NOTHING WILL REMAIN OTHER THAN THE THORN LODGED IN THE THROAT OF THIS WORLD
“Don‘t be sad. No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat. No one will manage to swallow it. Don‘t worry.”
– From Wadih Sanbar’s last words to his son, Palestinian historian and poet Elias Sanbar.
Haig Aivazian and Noor Abed enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, hisses the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.
In a recent correspondence spanning several months, the pair exchanged reflections, quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs and recitations. The performance acts as an active labour of selecting, remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, reassessing, and reassembling elements from the correspondence, as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists‘ respective trajectories.
Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, the pair attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a resonance chamber traveled by vibration and transformed into a disparate choir.
NOTHING WILL REMAIN OTHER THAN THE THORN LODGED IN THE THROAT OF THIS WORLD is a collaboration commissioned by Mophradat.
The program opens with Rick Geene’s “next stop only friends.” The video and reading are a working through of the break between violences, and a carving out of a space for a sociality that endures through the tension between dream and reality.
Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who works at the intersection of performance and film. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’.
Haig Aivazian’s practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of 3 technologies: artificial light, computation and law. Working across diverse media and modes of address, his work is animated by research and chance discoveries, where history is an omnipresent hum that conjures and bumps up against degraded futures and the persistent efforts to survive them.
Rick Geene is an artist, writer and filmmaker. They keep and perform emotional archives, traversing different scales and registers, recognizing outside within and finding the self caught up beyond itself. They practice collectivizing thinking without closure or guarantees–an exposition of coinciding repetitions contingently stumbled upon.
Hosted by Marija Cetinić and Lorenzo Garcia Andrade.
