like Syria and Iraq, we do have kind of watchdogs and UNESCO and World Monuments Fund, all these different sort of NGOs that are tracking what is being destroyed.

But then places like Gaza and the West Bank, where you don't really have access to the place, you know, a lot of the research came from social media, people there who are posting or press outlets that have access to it.

it's quite varied and it's always like something you need to verify from different sources.

So then the process from that is really after kind of verifying that these places have either been destroyed or fully destroyed or damaged, then I go into the sort of research into this building itself, looking at the find a different ornamentation, the patterning, the mosaics, the tiling, and all of that.

And it's a deeper dive into every single different site.