metropolis m

Beige paper-tape torn in pieces to spell the three letters that form the name of one of my best friends: Nat. I remember suddenly that I haven’t seen her for a while. She lives in Rotterdam. Is it possible that someone from Amsterdam is in love with her? It must be possible, since she comes at least three days a week to work and go out, here in Amsterdam. The person spelled her name with beige tape on the back window of a car parked in the centre of Amsterdam nearby the library of the UVA, and I’m suddenly faced with it now. For months after this incident I was touched by the sensitivity of this person in love with Nat. A few weeks later, a bit further up, near Vrolikstraat, I saw the name of Nat again written on several walls, mostly with the same tape but sometimes with black plastic tape. Occasionally half of the name would be written with beige tape and the other half with black tape. Is it the same Nat? Does she know about this?I had to think about graffiti, but I almost always find it boring. Like conservative people I prefer to see walls left alone to face rain, wind, pollution and urine instead of being covered with boring, stylised drawings. I only like the simple tags. This made me remember two incidents. The first took place in Rotterdam in 2003 when I went visiting my brother and lived there for three months. I was walking with a friend of mine who had come over for a short visit, when we suddenly saw a little sign as big as a street sign, but more square and with a black background. It read: We stopped instantly surprised to read Arabic on a street in Rotterdam, and, more importantly, something I would translate as: ‘Never show your dick/To a bunch of widows.’The text was hanging in plain view in the centre of Rotterdam, in front of an elegant café on one of the corners of the long Nieuwe Binneweg of all places! We had to laugh hard, even though the message was full of cliché contempt – logically, we couldn’t imagine a woman had written it. Was it an artwork? The second incident took place in Beirut in 2002. This time it was me who candidly sprayed my name on walls and I did it in streets where my mom would pass daily or on walls facing the houses of her friends. When my boyfriend came back to the same spots, he sprayed his name above mine, next to mine, or underneath it as a joke and as a contribution to my act. I wanted to surprise my mother, to offer her my ghostly presence for a while, since she was in love with me, and since I had decided to leave the country for three months and visit my brother in Rotterdam. I thought this way she wouldn’t miss me so much, especially as I was unconsciously planning never to go back again. Of course she did not appreciate the joke and in the end I never told her the purpose of my act. Instead, rumours were spread in bars that my boyfriend had sprayed our names as a statement of his love since my Ibn Battuta journey (14th century Muslim scholar, traveller and explorer – ed.), or rather since my Marco Polo journey began. Couples started to see us as an example of extreme passion, we became the modern Qays and Layla (a classical Arabian love story ¬– ed.). A year later we witnessed a couple fighting in a bar because the guy did not spray their names on the walls of the city.But what about Nat? When I started my residency at the Rijksakademie, I saw Nat’s name written on a piece of paper taped to a door of an empty studio. As I got closer I could read in smaller letters: ‘wet paint.’ Finally, after a couple of years, I understood the meaning of Nat in Dutch and at the same moment of my discovery I don’t know why I suddenly recalled this sentence by Borges: ‘Whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition.’Mounira Al Solh is an artist, Amsterdamwww.mouniraalsohl.com *) original title: ‘What happened to Them at Surinam, and How Candide Became Acquainted with Martin’, Chapter 19, Candide, by Voltaire