The Giving Tree
The Giving Tree is Adila Hassim’s favourite children’s story. She read it to her children again and again. The tree loves a child and gives all she has to enable their happiness: leaves, apples, branches, trunk, stump—everything.
What is the demand of a more livable and loving world? What does it ask of us if not everything? Preeminent black African feminist writer Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola lives by a dictum: to never invoke the violence of rape culture and femicide without simultaneously, “gesturing towards its unmaking.” For Arya Lalloo, filmmaking and activism coalesce in a radical praxis of storytelling—of tending to lives lived and lost in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Human rights lawyer, Advocate Adila Hassim, works to realize the more livable, loving world she imagines for her children, embodying this ethos in the slow juridical labor of defending lives rendered precarious, from abandoned mental health patients in South Africa to a civilian population in Gaza subjected to mass displacement and genocidal violence.
Unmaking the world, imagining it differently. It is for these women, these mothers, the difficult, life-giving labor of giving and exceeding this everything.
—Gabrielle Goliath
Survivor Offerings
In addition to what is presented (and withheld) in the installation itself, collaborators in Personal Accounts sometimes choose to share supplementary offerings which are made available online. These may be narrations of their experience or practices of survival and wellbeing, such as prayers, poems, playlists, recipes or artworks.