Zahra AlMahdi The infinite alchemy of storytelling TED Fellows
[SHAPE YOUR FUTURE]
I grew up in Kuwait in the early ’90s,
where I was raised by screens.
The main windows to reality for me
were television and the internet.
Not because of their accuracy,
but because there were
storytelling machines.
These machines told stories
that contradict one another,
but all somehow seem true.
The Arab region knew Kuwait to be
one of the leading voices in media,
specifically for comedy shows and theater.
The rest of the world knew Kuwait
to be a small country
that was located between Saudi Arabia,
Iraq and Iran during the Gulf War.
Both stories are true.
These screens that I drive
my sense of reality from
told me different and sometimes
contradicting stories
about who I am and where I come from.
And that was the only way
I understood anything around me:
By placing it into different
sets of stories.
When social media came around,
it changed the way screens worked for me.
It wasn’t only a window
for observations anymore,
but an interactive one,
one I could use to identify
everything around me
in even more varied in multiple ways,
and to know myself better
and actually participate
in the storytelling process.
It started with these drawings,
mostly crosshatched on photographs
that I took with my iPhone.
With time, I started
to animate them onto videos
that told stories
from different perspectives
in a mocumentary series
titled “Bird Watch.”
It consists of scripted interviews
by imagined minority voices
discussing a general issue
or one of common interests.
The title of the series
is meant to ponder the idea,
What if birds were watching back?
What would they think
of our obsession with speed and oil?
Would they think we were dumb
for standing under the rain?
The second episode, for example,
is an interview with a little girl
that tries to explain
her definition of health,
where she says she wants
to be like her father,
be strong, smoke and tell children not to.
And also like her grandmother,
cook good food, be loved by everyone
and have diabetes.
She also introduces us
to the stomach animal.
It’s the head of an animal
that’s connected to our stomachs
and its objective is to continue eating
even after we’re full.
You see, Kuwait has one
of the highest rates of childhood obesity.
Presenting it in an amusing story
while pointing out that children
are themselves a minor voice
is a great way to really
put the statistic into perspective.
Another episode is an interview
with a horse breeder
who talks about the rules
of making sure your well-bred horse
is taken care of.
She, the horse,
must not be seen by others,
must only mate with the same breed,
must not be ridden by other men
and must be veiled.
Making a story about a parameter
of repression towards women funny,
especially when it has
animation or live action,
is a great way to walk clear through walls
of censorship, intolerance
and political correctness.
I tried to implement the ideas
behind these two episodes
before or during my first
art solo in 2014,
but I still had to put it into a story
to both be understood and accepted.
By speaking in someone else’s voice,
I was experimenting
with detachment from ideas
I grew up thinking where axioms.
We’re in a strange place
where our problem
is the abundance of information,
where the majority of people
have a platform to be heard,
but representation is still an issue.
Representing a certain group,
giving them justice.
All of these stories
can naturally contradict,
even if they differ slightly.
We as humans are not merely
the shape of body that we occupy
or the specific description of behavior.
We’re a multiplicity of stories,
stories that often come
in repetitive patterns
that can be rewritten and reread.
Having been raised by screens
that told me different stories
about who I am and where I come from
confused me in the best way possible.
I saw that history
is not as static as we thought,
that stories can be told, retold,
read and reread.
A change of context,
change of perspective in hindsight
can assign different values to everything
and everyone around us.
The way I see it,
that’s where artists are most important.
To present metadocumentations
of our history,
to give villains their origin story.
Nothing and no one can be said
to be good or bad
in isolation of the story around it.
It’s much like learning a new word.
You have to use it in a sentence
for it to make sense.
And then to challenge its meaning,
you begin to use it
in an infinite amount of stories.
Thank you.