The series But My Head is Still Singing... mobilizes the figure of Orpheus, a bloodied martyr whose head, after his dismembered body was scattered across the four corners of the world, continues to sing. Joana and Khalil confront the inner tragedy that breathes life into Orpheus with our world today. By projecting fragments of poetic and philosophical texts onto layers of broken and salvaged glass, they underline the compelling need not to accept, in Gregory Orr’s words, the death of the heart, addressing the condition of poetry as a bulwark and weapon in the face of barbarism and chaos. Language is approached in its performative dimension, in its capacity to be rallied and propagate like a struggle. This idea can be found from work to work, as in the series I Stared At Beauty So Much (2013 - ongoing), which borrows its title from a line by Constantin Cavafy. In But My Head Is Still Singing..., these correspondences of words and thoughts form a choir, that embodies a hope: that of collectively finding the voice, an exhausted but resolute one, that can make its way, like vivacious plants, between the debris. The great philosophical questions raised in the twentieth century, notably by Adorno and Ceylan, concerning the validity of art and poetry in the face of horror, run through the series. It brings together the regimes of the poetic, the political and the material, particularly as seen through the prism of destruction, offering a reflection on the fertile and momentous potential of fragility, sighs, weariness and pain. The ability of light to reflect and adapt to the irregularities of glass seems to embody the capacity of words and images to pierce the layers of reality to touch our hearts.

Notions of persistence, survival and reparation are addressed in reverse in Message With(out) a Code. Concrete matter, taken from the ground, itself becomes the message to be deciphered, which could shed light on the present. Joana and Khalil have been interested in the sedimentation phenomena involved in soil formation, accompanying and observing archaeologists in their research. The tapestries reproduce photographs taken of the classification of elements drawn from underground strata and carried out by archaeologists in absolute urgency under the pressure of bulldozers already working in the field and destroying the excavation in progress. These extracts and deposits help to put into perspective the possible narratives and representations of the history of cities. They provide access to the invisible vestiges of buried worlds and their multiple temporalities. In their words, “living in a region where we are continually in rupture, this is an echo of how we can continue to create and tell, despite the discontinuity of our history.” This project reflects the artists’ major interest in the historical and the problems that accompany the writing of history and its interpretation according to a dominant narrative thread. In the course of events, the original photographs were destroyed in their studio at the time of the explosion on August 4th, 2020. The use of tapestry emerged from an encouragement from their friend, artist and poet Etel Adnan, to restore and confront this loss through weaving. Tapestry enables them to envisage, right down to its form, a rhizome-like conception of time and events, made up of a multitude of interwoven wefts and realities.