Visible memories Mohammed Alani is using his memory of his cultural heritage and everything he has learned and seen to shape a simple piece of art composed of a brownish-red clay tablet on which something has been written in braille. What has been written, is like a code or a talisman to lock something as we can find in ancient Iraqi and Pharaonic civilizations: to close a burial place, on a royal seal, symbols and incantations to warn and scare intruders or the Sumerian tablets with cuneiform writings. It reminds us of amulets hung on the facades of houses to ward off evil spirits that were prevalent in Iraq and have their roots in the ancient Sumeria and Babylon: a turquoise circle with 7 holes in it. But it also reminds us of the holes in a horseshoe that is used in Europe against those evil spirits and was also hung on the facades of houses. Mohammed Alani was looking for the collective awareness of different societies and found what unites them, despite their differences in language and geographic location. There have to exist common elements that bring people together and this is what pushed Alani to create a piece of art that everyone understands in order to create an artistic awareness. There is no better script than Braille because this is the only script people all over the world understand independent of their culture, language or color. The letters don’t differ from country to country like the letters of all other languages on earth, which do differ in form and pronunciation. This is the message of art: the creation of joy, fun, beauty, understanding and harmony. Mohammed Alani is putting the cohesion between people in the spotlight. The form of the piece suggests that it is an sos message that was left behind alongside the road. Maybe someone that passes will offer help. This represents the catastrophic events in the Middle East that forced people to run like crazy, away from their devastated region and how they were received in Europe. Mohammed Alani has the intention to turn this into a memorial for human cohesion that becomes part of the collective memory. As audience, we notice some sort of convergence and dialogue between what is written on the plastic tube and what is on the clay tablet. One can state that it is a dialogue between the past and the present. The plastic refers to the industry, the Industrial Revolution and the consumer markets while clay is as old as the earth itself and refers to the first humans and the ancient civilizations that were using clay instead of paper to write and as a base to make many things. The text on the plastic tube is also a digital print while what has been written on the clay tablet was done by hand. Nevertheless there is a connection and communication between the two, between the ancient and the modern world, because both are the heritage or mankind. There is no present without roots in the past and there is no future without the present. Mohammed Alani means that whatever kind of development or progress, people are still dependent on each other, especially in times of a crisis that unites them. So we come to the conclusion that this piece of art is a concept on human symbols that are traces that testify to their role in realizing human awareness. It gives us an exciting aesthetic form rather than its exaggerated interpretations. Dr. Ahmed Khlaif Mankhi translation: Sofie Van Den Abbeele http://www.mohammedalani.be/ See less — with Ahmed Almankhi and Sofie Van Den Abbeele.