Image: One of the 13 bullets fired at Wael Zuaiter hit volume two of One Thousand and One Nights which Zuaiter carried on him when he was assassinated in Rome, Italy on 16 October 1972
In 2006 Palestinian artist Emily Jacir created an installation for the Sydney Biennale, Material for a film. The installation comprised notes, photographs, portraits, letters, postcards, telegrams and audio recordings of phone conversations relating to the life and death of Palestinian poet/intellectual Wael Zuaiter, who was murdered by Israeli Mossad agents outside his apartment in Rome on October 16 1972. Inspiration for the title and form of Jacir’s project came from a book published in 1979 by Zuaiter’s companion, Sydney-born artist Janet Venn-Brown, For a Palestinian: A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter. One of the chapters of the book was titled “Material for a film” by Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro, involving a series of interviews conducted with the people who were part of Zuaiter’s life in Italy. Petri and Pirro were going to make a film, but Petri died shortly afterwards and the film was never realized. This chapter was the point of departure for Jacir’s artwork.
Zuaiter’s assassination was one of several in Europe and the Middle East during that time by Mossad agents of Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats. Zuaiter was gunned down, twelve bullets to the head and heart. A thirteenth bullet lodged into the spine of the book he carried, One Thousand and One Nights; a book Zuaiter was in the process of translating from Arabic into Italian. For the 2006 version of this ongoing installation, Jacir learned how to shoot a .22 calibre pistol like the one used to kill Zuaiter, and which she then utilised to shoot 1000 blank white books that were then arranged on shelves in the exhibition. Material for a film is not only an action and installation that seeks to remember, but also discover Zuaiter, it is also about the many Palestinian lives martyred, their stories and lives cut short, only to be remembered by those left behind.
The first art story I wrote on one of Emily Jacir’s installations was Memorial (2001). Material for a film is the second, and can be read here.