We are a string of pearls that has been severed; the pearls have scattered in every direction.

—Cristina Ali Farah

Scattered Pearls is an installation centered on the theme of travel and the return to one’s country of origin. A journey from Mauritius to Europe and from Europe to Mauritius; it is a multimedia and imaginary geographical map, a narrative and sensory path through memories, and a reflection on what one carries when they migrate. Water is a fundamental element throughout the performance, becoming the metaphor for the diaspora.

Vashish Soobah was born in Catania in 1994 to Mauritian parents. Of his homeland, he holds onto one image: an immense sugarcane field opening up before his grandmother’s house. The plantations evoke the violent context of the slave society that imprisoned Mauritius for centuries, but also the genesis of a true binding force for the diaspora: Séga music. Like an intangible piece of baggage, Vashish’s mother and father brought those songs to Italy—songs that were central to religious rituals alongside water: the sea, which in Hindu culture represents a divinity; the river, where families would meet to wash clothes; and then Sicily’s Fiumefreddo, yet another place for gathering and community, in another life, on another island.

Bio

Vashish Soobah

Vashish Soobah is a visual artist, born in Sicily to Mauritian parents. Raised in Northern Italy, he trained in London and is currently based in Milan. Through video, photography, performance, and sound, his work explores the root causes and intrinsic social mechanisms of African migration within a global context, with a particular focus on its implications for Western societies.

His artistic projects also stem from a personal need to articulate with precision and complexity his own positioning as a member of the Mauritian diaspora in Italy—that is, as a brown Afro-descendant (and thus not Black) with a genealogical history in Southeast Asia.

His work has been exhibited at Madragoa in Portugal, MA*GA in Gallarate, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Guarene, Almanac Inn in Turin, and Marsel and Spazio Oberdan in Milan. On the occasion of the 28th FESCAAAL, he presented the documentary “Nanì.”