Editor’s Note: This conversation took place across two online sessions between the artists, facilitated by guest editor Nisa Ari, on April 8 and April 17, 2025. It has been transcribed and edited for clarity.

michelle samour (ms): It’s really been lovely getting to know your work, Jumana. I see so many relationships and parallels in our artistic practices, especially around water, which is as integral as plant matter is to papermaking. These are the essentials.

Perhaps we could start by talking about the differences and similarities between your work and mine. I come to my series of works, Borders and Boundaries, as someone from the Palestinian diaspora, so I don’t have that connection to land in the same way as someone, like yourself, who is from there. My investigations into water have evolved from my research about Palestine and the Israeli government’s control of water in the Occupied Territories. I have also been thinking about my father and his parents who immigrated to the US, in 1946 and 1948 respectively, by boat—the oceans offering access but also creating a distance between their ancestral homeland and adopted home. Since water is a vehicle of transport, what does that mean from the perspective of the diaspora, especially during that period of time when most people immigrated by sea? So, I think it was not having that physical connection, not being part of that land that led to my investigation into the politics of water in Palestine—always as an outsider, in a way.

jumana emil abboud (jea): I came to water in my attempt to reconnect to Palestine and to that question of home after living abroad. It was really a nostalgic approach. I wanted to reconnect with my childhood past, and folktales were my playground: to look at the past and present and to do so without directly speaking about daily life in Palestine, whether it’s the politics or culture. I found comfort in folktales. Eventually I came to water because I understood that so many of these folktales that I was in love with were part of the Palestinian traditions of being with water.

ms: What you’re talking about—connecting to home—fits with my interest in doing work about my Palestinian ancestry, which I’ve been thinking about for a long time. When I was a child, I asked my father where his family was from. He brought me over to the globe, and I remember being very confused because there was no country called Palestine. When I hear you talk about this connection to home and family, I relate with a similar desire to find my roots—my work has been a way of finding them. Water is so elusive: it moves, it transports, it’s not static. There’s such a strong relationship between water and that sense of desire and need, but loss at the same time.

jea: When I go to folktales, I’m looking at them because of the way they express the strong community character that we build with human, and also, more-than-human counterparts. Who is a part of our community? Women were the majority of storytellers in Palestine and this somewhat went hand in hand with their collecting water, sharing stories around water sources. Water springs in Palestine are spaces of collectivity. They are living sites. The stories are often about fertility or marriage, but the stories themselves are more pluralistic in meaning than just the feminine perspective.

ms: Your paintings based on these folktales are just so beautiful. I sense that they’re about memory—and like water, they are fluid, not illustrative in a didactic, specific way. They leave space for imagining and for falling into a space of reflection. They’re very, very powerful and poetic.

jea: I love that reading of them, Michelle. The negative spaces invite the viewers to move through them. Absolutely.

ms: The more I work with issues around water, the more I see everything in relation to water. It’s hard not to. In my recent collaborative performance and installation, The Water Runs Through It: Tools for Water, I was thinking about how water runs through everything: the spiritual realm, the body, tributaries, politics, and oceans. The connection between memory and fluidity and water as transport is a powerful and all-encompassing idea. And I think about these things when I’m making paper, when I have my hands in the slurry and I’m really feeling the temperature of the water and assessing the relationship of fiber to water.

I was so excited when I saw the video from your exhibition, “The Unbearable Halfness of Being” at Cample Line, where you talk about the relationship between the Arabic word for “eye” and “water source” in Arabic. Many of my works center the eye and a lot of my installations are in the ovoid form of an eye. I’m interested in the idea of being watched; not only being the person who’s observing an artwork, but respecting that we’re also being observed. It opens up a conversation with the artwork instead of it being one-sided. Can you talk more about the eye in your work?

jea: It’s amazing to hear you speak about how you use the eye. I’m very interested in how the Arabic letter of ‘ayn, which means ‘eye’ as well as ‘water spring’ or ‘the source of water,’ is also a letter that is, for many who don’t grow up speaking Arabic, impossible to say. The first Arabic-language dictionary was titled Kitab al-‘Ayn and was compiled by al-Khalil bin Ahmad al-Farahidi who believed the Arabic alphabet should start with ‘ayn instead of alif because when you say it, it has to come from a source deep within your body. I love this idea. I can imagine this Arabic letter—like the water source it references—floating in my body when I say it.

During the Water Diviners performances I ask everyone to simultaneously try to pronounce the ‘ayn. It’s a physically difficult thing for non-Arab-native speakers. I do this because there’s so much metaphor in the depth of the stories. Similar to the letter, they too are being pulled from the center of a cultural body. So, when I ask the audience to attempt to pronounce the letter ‘ayn, it’s a reminder, a reflection of the metaphor of the ‘ayn, the story, the letter and the access to water source.

As part of the Water Diviners performance, we also call out the spring names and we ask the audience to stand up to honor that source of water. We speak to the audience as though they are the water source. I think this comes back to the letter ‘ayn as both a letter, an ‘eye,’ and a water source. I hope the audience member who is now recognizing the spring in Palestine will carry the story of the spring, in the same way we carry letter pronunciations deep inside our body.

ms: You’re speaking about a sort of embodiment, right?

jea: Yes. And I now have this visual of you, Michelle, working in the water, making paper. In hearing you talk about how you love immersing your hands in water to make that paper—that also becomes a form of embodiment.

ms: Watching your film works, I was struck by the relationship of your voice to the narrative. It’s very dream-like or trance-like. You fall into the story in this beautiful way, and it reminds me—maybe I’m reading too much into it—of water and how not only seductive water can be, but how it’s all encompassing. It’s comforting. It moves like a story moves.

jea: Now that you’ve mentioned it, it’s like the experience of floating.

ms: And that was my reaction to your paintings, as well, where there’s that space you create for the viewer to fall into. It feels to me like your images are emerging, but they’re dissolving at the same time. It leaves us in this liminal space between past and present.

jea: Thank you for seeing my work in that way. You’ve made me have a different look at a drawing that I started last year and came back to just a few days ago, while watching the video of your beautiful performance collaboration (The Water Runs Through It: Tools for Water). I love the bodily gestures of the dancers and the way that they are communicating, both on stage with the dowsing tools and rods that are projected, but at the same time their bodies become the dowsing rod. There’s this one gesture where the dancer is lifting his arms and moving them in a way that he somehow becomes the fork of that divining rod. And I looked back at my drawing and I thought, oh my god, is that what I’ve drawn? And I wasn’t even conscious of it.

ms: When the dancers came to my studio initially, the dowsing rods were installed on the wall and all of a sudden one of the dancers started mimicking the shape of the rods. I had a very traditional idea of how I wanted the dowsing rods to be activated, but I hadn’t expected the dancers to make that kind of immediate connection between the body and the rods. At one point the dancers wanted to use costumes, but I said, “No, your body is the costume.” I’m glad you enjoyed that.

jea: Yes, the connections between our work and divining rods and water divination were pretty surprising and wonderful. I think I’m learning a lot from you and also through your eye works. What are those eyes made of? Is it pulp?

ms: Yes, they’re all liquid, pigmented pulp that I pour or cast into circles. After they dry, I use gouache for the fine details.

jea: Does it dry hard?

ms:  Yes. It’s also translucent, and in many cases I put a light source behind the paper. I’m interested in the eye as a lens, which is, of course, dependent upon light. And so having a paper, a substrate that is translucent, supports that idea.

jea: There’s kind of a reflective quality in the paper too. When you work with the colored pulp, would you say that you are drawing with the pulp, or are you pouring? Because it’s so liquid, do you feel like you are pouring an image into the world?

ms: I feel like it’s more about pouring though in some cases when I’m using a squeeze bottle as an applicator, I refer to the process as pulp drawing. It’s the fluid quality of that particular fiber and process that sometimes feels, as you say so beautifully, like pouring an image into the world. There are other ways that I work with fiber that are not as fluid, as in my Withholding Water series, where the pulp is very fibrous.

jea: And if you were to put those eye pieces back into a water basin, would they dissolve or soften?

ms:  They soften, but they don’t break apart. They turn into a kind of rubbery leather. It’s totally fascinating. If you were closer you could come into my studio and make some with me!

jea: I wish! The reason I asked you if it can dissolve was because I was wondering if you think of this as a fixed object or one that can change through other materials or tools? Do you ever think about translation in your work?

ms: I haven’t considered that word specifically, but as you’re asking me about translation, I’m thinking about how the effects of light can translate how we see the world around us, and light has always been very important to my practice. One of the reasons that I work with translucent paper is because of the way that the light activates the color and vibrancy of the work. Depending upon the lighting conditions where my pieces are installed and the audience who engages with them, there’s always going to be a different translation. And because my work with paper is not confined within a frame, it allows for a more expansive reading of the image. Again, I’m thinking of your work too. In storytelling, folk tales, and myths, the story changes every time you tell it, and it depends on who the storyteller is, right?

jea: I think that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been able to think about how to publish the Water Diviners texts. Over the last five years there’s been at least four workshops and each time the stories get expanded. They start with the Palestinian springs, but they expand demographically. The only time we “publish” is during the public spoken-word performance.

These stories are necessary. People need to know what’s happening in Palestine, and also the work needs to get documented. But a part of the reason I hold back on publishing them has to do with my reluctance in them becoming fixed. I want them to continue being alive. With storytelling, the stories’ activation in spoken-word performance is where they’re alive. And I worry about who these stories will belong to once they’re printed. My objective with the collaborative element of these workshops is to have this feeling of co-authorship as we elaborate and write new stories. It is important to acknowledge that a story came from Palestine and to reveal how the story continues to expand—based on the Water Diviners’ new telling of it—into new territories.

ms: I also wonder if part of this anxiety about “Who does the story belong to once it is on paper, once it is in print, once it is authored?” is specific to Palestine and Palestinian history, which has frequently been co-opted or undermined to serve other narratives?

jea: Yes precisely. I want to explore how co-making can also lead to a form of co-sharing, and to always remember that the stories are living stories, just like the water is a living water. This means every moment of the stories’ lifeline has to be acknowledged as a living, moving, changing, expanding spirit. To do this, we may need to reimagine an alternative publishing language—some radical means perhaps—and to hold in our hearts the question of how to get Palestine “unstuck” or freed from a form of publishing that frames her (Palestine) in immobile spaces and co-opted narratives.

ms: The way we’re talking about water and paper is making me realize that these two modes of storytelling and of keeping memory alive—one on paper and one orally—are not quite as opposed as I always imagined. And I’m coming to this idea through your question of how to fix these stories. Do you have to publish them or can they be published in a mode that is somehow dissolving? I’m going back to this idea of things that are both emerging and dissolving at the same time, because paper is a curious material. This fluid material (water) and fluid pulp ends up in something that we think of as a fixed substrate that we all depend on to fix and document our ideas. But a piece of paper is a living, breathing material. Even though we think of paper as being static, it responds to the atmosphere, and it’s always moving.

And the storyteller makes a huge difference, too. When I hear you tell a story, Jumana, I hear it through your voice. I am brought into the story through you. And for me, when I work with paper, I’m not typically making a substrate of paper and then putting an image onto its surface. I am building my story with the material. So, I’m also using paper in a different way: not as a substrate, but as a language. I’m telling my story with the material itself.

jea: That’s beautiful Michelle. The story as the material. I honestly believe the physical material or form of the art doesn’t mean it fixes Palestine into only one translation either. Palestine isn’t just one thing, right? That’s perhaps where certain parts of history have failed us, in wanting to fix Palestine into a settler-colonialists’ dominant narrative. The way I see our work is that it’s about the multitude that Palestine is. For me, Palestine is not a response to another’s story.

ms: I am reminded again of when I asked my father to point out Palestine on the globe and it wasn’t there—I wanted something right in front of me that I could touch and say, “See, there it is!” The lack of something being fixed has been the catalyst for a lot of the work that I make; it’s a seeking for something that is tangible, rather than about trusting someone else’s experience. I perceive the work you’re doing as asking the viewer and participant to trust their experience and create new ones. As humans and as Palestinians, we have value. We have agency. It’s not just about the history that you know, it’s about creating new histories. And I think that’s really, really powerful in your work.

jea: I had someone once say to me, “Oh, your stories and the way you tell them are romantic and naïve,” and I understood that not necessarily as a negative thing. If I present the folktale of “Half a Halfling,” or of “A Girl Whose Hands Get Cut Off,” then the prism I am telling these tales through is, to use this person’s wording, “romanticized.” These stories are harsh, and they are metaphors for Palestine, such as in the cutting off of the limbs of the country, in the way that Palestine has been fragmented since 1948 and prior to that even. I don’t believe the stories I tell are romanticized to be honest. But I do acknowledge that my aim is to speak about the future as well. In my version of the traditional folktales and the newly co-made stories, there’s always a happy ending. So, there’s this invitation to the listener to imagine Palestine in a future setting, one that might offer a more hopeful alternative than those we have witnessed thus far.

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