The Idea

A couple of hundreds of years ago in Middle East, there existed a tradition of story telling called ‘Naghaali’. A group of men would travel from one city to the next with their few belongings, recognisable by their significant costumes, music instruments and the large roll of canvas that they used to carry.
This canvas would later unroll to reveal a painting, illustrating scenes of a story. This story was often of heroic tales from ‘the book of kings’, mythical scenes of battles and -in later decades- religious figures.
As people gathered in the main square of town to greet the exotic arrivals, the story tellers began to narrate their tales in front of the painting with catchy voices and dramatic gestures, singing here and there while playing drums and bells.

“The Forgotten” is a project inspired by this tradition. However, it narrates stories of today. By selecting modern-life stories that have routes within documentations of reality, ‘The Forgotten’ aims to demonstrate that as much as heroes and villains / good and bad do not exist in the real world the same way that they do in fairytales; there exist a few of those among us whose battles with life are way more fierce and their survival, way more heroic than what we know.

By narrating the stories of these people -through words and images- this project opens a small and yet personal window to what has been happening in our time in other parts of the world and to others.

Assuming that a good story is the one we can believe -even for a short duration of time-,‘The Forgotten’ invites the viewer to enter stories that are often forgotten, the kind that we encounter in an everyday basis but take for granted shortly.

This project creates a zone where the abstract concept that makes us think in us and them terms breaks and allows us -for a few moments- to believe what happened. And by understanding, feeling and remembering the stories of these people, do not let their stories die.

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