FONS ÀUDIO #65
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Basel Abbas (Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Boston, USA, 1983) work together across sound, image, text, installation and performance, unfolding a practice that moves between documentation and performativity, between political reality and speculative imagination. Operating between Ramallah and New York since 2007, they approach the present in Palestine as a territory captured by settler colonialism and global regimes of capital: systems that organise not only access to land, but also perception, memory and time itself. In their projects, they excavate, activate and recompose incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites, treating them as material for reimagining what the present might hold or yet become.
Focusing on their works in the MACBA Collection, FONS AUDIO #65 turns to their reflection on Prisoners of Love (Until the Sun of Freedom) (2024–2025). Developed as a site-specific multimedia installation, the work emerges from their ongoing research into the resilience of former Palestinian political prisoners, where song and poetry persist as forms of transmission under conditions of confinement. Here, resistance is understood less as a statement than as a relation –woven through love for land, community and collective survival– where voices, texts and coded gestures circulate across histories of struggle, producing unexpected and fragile forms of kinship.
In their reading, the imprisonment of political prisoners is both a rupture and a site of continuous production: a space of violence, but also of writing, thought and political imagination that refuses interruption. Songs carry memory and instruction, poems migrate across contexts, and meaning travels in forms that evade containment.
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