So Much I Want to Say (1983) Mona Hatoum

This moving-image work uses a series of close-up images of the artist with a pair of hands reaching from behind her to cover her mouth, which she is struggling to remove. Hatoum is a Palestinian artist who grew up in Beirut, and was studying in London when the Lebanese civil war broke out and she couldn’t return; this  work is a directly addresses the impossibility of speaking about traumatic events, such as displacement. The video uses images from her performance work of the same name, which was shown as part of Slowscan live satellite transmissions between Vienna and Vancouver (Wiencouver IV), where an image is received every eight seconds, and sound was transmitted via telephone. 

It addresses similar themes I was exploring in Aphonia, about speech, agency and the struggle to be heard. Re-watching this film in terms of research around c-PTSD, the freeze frames images remind me of memories that can’t be processed and integrated, and that return as flashbacks. The soundtrack is Hatoum continuously repeating the phrase ‘ So Much I Want to Say’, which is said gently but also with desperation and urgency; the insistence reminds me of the relentlessness of c-PTSD flashbacks, and the work explores the struggle between the need to speak, but speech always being obstructed. Given the current political climate in the UK, perhaps it can also resonate with increasing restrictions or censorship of speech, including speaking about Palestine and Lebanon.