Culture is fluid, it flows everywhere. You get Lebanese tacos in Mexico, synagogues in Ethiopia, hip hop in Korea. It’s been that way since the dawn of humanity. So seeing Palestinian culture in Puerto Rico – as depicted in tapestry form here at the Chisenhale by Alia Farid – shouldn’t be a surprise.
These big, intricate, colourful weavings show street scenes, Palestinian businesses (‘Farmacia El Amal’), menus for ‘comida Arabe’, and shimmeringly bright images of the mosques that dot this Caribbean island. Another layer of internationalism is added: the tapestries were woven in Samarra, Iraq, using techniques unique to the region.
These are works about cultural exchange, about migration and identity, how culture survives upheaval and history survives injustice. They’re pretty things, but they’re more decorative than they are insightful, they don’t say a huge amount about those themes, they don’t offer comment or analysis, they just seem to be saying that there’s Palestinian culture in Puerto Rico, and you feel like saying ‘...and?’
But the idea is that this is just the first part of an ambitious material archive about Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America. So hopefully, these promising individual strands will weave into a more cohesive whole.
