During the last five years, Aissa Deebi conducted a visual, theoretical and historical research dealing with issues of migration and displacement. In the process, he visited many bird migration scopes in New York, London, Haifa and Mexico. He found that human migration is embodied in nature and it links back to primitive basic needs. As an Arab of Palestinian descent, he wanted to understand his position, history and personal experience learned about the Arab history of nomadic life.
As a Palestinian living in diaspora, from Shatat, this concept was embedded in his history as an individual and part of a collective experience. Two years ago, Aissa worked on a “Killing Time” project with the Queens Museum in New York, that dealt with the life in a cafe as a space of displaced Arab men, and its context of a space in between.
Returning to nature, Aissa uses it as a place where you can merge between theory and practice, science and fantasy, dreams and reality. He was fascinated by the behavior of migratory birds, as a group of travelers with a leader. They would move from one place to another in a cycle, almost creating a performance of patterns. Through this experience of traveling and waiting for a wave of immigrant birds came a sublime collective of visuals, sounds and social behavior that he captured with thousands of photographs. By visiting many locations, following the news on BBC, and surfing the web on line about bird migration schedules and locations, he found a massive amount of information that fed into his research. Flyway, is a concept for a new body of work that deals with new aspects of cultural anthropology, design, typography and image-making.
“I started my career as a designer/calligrapher in my-home city in Palestine, I made hundreds of signs, symbols and protest art. After 10 years of conceptual photography, video and installation, I discovered myself as a multi media artist dealing with many new forms of visual dialogue.”