Abdi Osman, Gardens of the Mediterranean, 2018

Gardens of the Mediterranean (2018) recalls ways in which human and more-than-human life has been forcefully transposed across vast lands and waters. Quiet scenes of the wind blowing a woman’s hijab as she sits alone facing the water are juxtaposed with images of other international waters, together creating richly textural scenes through the pacing of single and two-channel video montage. A text by Somali-Italian poet and scholar Ubah Cristina Ali Farah that overlays the imagery of water lends diasporic voice to the storying of migration across waters, and territory. The combination of perspectives here – of the written word, of the seated woman’s positional view, and of the rolling sounds and motions of waves against shorelines – construct a multifaceted “text” of (im)migrant stories. Like the turn of each wave, viewers are brought into a complex entanglement between nature and humans, that carries with it beauty as well as brutalities.