Solitude

Is a series of experimental self-portraits that I took during times of the confinement caused by Covid19. These reflect the notion of a sudden claustrophobic reality that was forced on many people around the world.
This pandemic that came suddenly too close to us, and forced us to sit at home waiting until another notice.
The confinement started only three days when I landed to Tunisia in North Africa, where I had the plans to live for 6 months.
I rented a collective, that got empty as soon as the lockdown started since my flatmates, preferred to be locked with their families.
The lockdown came with endless days and nights that I had to spend alone, revising my life, and my dramatic experiences under wars, when we were forced to be locked in our houses too.
The psychological effect of the lockdown had so many sides especially that it linked itself with so many issues that I worked hard to overcome or fight.
The loss of freedom in moving, surveillance issues where so many states used the pandemic to control it’s citizens, the fear of being controlled and watched because of a virus awaken all those fear feelings that I grew up with under the occupation .
I didn’t panic as much as I got slowly anxious. This new anxiety awaken old traumatic experiences which I genuinely thought I am over it, but then I discovered in an empty moment that I didn’t.
The amount of emptiness, that created a space to analyse what I have experienced in my life since I come from the Middle East where conflicts are shaping the characteristic of the area .
Meanwhile reading the news news about the pandemic, you get read all about the political and social disasters. The plan of annexation was pushed heavily for implementation on the ground, and to occupy more land and displace more people in the West Bank .
The the news about domestic violence against women when they are locked with their abusers helpless and hopeless, they news about the refugees, who are stuck in the middle of no where in between borders, with no clean water, neither health care.
The suicide of the queer Egyptian activist Sarah Hajazi, the death of the young beautiful dancer Aymen Safiah, who both were not my close friends but part of same community that fight for freedom and work hard to change realities in the Middle East .
These are my faces, my selves everyday reacting on each single day of the confinement.