2. Dala Nasser (Tyre, Libano, 1990)
This dirt is teeming with life, 2025
Orange Fabric, pigmenti naturali
Orange Fabric, natural pigments
600 x 145 cm
Courtesy: Collezione Fondazione OELLE

Dala Nasser (Tyre, Libano, 1990), a visual artist who—despite working across multiple mediums—chooses to define herself as a painter, builds her practice around abstract evocation and the deliberate use of traditional painting materials: canvas, pigments, frames, and marks. Her works are created through frottage on sites across Western Asia—lands scarred by war and devastation—into which she incorporates salvaged materials: physical remnants of landscapes altered by human presence and intervention.
Nasser brings to light forgotten histories, ecological wounds, colonial plunder, and infrastructural disasters. In contexts where language proves insufficient—or misleading, inadequate, even manipulative—it is the painterly gesture that becomes witness. Her works, like modern shrouds, absorb and preserve imprints of pain and memory, while also conjuring nostalgic and imaginative visions suspended between time and space. They are muffled cries, tragic snapshots, emotional detonations—assertions of an identity deeply rooted in a critical stance toward the legacy of colonial landscape painting.

2. In 2025, Nasser creates This dirt is teeming with life during a turbulent residency at the OELLE Foundation in Catania, deeply marked by the unfolding war in Palestine. The experience—lived in the strain of commuting between Lebanon and London, her adopted city—takes form as a dense work, charged with unrest, disorientation, and rage.
For this piece, the artist employs Orange Fiber, a sustainable textile produced in Sicily from citrus processing waste, alongside natural pigments extracted from flowers sourced from territories ravaged by human destruction. The result reads like a screen, reflecting the extraordinary complexity of the Cappella del Rosario. The chapel’s intricate polychrome marble inlays seem mirrored on the canvas’s tormented surface—bearing the wounded traces of her homeland, transposed into sublime marks indelibly etched by history.
The work assumes a sacred aura, celebrating the greatness and hope that every place—regardless of its geography—deserves to preserve. It becomes a contemporary shroud, a banner of memory and hope, crafted with an intimate warmth and unshakable conviction. A visual poem for a generous, vital land—one that resists, even in the face of death now sweeping across it.