Bassem Yousri
ARtist website
Artist Interview
During his four-week residency at RAIR Philly, Bassem Yousri built his concept around family photographs that he picked at the dumpsite at Revolution Recovery. Yousri considered such pictures as a starting point that inspired him to focus on collecting domestic objects that hold personal histories—salvaging those images and various items before they get smashed and combined into large piles before being loaded into trailers and taken to landfill. Yousri based his criteria on the emotional quality of any object he picked. He collected dozens of family photos, albums, projector slides, scrapbooks, personal notes, death certificates, eviction notices, kids' toys, various pieces of furniture, home appliances, and equipment. Bassem aimed to assign a new voice to the discarded materials in an attempt to investigate the relationship between materiality, death, and memory.