Off You Shore Paper Trail (2024)
Off You Shore Paper Trail is a short film by Shuruq Harb with Federica Bueti. It is set within the Liberty Hellas Museum, which was once a ‘Liberty ship’ turned commercial boat that today hosts a floating museum at the port of Piraeus in Athens. Liberty ships are a class of cargo ships built in the USA during World War Two. Filming into and around the liberty ship, which became a catalyst for the complex relation to the Mediterranean basin shared by both Harb and Bueti, which allowed for musings about imaginations of sharing, movement and accessibility, in contrast with a reality of police control, interruption, or being stuck without the possibility of leaving. The Liberty ship carries memories of hope and despair relating to narratives of return, and becomes a haunting vessel for ruminations about migration, tourism, trade, and security interests. Following the eerie demise of these ships which often undertook tragically fated journeys, the film comes to terms with inherent contradictions of archiving, and what resists such preservation, to engage with the unspoken, unrecorded histories, subversive ways of movement of people and goods.
Multidisciplinary artist Shuruq Harb and writer Federica Bueti share a common interest in exploring the practices and poetics of refusal in digital culture and archives that resist the colonial logic of erasure. In 2023, they embarked on a residency at Onassis AiR in Athens, where they began working on a collaborative project that delves into modern maritime histories, the toxic legacies of the nation-state, piracy, and mobility in the Mediterranean Sea. Check our Fieldnotes
The first iteration of their collaboration is presented in the Busan Biennale 2024.
