Arabic-Speaking Objects is a storytelling installation that situates the personal belongings of Arabic-speaking immigrants within the broader politics of displacement, memory, and urban space. A coffeepot, a religious icon, a comic book, an embroidered school bag, family photographs, soap bars, and travel souvenirs become traces of migration, exile, and everyday negotiation. Each object carries histories of care, loss, and survival, transforming intimate artifacts into markers of presence in the city.
Through oral histories anchored in these objects, participants, Wissam Assouad, Dunya Bilal, Béatrice Moukhaiber, and Farah Mustafa, render visible the ways memory, language, and material culture shape belonging, trace connections across continents, and contest the erasure of immigrant experience. The installation enacts a spatial and temporal layering: personal narratives unfold alongside objects, creating a shared archive that is both poetic and political, mapping the intersections of intimacy, memory, and the social geographies of migration.
