Contextual Practices

Measures of Distance, part two

Reading the work in the light of Contextual Practices

There is clearly an historical context to this work - Beirut in 1981 was a place of turmoil and the letters from mother to daughter would have been completely different had the mother not found herself living in a warzone. This therefore puts the video into a political context too, although no specific mention is made of political events. The fact that we are hearing the intimate correspondence between two family members gives us a very personal context too, all the more so because the words are genuine, and the voice we hear is that of the film-maker. The geographical context is implied, or rather the viewer is free to infer it, through the use of Arabic lettering, voices and references to the recipient of the letters being far away.

But perhaps the most important context in which this work is set as the cultural one. We know that the mother is living in a culture which is very different from where her daughter has gone, and that the daughter is becoming 'Westernised'. We hear about the patriarchal family structure in which the mother still operates, (from which we can choose to make all manner of assumptions about the passive role of women), but it is the mother who entreats her daughter to enjoy sex (having married first, of course) rather than 'lie back and think of England'. So our theory of unhappy wife trapped in marriage with possessive husband does not hold water; she is in fact content, and concerned for her daughter now she has left home for an alien lifestyle.

back to part one....