I have never stayed in one place for more than nine months. One hundred and sixty-six visa stamps between Lebanon and the UAE. That is eighty three trips in total turning into an average of a three months stay at one place before leaving. Looking at a map I was not able to pinpoint home as a location, instead my meaning, as well as most kids who grew up between multiple locations, of home transcends location and turns into an experience of home rather than a tangible structure or place. Mapping Home is my experience of finding home by weaving the tangible with the intangible using everyday objects like maps, threads, needles, and tokens collected throughout my life. In this piece, as I repeated the motion of stitching threads through a map, the locations themselves faltered into voids giving the threads a predominant location of a map that wasn’t accustomed for them. As the holes thickened and there was not enough space to weave through the two countries, the previous threads, my previous journeys, gave support to the threads to come as I started weaving through the line of wool itself and not the map. All the while the back end of the map was left to organically weave itself through and through creating a secondary mapping, a map that more accurately describes the terms of what a home means to me; tangled lines, relations, some taut, some loose yet all contained in one space, in the thread of wool, in my experience of living.

FIRST TRAVEL BETWEEN ABU DHABI AND BEIRUT IN 1995