What happens when we try to make an archive of something that is incomplete? This workshop explores the relationship between memory, migration, diaspora, storytelling, and the archive through collage and text.
Drawing from her practice across film, installation, writing, and image-making, Nada is interested in the ways memories are transmitted through fragments: photographs, family stories, objects, places, language, documents, and things that are absent, hidden, ignored or have been lost.
Rather than thinking of the archive as a fixed collection of evidence, the workshop approaches it as something porous and continually reconstructed. What survives is often incomplete, and what is missing can be just as significant as what remains. For those whose histories have been shaped by migration and displacement, memories may also be inherited, mediated, mistranslated, or imagined rather than directly experienced.
The workshop aims to invite participants to work with these gaps through a series of short, accessible exercises combining writing, found imagery, and collage. The intention is not to recreate the past accurately, but to explore what happens when memory is fragmented, rearranged, contradicted, or imagined.
Join us for the second session of Archives & Anecdotes, a virtual series that builds on the themes of the Remix Residency by inviting archivists and cultural workers to explore how archives can help us imagine and shape liberatory futures.
ABOUT NADA EL-OMARI
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin, based in Montreal. Through a hybrid practice combining film, installation, writing, and sound design, she explores themes of memory, migration, displacement, and diasporic identity. By focusing on process and fragments in text, sound, and image, Nada explores new ways to self-narrate, and speak hybridity and self. Her work, often constructed from intimate fragments: family archives, recorded conversations, everyday objects, questions notions of belonging and intergenerational transmission. Nada El-Omari favours a poetic and non-linear narration that brings out the traces and silences of stories that are often invisible or erased. Her films have been presented at various festivals, on Shasha and Tenk, and in galleries. Her work has also been published in Montreal Serai, qumra journal, Public journal, Pavillons and Tantôt magazine. Nada El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in Film from York University.
This program is generously funded by the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change (CCESC).