Pearls

Conceived for the exhibition “Sempre il mare, uomo libero, amerai!” (Free man, you’ll love the ocean endlessly!), titled after a verse from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “L'homme et la mer,” Pearls comprises seven spheres made of blown Murano glass. They are engraved with the first lines from the “Contrasto della Zerbitana” (The Conflict with the Woman of Djerba), an anonymous fourteenth-century poem that recounts an argument taking place on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, between a sailor and the mother of a woman he has abused, and one of the earliest example of Sabir.

“Oi Zerbitana retica

come ti voler parlare?

se per li capelli prendoto

come ti voler conciare!

cadalzi e pugne moscoto

quanti ti voler donare!

e cosi voler conciare

tutte le vostre ginoie.”

Sabir was a combination of Arabic, French, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. It was the lingua franca that all merchants, pirates, and slavers spoke along the Silk Road between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries. This language linked all the people of the Mediterranean, but has been forgotten. Unlike today’s lingua franca—English—which is a testament to British colonialism and domination over countless lands, Sabir was a language without a territory.

Poetry is a rich vessel of transmission from one language to another, from one culture and temporality to another. The Contrasto brings to surface the repressed complexities of the colonial past and neo-colonial present of the Mediterraneans, impossible to narrate through a single story.

“The pearl trade was one of the largest industries connecting the Orient and Europe,” Simone Fattal says, “and with it came politics, community, and a legacy we can still see in Venice today.”