The infinite alchemy of storytelling | Zahra Al-Mahdi

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2021

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

TED Fellow Zahra Al-Mahdi was raised by screens -- "storytelling machines" like TV and the internet that shaped her sense of self and reality. Now a multimedia artist and filmmaker, she challenges common historical narratives and brings a multiplicity of perspectives to the surface. In this dynamic talk, Al-Mahdi traces her development as a storyteller using satire, dark humor and tactile collage techniques to expand what we think we know about ourselves.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Jennifer Garner here, guest hosting today on TED Talks Daily.
0:08.6	Here's a talk from an incredible multimedia artist and TED fellow, Zara Almadi,
0:14.0	about the barrage of narratives we take in and how to tell funny stories so people will listen.
0:22.9	I grew up in Kuwait in the early 90s, where I was raised by screens.
0:27.6	The main windows to reality for me were television and the internet.
0:32.0	Not because of their accuracy, but because they were storytelling machines.
0:36.4	These machines told stories that contradict one another, but all somehow seemed true.
0:40.7	The Arab region knew Kuwait to be one of the leading voices in media,
0:43.6	specifically for comedy shows and theater.
0:46.2	The rest of the world knew Kuwait to be a small country that was located between Saudi Arabia,
0:50.8	Iraq, and Iran during the Gulf War.
0:53.6	Both stories are true. These screens that
0:56.2	I derived my sense of reality from told me different and sometimes contradicting stories about
1:00.4	who I am and where I come from. And that was the only way I understood anything around me
1:04.9	by placing it into different sets of stories. When social media came around, it changed the way
1:10.3	screens worked for me. It wasn't only a
1:12.6	window for observations anymore, but an interactive one, one I could use to identify everything around me
1:18.0	in even more varied in multiple ways, and to know myself better, and actually participate in the
1:22.7	storytelling process. It started with drawings, mostly crosshatched on photographs that I took with my iPhone.
1:29.8	With time, I started to animate them onto videos that told stories from different perspectives
1:34.0	in a mockumentary series titled Birdwatch.
1:37.8	It consists of scripted interviews by imagined minority voices discussing a general issue
	...

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