Supported by the 2023 Deloitte’s Photo Grant, Dust From Home reconstructs Liberti’s Syrian roots by browsing through old archives, retracing geographies, and reuniting a family after 10 years apart.
Ciao Fernanda, let’s start from the origins of your project. How did Dust From Home first come about?
For about four years I had been conducting research with indigenous artist, leader and activist Glicéria Tupinambá and her community in Brazil’s South Bahia. We were focusing on the reclaiming of ancestral objects from European museums and collections – it was about the recovering of memory. Working with her really inspired me to look at what had been lost in my own family, and in my own story.
Mine is a family of immigrants – we come from Italy on my mother’s side, and from Syria on my father’s. As my mother tried to get Italian citizenship, she traveled to the town we are originally from, meeting relatives, finding documents… This almost journalistic research was completely missing on the Syrian side. The history of our origins got somehow erased, and while my grandma and her siblings grew up hearing Arabic at home, my parents and my generation didn’t.
I really wanted to connect with my ancestors and their stories. At that time, I was in a really hard place mentally. I thought I needed to do something for myself. I wrote the project, I submitted it to Deloitte’s Grant, and then I got the news. Since then, it has been a really big, beautiful roller coaster.
Tell us more about it. What have you been up to in the past months in Brazil?
I have been working with the archive, I’ve been photographing my family, and the places in Rio where they have lived, or worked. There is a huge Arab influence in Brazilian culture, so embedded that we don’t really notice it. For example, people sell Arabic food at the beach just as if it was Brazilian. Even my favorite place in Rio is called Sahara – and it’s pretty much like a souk.
There have always been a lot of Arabian influences in my life, even though at the time I didn’t recognize them.
Something really important is how this project ended up bringing my family together. My grandma died 10 years ago. Since then, the family kind of drifted. I wanted to photograph everyone for the project, so we reunited for lunch at my grandma’s sister’s house. Everyone kept saying: “I haven’t seen you in 10 years!”. And I told them: “Look, we cannot only meet when someone dies. We cannot just unite in sorrow”.
It was very emotional for all of us. My uncle’s cousin has a really tough story, leading to difficult memories. He said that for the first time, the work we were doing together made him look at the past with love and with happiness.
How have you and your family members been collaborating?
I am collecting images and objects, things that they had at home, but didn’t care about. We have a Whatsapp group now, and every week I get a message saying “I found this object from Syria in a drawer, I’m gonna send it to you.” “Oh, I found these pictures.” “Oh, I found your grandfather’s passport.”
Last week, I went to the place where my grandparents had their shops. Of the two of them, I only found one – though I noticed another shop across the road, called by my same family name. I went to meet the owner, whom I found out to be Syrian, and we spent two hours talking. In the end, he said: “Habibi, I really like you, come back to my shop one day.”
This project is really about connections. It is about people. There are so many different crossroads that I’m finding – for example, he had a dictionary on his table. It was the first Arabic-to-Portuguese dictionary ever, and it was created by the bishop of a Christian Orthodox church in Rio, someone my family was very close to.
What I considered to be a unique, personal story, I’m starting to realize is instead a very general, Syrian–Brazilian experience.
What are the next steps?
I will be traveling to Syria and Lebanon. I have a tour planned, mainly focusing on archaeological sites. A lot of sacred, historical places in Syria were destroyed by ISIS, with statues that had been there for 3000 years now having their heads chopped. I was always drawn to religious images and iconography, so these are photographs I’m really interested in. An historical recording of the absence of memory.
At the moment, I’m also thinking about self-portraiture as a way to place my body in the landscapes I will find. There is one portrait of a Syrian woman I saw in the National Archives, with no specific information about her. She is wearing an amazing outfit, looking like a queen, with a huge shisha, just chilling. I thought – yes, this is the energy. I have rented a flat in Lebanon that looks very similar to that location, and I’m planning to re-create that picture.
It is this feeling of an alive, breathing archive, with the past and the present morphing into each other.
How do you envision all the different elements of Dust From Home to come together?
I see the project as divided into chapters. The first chapter is the past – my family’s archive. The second chapter is the present, with photographs of my family today. The third chapter collects spaces that were important to our history in Brazil, then the last chapter is the return to Syria.
I’m really curious to see what will happen during the trip. A lot of photographers and artists have very set plans, but I don’t work that way. I need spontaneity. This is the way that I believe work really thrives – with no set expectations of what will happen. I let the people, the landscapes present themselves to me.
These past months, I found lots of unexpected stuff in the archive. My great grandma’s ID. The receipt from the ship she came from Italy to Brazil with. And I couldn’t help but think – of all the countries that could have supported the project, this grant eventually came from Italy.
Indeed, you’re developing this body of work in a context – that of Deloitte’s Photo Grant – that isn’t in Brazil, nor in Syria, with a final exhibition that will take place in Milan’s MUDEC. Was this relevant for you, also in relation to a story so rooted in migration and movement?
I feel like it was my other ancestors, saying: “We’re gonna support you in this, we’re all working together for you!” It was very special. My mom lives in Italy now, so she will be able to join me for all the events. Having support from my other country actually means a lot.
Is thinking of the exhibition already having an impact on the way you’re developing the work?
In a way, it helps me think of the narrative from a viewer’s perspective. I am living this, the viewer is not. How can my family’s stories be passed through?
My favorite anecdote is about my great-grandfather. He was one of the few immigrants who knew how to write and read in Arabic. Every Sunday people would come to his home, and ask him to translate and transcribe letters. They would tell good news from bad news by the amount of Arak – an Arabic drink – he would serve to them. Last week I bought a bottle of Arak, and I went to the house he used to live in. I just knocked on the door, and asked if I could take pictures there. I am wondering if I will be telling this and other stories through writing, through spoken words, through images only…
We have spoken of how Dust From Home pulled you closer to your family, having a concrete impact on your relationships. Did it also affect the way you see your artistic practice? Have you found out anything new about yourself as a photographer?
I realized how sometimes, the things that we find the easiest can be the hardest. I’ve done jobs that were a lot more challenging on paper, but I wasn’t this emotionally invested. Taking pictures of a model is not the same as portraying my cousin that I haven’t seen for 10 years.
But mostly, this project really pulled me closer to the reason why I love photography – it being a tool to connect with people. Photography has not only connected me with my family, my family with themselves, and with their culture. It has helped them resignify their stories as worthy to be proud of. My relatives were farmers who traveled as refugees, my great-grandmother embarked on a ship from Syria to Brazil when she was pregnant. There is a lot of shame that comes with being an immigrant. But the more I know, the prouder I am of the journey that they went through.
What have you discovered of Arabic culture that you were not aware of before?
Everyone has the same last name, but spelled differently. When people emigrated to Brazil, they wouldn’t speak Portuguese – so my grandma had eight siblings, each one of them with a different surname spelling.
More broadly, the most interesting thing was seeing that my family’s experience is not unique, but part of a broader history of people trying to understand who they are, where they come from, and why they behave in a certain way. My family would often behave in ways that I didn’t get, and now I do.
Also, you know, things don’t die. They transform, they transmute.
My grandma’s sister gave me a book of Arabic recipes. Inside there was a dedication, reading: “To my sister, so that you’ll never forget where we come from. With love, your sister”.
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All images © Fernanda Liberti
(work in progress)
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Deloitte’s Photo Grant 2024 is open for applications until 30 June, with no entry fee.
Under the artistic direction of Denis Curti, the Open Call welcomes photographers aged under 35 to submit unpublished works, not yet awarded or made public during other events. A selected photographer will receive a €20,000 grant aimed at the development of their project idea. The resulting work will become an exhibition at MUDEC. Find out more on their website.
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Fernanda Liberti is a Brazilian artist working with photography and video. In 2013 she moved to London to pursue her degree in Photography at London College of Communication (UAL). Having graduated with honours, and a Best in show award for her series ‘FFF’, Fernanda has continued her education at Royal College of Art where she got her MA in Photography in 2022, focusing her research on the Tupinambá capes. In 2022, she was selected as one of Dior’s Laureates, won the British Journal of Photography International Photo Award and Portrait of Humanity. In 2023, she won the Deloitte Photo Grant to pursue her new currently in progress project, Dust From Home. She is now an associate lecturer in Photography at the University of the Arts London.
