'USRATI

2024

“ ‘Usrati, ” my family in Arabic from the Egyptian dialect.

A short, experimental exercise video art that was about language and translation for my Video-Based Art course. From my own personal experiences, I had the video centered around my grandparents as the majority of our interactions, we had someone translate for us as they're fluent in Arabic (Egyptian Dialect) and I was raised to speak English only to "fit" in. I can, most of the time, understand what my grandmother is saying based on her tone and body language. I had my grandmother tell me what about her hobby with embroidery art as I recently learned about it from her life. I included the images of grandparents and some of her embroidery works to emphasize the storytelling from the video, regardless if you could follow along with what we are chatting about or not. I also intentionally did not include subtitles for the exercise assignment. We grew up with many English-speaking films that had no thought in accommodating those whose English is not their first language; I wanted my viewers to take the time to critical-think and comprehend the message to accommodate us as this is our perspective that we are showing you.