Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: Artistic Articulations of Borders and Collectivity from Lebanon and Palestine 9783839443637

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Sandra Noeth Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

Critical Dance Studies  | Volume 52

The series is edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein.

Sandra Noeth (Dr. phil.) is a Professor at the HZT-Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts/University of Performing Arts »Ernst Busch«) and curator and dramaturge internationally active in independent and institutional contexts. She specializes in ethical and political perspectives toward body-practice and theory and in dramaturgy in body-based performing arts. As Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien (2009-2014), Sandra Noeth developed a series of research and presentation projects on concepts and practices of responsibility, religion, integrity and protest in relation to the body. As an educator, she has been working with DOCH-Stockholm University of the Arts since 2012 and was Resident Professor in the 2015-16 HWP-program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut.

Sandra Noeth

Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects Artistic Articulations of Borders and Collectivity from Lebanon and Palestine

The publication of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects has been supported by the Regional Research Programme of the Hamburg Ministry of Science, Research and Equalities, Germany.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Contingency, 2010 Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4363-3 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4363-7 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839443637

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments | 11

RESILIENT BODIES, RESIDUAL EFFECTS. ARTISTIC ARTICULATIONS OF BORDERS AND COLLECTIVITY FROM LEBANON AND PALESTINE Chapter 1 What does it take to cross a border? And what does it take to belong? Introduction | 17

1.1 Research Questions and Hypotheses | 18 Methodology | 20 Literature Review and Relevance of the Study | 21 Structure of the Study | 25 1.2 Body-based Artistic Practices from Lebanon and Palestine. Contextual Remarks | 27 Working with Bodies: Conditions of Creation and Production | 28 Dance and Artistic Movement Education | 31 Framing Bodies: Thematic and Curatorial Concerns | 32

NEGOTIATING ENGAGEMENT: THE EMPIRICAL PART OF THE STUDY Chapter 2 Negotiating Engagement: the Empirical Part of the Study | 37

2.1 Responsible Moves. Epistemological and Ethical Concerns | 38 Access to the Field, or: Caring as a Methodological Position | 40 The Bias of Expertise: Artist-Researchers | 44 Do Borders Sit in Places? Framing Research as Conflict | 47 On Catering Expectations | 49 On Bodily Grounds. The Informative Potential of the Sensorial | 51 To Unlearn what has been Learnt: On Epistemic Disobedience | 54 2.2 Aesthetic Evidence. Working with Artistic Case Studies | 60 The Epistemic Potential of Imagination and Experience | 61 Methodological Reflections on Case Study Work | 64 Criteria for Selecting the Artistic Case Studies | 65

2.3 Corpus of Empirical Materials and Analytical Methods | 67 Measuring Proximity and Distance: Fieldwork | 69 Performance Documents: From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical Analysis | 70 Interviews and Transcription | 76 Organization of the Data and Structure of the Case Study Analyses | 82

ARTISTIC CASE STUDIES Chapter 3 Artistic Case Study Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Contingency (2010) | 87

3.1 Borders | 92 Residual Effects: The Everyday of the Border | 94 Scattered Movements: Editing as Compositional Principle | 97 Docile Bodies: The Visceral Experience of the Border | 99 3.2 Collectivity | 102 Caught in Loops: The Unavoidability of the Collective | 103 Movements of Address | 105 The Negative Construction of Collectivity | 108 3.3 De-Normalizing Bodies: The Impotency of Images | 110 Chapter 4 Artistic Case Study Farah Saleh: Free Advice (2015) | 115

4.1 Borders | 122 Interacting: Entanglement of Material and Immaterial Space | 123 Becoming Vulnerable | 124 Acts of Accessibility: Contemporaneity as Bordering Practice | 127 4.2 Collectivity | 130 Acts of Translation: Recreating ‘Palestine’ in Dance | 130 Collective Gestures | 135 Talking Back: Agonal Dialogues | 138 4.3 Coming Closer: Real and Imagined Movements of Resistance | 140 Chapter 5 Artistic Case Study Dictaphone Group: Nothing to Declare (2013) | 145

5.1 Borders | 152 Traveling: Border-Movements with the Body | 154 Internal Affairs: The Internalization of the Border | 156 Claiming the Commons: Experiencing Public Space | 159 5.2 Collectivity | 161 Collective Inscriptions: Moving through Contested Space | 162 Alternative Stories: Oral History and Collective Memory | 164 Extended Bodies, Collaborating Audiences | 168 5.3 Networks of Solidarity: Thresholds to Artistic Action | 171

BECOMING BORDER, BECOMING COLLECTIVE Chapter 6 Becoming Border, Becoming Collective: Comparative Cross-Case Analyses, and Theoretical Discussion of the Findings | 177

6.1 Bodies Bodies as Research Tools and Perspectives | 178 Bodies in Relation | 178 Scaling Agency: From Solidified Images to Silent Moves | 186 In Response: Body Ethics | 195 6.2 Borders ‘The Border’ as Analytical Category | 202 The Border In and As Movement | 208 Bordering Bodies | 215 Border Structures | 222 6.3 Collectivity Bodies, in the Plural | 229 Positioning Oneself, Collectively. Markers of Collectivity in Lebanon and Palestine | 231 Towards Relational Collectivity | 240 To Consent To Not Be A Single Being | 251 Chapter 7 Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects | 259

7.1 Closing Remarks | 261 7.2 Perspectives for Further Research | 264

Chapter 8 Primary Sources and References | 269

8.1 Case Studies and Primary Sources | 269 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme | 269 Farah Saleh | 270 Dictaphone Group | 270 8.2 References | 272

Table of Figures

Fig. 1.—p. 91.

Contingency, 2010.  Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Fig. 2.—p. 94.

Contingency, 2010.  Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Fig. 3.—p. 118.

Free Advice, performance at the Granoff Centre, Brown University, September 23, 2015.  Noémie Solomon.

Fig. 4.—p. 120.

Free Advice, performance at the Granoff Centre, Brown University, September 23, 2015.  Noémie Solomon.

Fig. 5.—p. 125.

Free Advice, field research, Ramallah, 2015.  Farah Saleh.

Fig. 6.—p. 150.

Nothing to Declare.  Dictaphone Group.

Fig. 7.—p. 151.

Nothing to Declare.  Dictaphone Group.

Fig. 8.—p. 165.

Nothing to Declare, field research, Lebanon, 2013.  Dictaphone Group.

Fig. 9.—p. 166.

Nothing to Declare, field research, Lebanon, 2013.  Dictaphone Group.

Acknowledgments Who are you, and where are you from? — I am not from anywhere, but from your fantasy and imagination. Shahram Khosravi, 2017.

The research process for Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects has put me in contact with many and myriad bodies that have, at times directly and at times obliquely, become interlocutors of this book: disciplined and trained bodies; marginalized and wounded ones; bodies in limbo and others in joyful expectation; real, fictional, and archived bodies. They have pushed me to embark on this study on the role, status, and agency of bodies in light of two critical and intertwined forms of experiences: the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. Finding expression in bodily postures and gestures, in coordinated and spontaneous movement and somatic tension, and in gazes and facial expression, these bodies have compelled me to explore how borders are not just given but are made, sustained, and challenged by corporeal, choreographic, movementbased, and sensory strategies—strategies that are tangible and observable and describable through artistic practice and the aesthetic experience of artwork. Hence, it is three artistic works that are at core of the present volume, and I am indebted to Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Farah Saleh, and Tania El Khoury, Abir Saksouk, and Petra Serhal of Dictaphone Group for the commitment, time, and trust that they have so generously given to my inquiry. These artistic works were created between 2010 and 2015, a specific moment in time associated with the Arab Spring uprisings and thus marked by sociopolitical realities to which the artists respond more or less explicitly. However, the forceful yet sensitive, playful yet resistant strategies and concepts that they illustrate open up a more general discussion of borders and collectivity that remains ongoing.

12 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

This book and its research hypotheses have emerged from focused interactions and long-term collaborations. Krassimira Kruschkova, Walter Heun, Lejla Mehanović and Arne Forke, as well as Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer were colleagues of mine at Tanzquartier Wien, where I prepared this work during my time as Head of Dramaturgy and Research. Their practice of radically investing themselves in the intersections of arts, philosophy and the sociopolitical realm has been an inspiration for me in many ways. I am also grateful towards the entire team at Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, and in particular its director Christine Thomé. In addition to hosting a preparatory research lab on the body’s capacity for action and giving me the opportunity to address the problem of the integrity of the body as a Resident Professor in the HWP—Home Workspace Program, they availed their exceptional archives on contemporary Lebanese and Arab art, which proved most valuable in situating this study. I equally acknowledge the support of Sareyyet Ramallah Cultural Centre and its director Khaled Elayyan, as well as the Goethe Institute in the Palestinian Territories and its director Laura Hartz. Their assistance has been crucial in undertaking research on the Palestinian contemporary dance scene, notably in collaboration with choreographer Samar Haddad King. Many other Arab and non-Arab artists and thinkers have inspired this work, reminding me through their practices that attention, representation, and imagination are at the core of arts and politics alike and that this immanent entanglement imbues our writing, dancing, and creating, with responsibility. Yet, borders have profound and unequal consequences, and what might be a gesture of gratitude within the conventions of Western academia may have serious repercussions for individuals living within the border zones under discussion. Thus, I thank them collectively and anonymously here, with my utmost respect. During the work on Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, I had the invaluable opportunity to share, discuss, and rethink my claims in the context of two artistic-theoretical conferences dedicated to the relationships among bodies, borders, and movement. My profound thanks go to the Dance Department at Stockholm University of the Arts and in particular Frédéric Gies, Cecilia Roos, Anna Efraimsson, Peter Mills and Anne Juren; as well as the Dance Congress 2016 and its directors Sabine Gehm and Katharina von Wilcke. Furthermore, I express my great appreciation to Arkadi Zaides and HAU–Hebbel am Ufer (Annemie Vanackere, Ricardo Carmona, Simge Gücük and Jana Penz). Our close collaboration on the project Violence of Inscriptions provided an important backdrop for exploring the structural and violent aspects of border experiences. Gurur Ertem has been a continuous partner in discussing the intersections of the

Acknowledgements | 13

ethics, aesthetics, and politics of movement; Bettina Masuch and tanzhaus nrw further encouraged this dialogue and brought it to print with the 2018 publication Bodies of Evidence. The present volume is a lightly annotated version of my doctoral dissertation for the University of Hamburg. As a member of the research group Loose Connections: Collectivity at the Intersection of Digital and Urban Space, I benefited from the group’s interdisciplinary take on collectivity, and from a research grant that enabled me to embark on this project in a concentrated manner. Moreover, my colleagues in the research colloquium at the Institute for Human Movement Science and the Section for Culture, Media, and Society have critically encouraged this work over many years and offered valuable suggestions and input. The book has been published with the financial support of Loose Connections and has been implemented thanks to the efficient collaboration with transcript publishers. Adam Kucharski has been a meticulous and engaged copyeditor of the English manuscript of the publication. Prof. Dr. Gabriele Klein from the Institute for Human Movement Science at the University of Hamburg and PD Dr. Ulrich Bielefeld at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and the Technical University of Darmstadt closely accompanied me in the process leading up to Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects as my doctoral advisors. Their critical input and practical advice encouraged me to develop my claims at the intersection of the fields of sociology, dance and performance studies, and political theory; their insistence on research practices that go beyond the mere defense of personal politics or positions has immeasurably improved this scholarship. Gabriele Klein has placed extraordinary and steadfast trust in my work, throughout its circuitous journey to publication. Finally, this project has been nurtured by myriad personal, intellectual, and artistic friend- and fellowships. Felix Wittek, Irene Noeth, Andrea Noeth, Kattrin Deufert, Thomas Plischke, Frank Gaster and Greta, Jessica Bauer, Bettina Maria Mehne, Eike Wittrock, Daniela Zymann, Monika Halkort, Jörg Richard, and Elke Scheuring have provided ongoing support and offered often unconditional hospitality, in particular when the violent realities of border experiences threatened to escape the confines of my work life. This book is dedicated to Ulrike Gaster and Edith Boxberger, who taught me not to shy away from tackling the deceptively small and unspectacular borders that create such powerful inclusions and exclusions in our everyday lives. Berlin, February 2019

Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects. Artistic Articulations of Borders and Collectivity from Lebanon and Palestine

Chapter 1 What does it take to cross a border? And what does it take to belong? Introduction

Two questions—“What does it take to cross a border? And what does it take to belong?”—set the scene for this book, Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: Artistic Articulations of Borders and Collectivity from Lebanon and Palestine. They drove and accompanied the research project, framing my own border experiences and spurring tentative and informal exchanges with the experiences of other border crossers. Rather than demanding quick or general answers, the questions interrogate the meaning and value that we attribute, both individually and collectively, to situating and positioning ourselves—our movements, actions, and thoughts. Combining moments of the past, notions of the present, and promises of the future, they open a door to a complex and ever-specific texture of elements that shape two critical and intertwined forms of experience: the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. The questions evoke sensorial and affective moments—senses of complicity and bonding, as well as suspicion and distrust, that mark our interaction with other people at the border. They remind us of the familiarity and mutual recognition of gestures among fellow border crossers, as well as the irritation that comes from unreadable movements and facial expressions. These are moments in which we try to catch—or avoid—the attention of our fellow border crossers, speculating on the probability of a successful passage. They invoke artifacts and objects like passports and permits that equip us with privileges, or conversely deny us the right to access and move across space. They unearth mundane routines, habits, memories, and desires that align us with or exclude us from a given collective. They reveal shared values, norms, discourses, and laws that frame our membership to a given group or community. They summon

18 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

experiences in which abstract senses of belonging and of being in or out of place become concrete. These loosely recollected snippets from various encounters stir the preliminary understanding that bodies are at the core of the experience of the border as well as the experience of collectivity: feelings of tension and joyful anticipation that turn visceral; states of lingering, waiting, and dwelling at the borders that find corporeal expression; direct and digitized practices of being body-searched or placing our fingers on the biometric reader; movements of firmly yet cautiously navigating through space, disciplining the breath, lowering the voice while being alert and ready to improvise at any time.

1.1

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

As an internationally active curator and dramaturge in the field of contemporary choreography, dance, and performing arts, I have been traveling in the Middle East1 for more than a decade now and have faced many of the experiences evoked here with the undeniable privilege of a Western passport. This practicebased background—and the focus on body-based forms of artistic expression that it introduces into the study—encouraged my initial decision to place bodies at the center of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects. By treating bodies as points of entry into my theoretical inquiry, I do not presume them to be the authoritarian markers of authenticity or immediacy. Rather, I assume that bodies, as an investigatory perspective and conceptual framework, not only reveal how borders are narrated and represented but help us to perceive processes in which our individual and collective capacity for moving safely and imagining ourselves freely in material and symbolic space are up for negotiation. In connection to this, I advance the hypothesis that the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity are interlocking and entangled and can only be understood in reference to each other. In other words, I contend that individual bodies, in the experience of the border, are assessed according to their

1

In the framework of this study, I use the term “Middle East” to refer to Lebanon, Palestine, and their neighboring countries. I do so with awareness that the term has been criticized for reproducing a Eurocentric historical perspective and for being a particularly imprecise geopolitical referent. Yet, in contrast to formulations like “the Arab world,” it provides a geographical, rather than ethnic, description, highlighting that the relevant binding elements strongly rely on but cannot be limited to Arab language and culture.

Introduction | 19

existing or alleged affiliation with certain collectives. My assumption that bodies and body-based experiences are key to theoretically processing these dynamics is grounded in the understanding that meaning emerges from the interaction between bodies and thus can exceed intentionality, subjectivity, or rational control. Moreover, preliminary indications from my own and other people’s border experiences suggest to me that the processes of collective alignment and contestation at stake here cannot be fully comprehended on the basis of homogeneous, preexisting, or exclusive categories. Rather, explanations based solely on transparent administrative logics, binding legal categories, or comprehensive social and identarian frameworks that are supposed to regulate territoriality and sovereignty fall short of the mark, and even more so when situated within the sociopolitical realities of the Middle East. Specifically, in light of recent migratory movements, the repercussions of the Arab uprisings from 2010 onwards, and the resulting forced or chosen coexistences of multiple communities, borders have become increasingly restrictive in the region. At the same time, borders seem to be more porous and portable than ever, reallocated and redistributed among different state and nonstate agents, varying local realities, and the conflicting interests of international politics. Thus, while the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity act as nonnegotiable elements of separation and division in the lives of many, I argue that these experiences are integral to how individual and collective belonging—getting and being together—are performatively brought about, although largely on unequal terms. Against this backdrop, the study at hand focuses on borders in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, with particular emphasis on the occupied West Bank. Here, the critical potential of the experience-based approach that I advance in this study gains relevance in a context that is marked by efficacious, highly mediatized, and symbolically loaded representations of the border: images of checkpoints, road blocks, and walls, as well as narratives revolving around war and violent conflict, occupation, and different forms of nationalism. My goal is not a general discussion of the geopolitical history and current realities of the region.2 Rather, I am interested in how these contested borders translate into current cultural realms, and, more specifically, into artistic practices that center bodies and movement. How do artists who researched and published their work between 2010 and 2015 approach the dual experiences of borders and collectivity in this context? What happens when they transpose their

2

For indicative positions on the geographical and geopolitical history of borders in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, see Hirst 2010; Shoshan 2010; Kaufman 2014b; Hanf 2015; Del Sarto 2017.

20 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

own and others’ experiences and realities into the aesthetic realm? What is the role and status of the corporeal and the sensorial in that process? And how, finally, do the aesthetic experiences under discussion in this volume make otherwise opaque political realities observable and describable? From the perspective of artistic practice, Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects seeks to understand how the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity are co-constitutive and how bodies inform this process. Methodology With Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, I do not aim at a general handling of the history of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel and its border and identity politics. Rather, I take as a starting point the field of contemporary body-based arts and, more specifically, a sample of three artistic case studies that rework to different extents specific experiences of borders and collectivity as a starting point: the live sound installation Contingency (2010) by Basel Abbas and Ruanne AbouRahme, the interactive performance Free Advice (2015) by choreographer and dancer Farah Saleh, and the lecture-performance Nothing to Declare (2013) by the female live arts collective Dictaphone Group.3 Each artistic work engages with the cultural and geopolitical contexts of Lebanon or Palestine/Israel. A mixed-media corpus of empirical materials, the works ground my qualitative and comparative analyses and expand notions of what a border is, including architectural and built infrastructure as well as symbolic, embodied, felt, and imagined borders. This sample and the perspective that it introduces into my analyses raise questions about the methodological potential and limitations of working with aesthetic evidence to investigate social and political phenomena, the selection methodology that was employed, and the comparability of the empirical data— all of which I will detail in Chapter 2. However, all of the artworks place bodies and movement at their core, even though they are from different disciplinary backgrounds and traditions. On this basis and benefiting from a generous, longterm exchange with the artists, my analytical focus is not directed towards biographical research or the reconstruction of the artists’ intentions. Nor do I emphasize how audiences perceive the artwork of Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group. Rather, I explore whether the artists’ dramaturgical strategies and concepts can contribute to theoretical rethinking of corpo-

3

For creation and production details and full credits of the artistic works, see the respective case studies; Chapters 3-5.

Introduction | 21

reality and embodiment as often-neglected analytical dimensions in the debate on borders and collectivity. On an operational level, I will combine different content-analytical tools from social sciences such as fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and participatory observation with a practice-based approach to dramaturgy, understood as an analytical function within a creative process. This procedure aims to shift the focus from the representation and narration of the border and of collectivity to their experience and imagination. Literature Review and Relevance of the Study During the research process, the evaluation of the data and the development of theory have been interwoven and mutually formative, particularly with regards to establishing the theoretical focus of the study. In addition to the theory already embedded in the artwork and the artists’ accounts, Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects engages different disciplinary and theoretical fields that often live separate lives: dance and performance studies, border studies, and body and movement-theory developed in philosophy and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary approach reflects the discursive histories of the study’s key concepts—bodies, borders, and collectivity. It equally suggests that art, politics, and society are closely linked in the experience of the border, the experience of collectivity, and their artistic articulations. In the following section, I will specify existing literature that informs my research and reflect on how this study contributes to and challenges the scholarly debate. Dance and Performance Studies Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects reflects, through the concepts of the border and of collectivity, on the importance of bodies in maintaining and challenging, rehearsing and staging, and legitimizing and aestheticizing social and political conditions and processes. Here, I draw on a substantial number of theoretical perspectives that have emerged from the field of dance and performance studies in recent years: research on bodies in protest, in assemblies, and war,4 for instance, as well as studies dedicated to the relationships among art, activism, and socially engaged work.5 Furthermore, underscoring the intertwining of

4

For examples of this scholarship, see Foster 2003; Butler 2011, 2016; Bharucha 2014;

5

Examples of these studies include Mouffe 2006; Rancière 2013; Crimmin and Stanton

Brandstetter and Hartung 2017. 2014; Malzacher and steirischer herbst 2014.

22 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

aesthetics, politics, and ethics that I advance in this book, different scholars have explored the concepts of responsibility, care, and vulnerability in their inquiries into social and political action.6 Alongside these approaches, I rely on scholarship that has elaborated concepts such as community and collectivity in connection with dance and body-based forms of artistic expression, from both historical and contemporary perspectives: explorations for instance, of the embodiment of politics and ideology, and the choreographic formation and orchestration of bodies in social or political mass movements.7 Against this backdrop, the last decade has seen a rise in scholarly attention to contemporary artistic practices from the Middle East. To some degree, this reflects the fact that artistic strategies have figured prominently in the implementation of processes of social and political transformation in several Arab countries since 2010. Yet, it is important to note that most of the existing corpus of available theoretical literature on contemporary artistic practices from the Middle East predominantly focuses on the fields of visual arts and theater. In addition to a number of anthologies that provide an overview of specific artistic practices, disciplines, or traditions,8 several publications pursue historical and geopolitical perspectives on specific countries or regions.9 Significantly, a number of critical online platforms and blogs showcase more recent artistic developments and offer valuable and timely information on the environments in which artistic works are produced.10 Next to these sources, self-authored texts by artists, catalogue entries, chronological overviews, and newspaper and magazine reviews complete the corpus of literature. Yet, in the Middle Eastern context, art forms that involve the body and movement lack more systemic academic processing and continue to be under-

6

This includes Burt 2013; Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016; Ertem 2013, 2017.

7

For indicative studies, see Baxmann 2000; Sasse and Wenner 2002; Rousier and Centre National de la Dance 2003; Van Eikels 2013; Giersdorf 2013; Cvejić and Vujanović 2015.

8

Examples include Winegar 2006; Amirsadeghi 2009; Keshmirshekan 2015. Also see the catalogues of the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts Ashkal Alwan’s biennial Home Works and the publications of the Sharjah Biennial.

9

See Downey 2014, 2015, 2016; Halasa, Omareen, and Mahfoud 2014. For a specific focus on dance and movement-centered art forms (and traditional and folklore dance in particular), see Al Zayer 2004; Buckland 2006; Shabout 2007; Boullata 2009; Rowe 2010; Makhoul and Hon 2013.

10 For online publication platforms on culture and contemporary arts in the Middle East, see Ibraaz; Bidoun; Makhzin; ArteEast.

Introduction | 23

studied. Thus, much of this specific knowledge is circulated in direct exchange or other informal ways. Given an implicit history of Western hegemony in dance and performance studies, this leads to an absence of reliable scholarly references about the history of contemporary art and cultural production from the Middle East. This circumstance is intensified by practical difficulties in accessing and circulating the available sources, which, furthermore, are often only available in English. Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects seeks to contribute to this deficit in scholarly research by placing specific emphasis on the problem of borders and of collectivity. By focusing on a younger generation of Lebanese and Palestinian artists and corresponding original materials collected in the research process, this project nourishes a local and experiential process of theory formation and contributes to a systematic academic processing of contemporary, body-based artistic practices from the Middle East. Border Studies Since the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of border studies has given increased analytical recognition to bodies and movement. This development is a result of a broader shift from discussions of the geopolitics and materiality of the border to its transformative qualities in society, politics, and the everyday.11 To summarize, in light of ongoing processes of globalization and digitization, borders have increasingly been approached as dynamic constellations—as processes of re- and debordering in which orders, norms, and values are constantly redistributed. The corresponding development of theoretical vocabulary, such as “border-lands” or “border-scape,” illustrates this conceptual expansion (see van Houtum, 2012). These more process-driven positions indicate a relocation of border research from classical elements such as nationhood or citizenship to more dynamic categories—a shift that gains specific importance in the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, as I will develop in detail in Chapter 6.2. Against this backdrop, I suggest regrouping existing research on bodies in border studies around three main interconnected investigatory foci. Next to general debates on the body’s capacity to restrict, monitor, or allow mobility, scholars have first highlighted the materiality and the corporeality of bodies. Debates on hunger strikes and suicide bombing exemplify these investigations into the body’s ability to participate in conflict as a weapon or fighter.12 Second,

11 For indicative positions, see Khosravi 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Kotef 2015; Nail 2016. 12 See Cornish and Saunders 2014.

24 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

the symbolic and metaphorical forces that bodies wield in bordering processes have been central to the debate and reflected in studies on the relationship between the violation of bodies at the border and their corresponding impact on a broader communitarian and collective scale.13 Studies on human shielding, martyrdom, and self-immolation can serve as examples in the Middle Eastern context as well. Third, I include theoretical voices that place their analyses of bodies and borders in line with human rights discourses and the status of bodies at the border in international law: for instance, critical discussions related to the freedom of physical movement or the integrity of the body at the borders.14 Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects responds to these developments in the academic field by specifically asserting relevance of theoretical and practical knowledge from arts to the theoretical inquiry into border issues. In addition to putting bodies center stage in the examination of borders, I correlate the artistic works at hand to the increased attention that border scholarship has recently given to nonstate actors’ impacts on borderwork: e.g., the influence of activists and artists on the experience, maintenance, and representation of borders. However, my starting point is not the eventual external effects that artistic practice and aesthetic experience might have on border dynamics such as how they might provide relief or support in community building, posttraumatic work, education, and so on. Rather, I am interested in how body- and movement-based artistic practices can inform border analyses; i.e., how the corporeal, the sensorial, and the aesthetic can be activated as analytical categories in their own right.15 This methodological validation of arts-related strategies and concepts has not yet been exhaustively explored in border studies. Social Sciences and Philosophy The third pillar of literature that Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects references builds on recent debates in the social sciences and philosophy on collectivity. In summary, I refer to scholarly positions that, from a process-driven perspective, critically reexamine what binds and holds a collective together. One element that traverses different approaches in my inquiry is the understanding that new forms of collectivity such as temporary practices of hospitality and protest cannot be sufficiently explained by the influence of homogeneous and preexisting elements

13 For examples of this debate, see McSorley 2013; Bargu 2014. 14 For indicative positions, see Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2001, 2017a; Perugini and Gordon 2015; Biedermann 2018. 15 For related scholarship, see Tlalim 2017a; Abu Hamdan 2018 (website); Hamed 2018; Ismaïl 2018.

Introduction | 25

or categories alone (e.g., shared interests, objectives, traditions, or other common registers that range from the biological to the metaphysical). Here, concepts like networks or assemblages have been reexamined to analyze how space and agency are redistributed, particularly with regards to the interrelations of animate and inanimate bodies.16 Furthermore, scholars have emphasized the role of affects and emotions in the process of becoming collective17 and pointed out that the formation and experience of collectivity are located at the intersections of different temporal, spatial, and digital orders. In line with this, I aim at applying knowledge from dance and performance studies as well as from artistic practice to the discussion on collectivity. I am specifically interested in analyzing how movement can be observed through the meaningful interaction of bodies and, in the process, theorized. Thus, existing research that gives primary recognition of imagination as significant element in the experience of collectivity offers important source codes for my approach.18 Furthermore, accepting that bodies always exist in relation to other bodies, I put forward the argument that the political and the ethical—that is, the negotiation and assessment of binding elements, norms and values—are key factors for understanding the experience of collectivity. Thus, my research question investigates how the mere colocation of bodies at the border might transform a largely homogeneous definition of collectives and communities into polyvalent and dynamic analyses of being together. This approach, more specifically, challenges predominant scholarship on collectivity in the Lebanese and Palestinian/Israeli context that emphasizes strong and often binary and exclusive narratives and representations based on categories such as origin, ethnicity, religion, or nationhood. Structure of the Study Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects is prefaced by this introduction that outlines the research questions and hypotheses and situates the study within existing scholarly debates. Moreover, it offers contextual remarks on body-based and movement-centered artistic practices from Lebanon, Palestine, and the broader Middle East in an effort to better situate the three selected artistic case studies. Chapter 2 subsequently presents the corpus of empirical materials and the methodological instruments that have been implemented to collect and evaluate

16 Examples include Klein 2004; Stäheli 2012; Latour 2013; Böhler and Granzer 2018. 17 For examples of these scholars, see Massumi 2002; Manning 2006; Ahmed 2014. 18 For indicative positions, see Anderson 1993; Bielefeld 2003; 2017.

26 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

the data. Alongside a detailed discussion of the research design and both the benefits and shortcomings of grounding qualitative research in artistic case studies, I address ethical and epistemic concerns that stem from doing research in the cultural and geopolitical context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: questions of responsibility and power-sensitivity in research, the specific status of theory and expertise conveyed in the empirical corpus of data, the impact of framing qualitative research with external categories such as conflict or care, as well as the status of the sensorial and the corporeal in qualitative empirical inquiries. This establishes the foundation for Chapters 3-5, which are dedicated to the three artistic case studies: Contingency by Abbas and Abou-Rahme (2010), Free Advice by Saleh (2015), and Nothing to Declare by Dictaphone Group (2013). I analyze the pieces in three separate chapters that are organized with a parallel structure. They are grounded in a description of video documentation of each respective case study that does not attempt to reconstruct the artistic works in detail, but rather serves as a tool to recall their dramaturgical design and allow the reader to orient themselves to the ensuing evaluation and discussion. On this basis, the qualitative analyses are organized into three steps, bringing different empirical documents into conversation with one another: the first two sections focus on the key concepts of the study, i.e., borders and collectivity, and a third section completes each chapter by considering how the notion of agency applies to each case. In Chapter 6, I put my findings from the case study analyses into dialogue and compare their commonalities and disparities. Analogous to the distinct parts of the case studies, this chapter focuses on the three key terms of the research project: bodies, borders, and collectivity. This structure coordinates the empirical findings and opens them up to selected theoretical positions from the disciplinary fields of dance and performance studies, border studies, the social sciences, and philosophy. It works toward a theorization of the main research question in Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: how can the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity be understood from the perspective of bodies? Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the study. Here, I will combine my observations of the residual effects of borders and the resilient qualities of bodies and continue to argue for an experience-based and embodied notion of agency and responsibility. Furthermore, this last part of the study will sketch out possible directions for further research.

Introduction | 27

1.2

BODY-BASED ARTISTIC PRACTICES FROM LEBANON AND PALESTINE. CONTEXTUAL REMARKS

The sample of case studies by artists Abbas and Abou-Rahme, choreographer Saleh, and live arts collective Dictaphone Group situate this study in the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. At this point, I would like to make clear that the scale and composition of this sample follow practical considerations related to the scope of the study; they do not provide an exhaustive overview of borderrelated artistic practices. Also, while all artwork engages to some extent with realities on the ground, this analytical framing does not aim to geopoliticize the artists and their artistic articulations as representatives of the respective territories that they address, or reduce them to their origins and nationalities. In addition to the collectivizing and essentialist perspective that such an approach would entail, it would fail to acknowledge actual working realities that unfold from much more complex conditions and influences. Moreover, both the Lebanese and Palestinian contemporary art scenes cannot be limited to activities that take place locally. As a result of a long history of migration and displacement that structurally characterizes the region, a large community of artists and intellectuals have been forced or have chosen to live and work outside Lebanon and Palestine, while often upholding strong ties and vivid exchanges with the art scenes they left behind.19 Against this backdrop, my subsequent introductory remarks will shed light on significant elements and frameworks that shape the creation, production, and circulation of artistic work from the Middle Eastern context. This includes social, political, and aesthetic elements as well as features related to institutionalism, arts funding, and education. However, rather than attempting a thorough overview, these remarks function as snapshots meant to provide a background for the cultural and geopolitical contexts that I refer to in Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects. More specific and detailed information on the artistic case studies will be provided in Chapters 3-5.

19 Correspondingly, artistic traditions and influences have been traveling among different countries and communities in the Middle East; a basic distinction might be made, however, between contexts that draw on long-standing modernist traditions (such as the cultural and artistic scenes in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt) and more market-oriented and globalized developments that have emerged more recently in the Persian Gulf states.

28 | Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects

As mentioned earlier, this study emphasizes artistic practices that rely on body- and movement-based approaches, even though they are from different disciplinary backgrounds. This reflects the specificity of my empirical sample. At the same time, while different artistic disciplines and traditions might stand apart in academic reflection, in practice they often appear to be fluid, interlinked, and in communication with one another. The fact that body- and movementbased practices are not reserved to the fields of dance and choreography but have been developed in other domains such as theater, music, sports, and circus, or in popular festivities or societal rituals, illustrates this dynamic. Working with Bodies: Conditions of Creation and Production20 The period from 2010 to 2015 during which the artistic case studies were researched, created, and produced coincides with a wave of interest in contemporary artistic practices from the Middle East by the international arts circuit. As a consequence, prominent Western institutions intensified their engagement, generating a wide range of corresponding programs, festivals, commissions, and residencies. This development is related to the Arab uprisings as well as recent migrations in the region that have entered public debate and gone viral on an international level. Yet, it also mirrors the parallel growth, proliferation, and professionalization that have over the last decade defined different art scenes and, in particular, the field of contemporary dance and choreography in the Middle East. A number of temporary as well as permanent projects dedicated to body- and movement-based artistic practices and related discourses have emerged in reaction to a lack of spaces and opportunities for presenting and creating work.21

20 The following observations on the Palestinian context resonate with field research that I conducted with choreographer Samar Haddad King from March 31 to April 2, 2016, in Nazareth, Haifa, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, and funded by the Goethe Institute in the Palestinian Territories. The Palestinian dance community is spread out over the West Bank, the territories corresponding to the 1948 borders, Gaza, Jerusalem, the refugee camps, and the Palestinian diaspora, with all of these contexts creating different conditions for mobility and exchange. 21 In the Palestinian context, the cultural center Sareyyet Ramallah and El Funoun Dance Group have established permanent structures dedicated to movement-based artistic practices like dance and choreography. Next to artistic and educational activities on the ground, both initiatives contribute to the international visibility of these art forms via touring activities; furthermore, Sareyyet Ramallah has been running an international contemporary dance festival since 2006. In addition to the manifold activities of

Introduction | 29

In parallel to this, different networks and alliances have been established across the region, juggling shared artistic projects and the practical need to connect in light of precarious and fragmented conditions for producing and creating work. With an almost total lack of public funding or social security for artists, many of these initiatives rely on the support of NGOs or even individual artists, curators, and private patrons.22 Without downplaying the importance of international Middle East-related development and innovation grants to artistic projects, their long-term impact on the ground, however, is often limited, especially with regards to creating audiences and engaging in educational contexts. Moreover, external funding and its normative evaluation criteria risk introducing and eventually imposing external values and norms on the artistic processes themselves; for instance, expectations that art should contribute to freedom or human rights discourses, or fulfil a community-building social function. Furthermore, in connection to the research interests of this study, different bordering processes that fundamentally affect artistic production and creation processes need to be taken into account. In addition to various limitations on travel and mobility, threats to freedom of expression are structural features that correspond to changing levels of explicit or implicit censorship (and, often, self-censorship). I will detail these dynamics more thoroughly in the following chapters, but for now I reference an informal exchange with curator Christine Thomé. Echoing many other practitioners that I encountered during my research, she describes the main

individual artists and cultural operators, I will limit myself to acknowledging the Palestinian Circus School, located in Birzeit, that has continuously contributed to the training and artistic development of physical practice. In the Lebanese context, the production, creation, and critical reflection of body-based work is, in most cases, developed in the framework of transdisciplinary platforms, festivals, and institutions such as Ashkal Alwan, or artists-run initiatives like the Zico House, 98-weeks, or the Mansion. With regards to dance and choreography specifically, I will mention the Arab dance platform Bipod and the residency and exchange program moultaqa leymoun. This is not an exhaustive list. 22 Foreign cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institute, the British Council, or the Institut Français continue to play an important role in the field of contemporary art, providing spaces and funding for presenting work, as well as enabling exchange programs and inviting international researchers, artists, and educators into local contexts. It is significant to note that, to very different degrees, the interdependency between foreign institutes and the local art scenes might represent a continuation of the colonial history of the Middle East and the corresponding unequally distributed power politics.

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challenge that contemporary and critical arts from the Middle East currently face today as a “war on mobility” (2015). With these restrictions in mind, it would, however, be inappropriate to reduce the discussion of contemporary artistic practices from the Middle East to the infrastructural, bureaucratic, symbolic, aesthetic, economic, and material challenges that confront artists in their daily work. Obviously, as I will argue with the example of the selected case studies, body- and movement-based forms of artistic practice can also provide a forceful means of standing together in times where language- and image-based forms of expression are censored by authorities. Furthermore, in addition to romanticizing existing sociopolitical realities, such a perspective would ignore that the artists and cultural operators’ habitual improvisation in maneuvering roles and circumstances also translates into the much-needed skill of reacting to changing social and political developments. In a similar vein and referencing the Palestinian context, architect and researcher Yazid Anani describes, how the departure of contemporary art forms from classical institutional spaces to more independent settings helped “constitute alternative social imaginings and facilitate a discourse on the representations of dystopias” (quoted in Toukan 2014, 210). Correspondingly, many artistic projects that have emerged in recent years demonstrate a high level of political awareness, responsiveness, and distinct engagement in their local contexts with different levels of explicitness, ranging from the implementation of artistic projects in public and urban space to combinations of art, archival work, and research.23 However, on the levels of infrastructure and human resources, these projects often operate on precarious terms that challenge their own stability and sustainability (see Haddad King and Noeth 2018). In concrete terms, working as an artist in the long term is often only sustainable when pursuing additional professional activities, such as day jobs or parallel studies—a condition that affects the planning of working processes as well as the development of skills and training on a practical level.

23 Examples of artistic practices that distinctly relate to current developments in public space include the independent and multidisciplinary festival D-Caf (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival) in Cairo, produced in consecutive annual editions since 2011, and the contemporary dance festival On Marche that inhabits urban space in Marrakech and other sites in Morocco. As an indicative position for the intersection of artistic and archival practices, see the HaRaKa—Dance Development and Research project (Cairo), directed by Adham Hafez.

Introduction | 31

Dance and Artistic Movement Education These predicaments create the problem of how to establish a safe space for exchange and collaboration, both logistically and artistically, and also concern the sector of education. In summary, professional artistic movement and dance education in the Middle East is still very much under development in institutional terms. For example, even today there are no stable, state-run academies or programs that provide formal higher education in contemporary, body-centered artistic practices in Lebanon or Palestine. Consequently, many practitioners draw on a background in traditional dance forms, theater, or music. In addition, formal BA or MA programs in non-Arab countries represent opportunities for learning and training, while diverse and mostly self-organized approaches to autodidacticism, such as workshop or pop-up training formats, are also common. Thus, artistic careers often show very heterogeneous profiles that reflect an entanglement of different roles and responsibilities. In addition to creating and producing artistic work, the artists’ activities might include instructing peers, mediating and communicating the outputs of their processes, as well as managing finances, bureaucratic regulations, and more implicit, symbolic, and political negotiations related to the status of art and of bodies in society. It is against this backdrop that the informal exchange and circulation of knowledge on body-based artistic practices gains specific importance in the Middle Eastern context, both on practical as well as discursive and theoretical levels. Yet, a number of strong and more permanent educational initiatives, particularly in the field of contemporary dance and choreography, have emerged in the last ten years in the region.24 Beyond the specificities of their projects and cultural and sociopolitical contexts, they share several common concerns. For instance, they strive to integrate materials from local cultures, traditions, and discourses in the educational realm, and thereby artistically acknowledge the richness and poetics of gestural and body languages in Middle Eastern cultures or enhance the possibility of working in vernacular Arabic.25 Moreover, these

24 Examples from the educational field include the artist-run, pan-Arab company project min’tala or the artist-driven Ramallah Dance Summer School that operates annually in Ramallah and different Palestinian communities since 2016. 25 These elements from local cultures are not necessarily presented in opposition to Western movement vocabularies or techniques, but as additional and alternative positions. With regards to artistic approaches to local movement languages and body cultures, see the choreographic and performative works by artists Nacera Belaza, Bouchra Ouizgen, Danya Hammoud, Taoufiq Izeddiou, Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis,

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projects pair their claim to revalidate the specificity of local contexts with a general sensitivity for what it means to artistically work with individual and collective bodies at the intersections of public, domestic, and theatrical space in the local contexts. Significantly, this need to resituate artistic work must be seen in light of a largely Western-centered history of contemporary body-based artistic practice, particularly dance and choreography, that continues to structurally dominate aesthetic and production standards in international arts markets and education.26 In line with this, philosopher Rachid Boutayeb speaks of “a double act of violence” (2012) when describing a mechanism that confronts artists from the Middle Eastern context: on the one hand, he refers to the judgment, norms, figurative traditions, and taboos related to the body that characterize their own societies and cultures; on the other hand he evokes the parallel influence of Western concepts and practices that also shape arts education. Bodies, here, appear as sites of contestation and negotiation for the societal and political determinants of authority over aesthetic developments. What is important to note is that these questions of legacy and legitimacy that find articulation here are both epistemic and corporeal at the same time. Framing Bodies: Thematic and Curatorial Concerns Arguably, artists’ aesthetic and thematic decisions within body- and movementbased approaches vary widely across the Middle East. Yet, when schematically looking at contemporary practices from Lebanon and Palestine from the 1990s onwards, some recurring interests and topics emerge: for example, a commitment to addressing history, memory, and those forgotten in war or written out of history, and a corresponding insistence on bodily presence and agency in light of political and symbolic regimes. This gives expression to the desire to embrace bodies as sites at which individual and collective identity

Mithkal Alzghair, or Radhouane El Meddeb as examples from the Middle Eastern context. 26 See dance scholars and critics Jens R. Giersdorf and Gay Morris who contend: “The conscious, if unacknowledged, incorporation of non-Western or indigenous dance techniques and structures as primitive or exotic Other was still considered a product of the choreographer’s genius rather than a skillful borrowing. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that practitioners and historians began to acknowledge the incorporation of non-Western and indigenous forms and structures into the movement pool and process of choreography.” (2017, 8-9)

Introduction | 33

politics can be imagined, tested, contested, rehearsed, and dreamed of in complex ways. As writer and curator Nat Muller observes: “[R]ecurring themes are memory (individual and collective), loss, identity and re-presentation, the production and construction of history, the thin lines between truth and fiction, the countering of stereotypes (disorientalization), the archival, relations to increasing and rapid urbanization and globalization, a critique on institutionalization and the expectations of the art world, etc.” (quoted in Barragán 2014)

In line with this, belonging is a recurring topic that animates the inquiries of artists and institutions alike: works and projects that deal with looking back and recollecting history, but also with providing alternative accounts when faced with a kind of national amnesia, nostalgia, or an absence of official archives. On a microlevel, this translates into questions of place that artists engage when, for example, addressing concrete effects of rapid urbanization and economization on many Arab cities, such as Ramallah and Beirut. It is significant to consider the normative dynamics launched when artwork from the Middle East is de- and recontextualized in the international arts market. To stay with the perspective of bodies, the obsession with the veiled female body or the focus on wounded, weak, and vulnerable bodies can serve as examples of unintentional or purposeful interpretations that install and stabilize gendered or orientalist stereotypes in the aesthetic as well as in the social realms. Arguably, recent political events such as 9/11 and ‘the war on terror’, the Arab Spring, and the frequently evoked and often vague formula of the ‘refugee crisis’ have intensified these essentialist dynamics and put the body’s capacity for action and transformation at the fore of the public debate. These broader developments that associate bodies with control, containment, subjugation, and biopolitical management, or, on the flipside, with resistance and protest, impact curatorial and institutional politics in the field of art, as well. This dynamic is paralleled on a discursive level by certain Western institutions’ and curators’ vocal insistence that the artists to whom they give visibility are ‘secular’, ‘critical’, and, of course, ‘political’. In a similar dynamic, borders have also become popular in the international art world, as illustrated by the proliferation of artistic projects and conferences dedicated to the topic.27 Whereas this focus on borders indexes a

27 For instance, I have been involved in the following projects as a curator and/or participating researcher alongside my work on this study: Bodies of Evidence: On Bodies, Borders, and Movement. Conference. January 14–17, 2016. DOCH Stockholm University of the Arts. Stockholm; Border Effects. Conference. June 16–

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long-standing connection between arts and politics in the region as well as realities on the ground, it risks reducing bodies and artists working on these topics to their representational capacities and thus neglecting the fictive, imaginative, and utopian potential of arts—its poetic surplus that might provide alternative readings to established narratives and representations. I do not seek to dismiss the myriad, artistically rich, and sensitive collaborations between Middle Eastern and Western artists, institutions, and audiences, or the positive, long-term effects of these exchanges. Nor do I ignore my active involvement in maintaining or challenging these dynamics as a curator and researcher myself. My interest here is simply to raise awareness of the more or less overt dynamics and economies at work when, as Nat Muller puts it, artists find themselves “being sandwiched” or being “pushed to take sides, to serve and include certain subjects and images while excluding others” (Muller 2016). Here, existing inequalities operating in the field of contemporary art and beyond risk being structurally reproduced. At a moment in time when dispersed and often identity-related fears, with the body at their core, color politics in a new and disquieting way, the close analyses of artistic practices in Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects can help to reveal these dynamics and contribute to a more profound understanding of the relationships among art, society, and politics at stake.

19, 2016. As part of Dance Congress. Hanover, Germany; Wounded Places. On the Integrity of the Body. Conference. February 27–28. Ashkal Alwan. Beirut; Art at the Borders: Spatial Politics and Post-Colonial Strategies in the Middle East. Conference. May 27-28, 2016. Onassis Cultural Centre and Athens Biennial. Athens, Greece.

Negotiating Engagement: the Empirical Part of the Study

Chapter 2 Negotiating Engagement: the Empirical Part of the Study

Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects emerges from my experience as a curator and researcher in the Lebanese and Palestinian art scenes, with Beirut and Ramallah being their center. Informed by a mixed-media corpus of empirical materials, the present volume consists of qualitative and comparative analyses of three artistic case studies that elucidate the contexts and environments of those art scenes: Contingency (2010) by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Free Advice (2015) by Farah Saleh, and Nothing to Declare (2013) by Dictaphone Group (Tania El Khoury, Abir Saksouk, and Petra Serhal). Taking on the notion that artistic practice can contribute to theorizing the experience of the border and of collectivity, I discuss in this chapter the epistemic and methodological frameworks and tools that I rely on to formulate research hypotheses and discover structural patterns within these complex art works. The first section of this chapter will introduce and situate the research process by outlining the ethical and epistemic implications of my access and subsequent movement in the field, exploring questions of sensitivity to power, conflicting or inconsistent epistemologies, and the specific status of theory in the empirical material. Furthermore, I will examine the twin notions of care and conflict as distinct frameworks that have conditioned the collection and evaluation of the data, as well as the status of the sensorial and the corporeal in my fieldwork. The second section reflects on the intersection of aesthetic representation and experience, addressing both the potential and the peril of working with aesthetic evidence and artistic case studies. The third section details the sample of empirical materials and the methodological tools applied to their collection and evaluation. Noting the environments and conditions in which the artworks are produced and distributed, I discuss the preconditions and the process of

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carrying out fieldwork, of applying dramaturgical analysis as a methodological tool to the performance documents, and of qualitatively evaluating the interviews that I conducted with the artists. The chapter concludes by introducing the structure and organization of the artistic case study chapters of the book.

2.1

RESPONSIBLE MOVES. EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL CONCERNS

Qualitative research methods (and particularly, ethnography) have become increasingly attentive to the epistemic and sociopolitical contexts and conditions that all research partners bring into and engage with in the research process, thus seeking power-conscious, pluralist, and contextualized ways of dealing with the social worlds being investigated.1 With regards to bodies as research subjects, scholars have paid particular attention to the politics and ethics of managing and disciplining bodies through technologies of power, authority, and knowledge (see Foucault 1977, 1978). Notably, recent studies from the field of contemporary performing arts have attributed a “growing ethical consciousness” (Cools and Gielen 2014, 10-11) to the artistic community as a whole, identifying critical reflections on how to engage with society on a collective as well as individual scale.2 I take on this ethical debate by closely examining how the notion of responsibility factors into the process of collecting and evaluating the empirical material at hand. This understanding of responsibility takes into account the interconnectedness of all research partners and, in particular, the immanent ability of bodies to articulate themselves differently in response to the changing (research) environments in which they are embedded and with which they are in dialogue. Accordingly, I opt for a more dialogical model of responsibility. Rather than drawing on a prescriptive definition of responsibility based on com-

1

For indicative positions in the context of contemporary arts, see Hlavajova, Winder, and Choi 2008; Bala 2017. On writing about culture, see wa Thiong’o 1986; Cixous and Derrida 2001. For debates on negro-politics and critical whiteness, see Gilroy 2006; Moton 2018.

2

In this context, ethical discussions have focused on the impact of different processes of commodification (e.g., economization, privatization, and self-optimization) upon bodies as well as on questions related to the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of artistic creation and production and the precarity of bodies in this context.

Negotiating Engagement | 39

fortable, moralizing or judgmental distinctions between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’, and instead of delegating decision making to overarching, universalistic frameworks like common sense,3 political correctness, or intentionality, responsibility here privileges reciprocity and responsiveness. Such a model integrates the outcomes of our individual and collective actions—their after-effects and at times indirect repercussions—into the analysis and questions how aesthetics and ethics are linked in the process. Dance scholar Ramsay Burt points to the specific betweenness that characterizes such a perspective on responsibility: “It [responsibility] speaks of a state […] between decision and obligation, between parting and participating […]. The passage from responding to taking responsibility during the meeting between self and other is always uneasy going.” (2013, 6) This process, as Burt signals, is “uneasy going”—unsettling and disturbing. It reminds us that the very idea of responsibility is built on shaky ground—that our systems of value, meaning, and interpretation are not fixed but rather are dynamic and up for critical negotiation in the interactions between bodies. It also implies a self-commitment to work against the epistemic imbalances inherent in our theoretical and artistic inquiries, reflecting critically on both the who and the how of conducting research—that is, bringing the idea of the encounter to the fore of research methodology (for the Middle Eastern context, see Abu-Lughod 2017; Kanafani and Sawaf 2017; Sabea and Westmoreland 2008). Thus, to be cognizant of the predicaments and the requirements of our engagements is to acknowledge the risk of reproducing essentialism and exceptionalism in our scientific methodologies, evaluations, and descriptions. Ethics may thereby be understood as a praxis that is always situated (not least in a corporeal sense)4 and that accepts accountability. And thus researchers striving for ethical practice are confronted with practical questions: How can one contextualize Middle Eastern realities under research, specifically when analyzing them from a Western perspective? Where are the limits to this process, and what is withheld? How does one negotiate the balance between one’s artistic and scientific interpretations of strongly collectivized representations? Is there a responsibility for the artists to stay truthful in sharing personal experience with

3

This is reflected in standard advice for doing qualitative research in social sciences and in corresponding formal, practice-based guidelines that address, for instance, principles of informed consent or the right to withdraw information at any moment.

4

For the positioning of ethics as praxis, see Beausoleil 2016. For an argument on the corporeal dimension of ethics, see Butler 2010, in particular the chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect,” 33-62.

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an audience or with researchers?5 Methodologically, such an ethical commitment questions what is speakable, expressible, and perceivable, and by what means. Who is able (and indeed allowed or legitimized) to speak of and to witness specific situations, and what can only be spoken about collectively? And, finally, what cannot be observed? What escapes in the blind spots, indeterminacies, and asymmetries? In the subsequent paragraphs of this section, I will examine how these general concerns about responsibility translate into the study at hand by emphasizing three aspects that distinctly characterized my research process: the interplay of different epistemic practices and traditions (notably, the curatorial and the scientific) in defining, collecting, and evaluating the empirical materials; the intersection of theory and practice in the data and the position of the artists as artist-researchers; and the impact of the notion of conflict on the conception and implementation of the research. As I will demonstrate, these frameworks are intersecting, permeable, and moving. Access to the Field, or: Caring as a Methodological Position The research that informs Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects is anchored in my professional practice as a curator and dramaturge active in the fields of contemporary body-based forms of artistic expression. In this capacity, I continuously worked with various artists, theorists, cultural operators, and institutions from the Middle East and North Africa, most intensively from 2009-2014 as Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien.6 This professional experience resulted in different collaborations with Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group prior to this study and was my initial impulse for engaging in a process of “mutual curiosity” (Hirschauer 2008, 165; author’s translation): a process of curating and presenting the artists’ work, partaking in joint editorial projects and mediation formats, informally pondering ideas, and spending time together. This initial relationship and position facilitated my entry into the field

5

While all of the featured artists’ works engage with border experiences, whether inperson or mediated, they all disclaim expertise on the topic and the epistemic responsibility that this would imply. Mixing fact and fiction and relying largely on imagination, they insist on the singularity of their accounts rather than claiming objective truth or authenticity.

6

Tanzquartier Wien is an international presentation, production, and research center in Vienna dedicated to contemporary dance and body- and movement-based performing arts (see Tanzquartier Wien, website).

Negotiating Engagement | 41

in the first place. I gained insights into the artists’ processes of creation and production and, on an operational level, enjoyed basic travel and research funding. I also tapped into a largely informal network of exchange across different countries in the Middle East through which relevant information on my research topic and its social, political, and economic dynamics circulates. Thus, my practice and perspective as a curator has defined my work on Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, both complementing and conflicting with my position as a cultural scholar. In order to look at these dynamics in more detail, I will draw on the concept of care and the practice of caring: two notions that I situate at the core of curatorial as well as academic research. It will serve as an entry point into my discussion of the entanglement of epistemologies, roles, and responsibilities that both practices bring to research.7 Curating—a term that encompasses offering, attending to, and taking care of—is a practice that has historically been linked to selecting, highlighting, and contextualizing ideas, materials, and bodies in the cultural realm (and is echoed in my selection of the artistic cases for this study). Responding to the simultaneous imperatives of discovering ‘new talent’ and ‘promising work’8 on the one hand, and supporting and making accessible artistic development and experimentation on the other hand, curating involves the task of organizing experiences, stabilizing (and, at times, destabilizing) traditions, and establishing canons. As such, every act of curating responds to borders insofar as it is conditioned by and reacts to a priori conditions such as institutional, economic, and infrastructural frameworks; commonplace conventions and standards; matters of taste; and, hopefully not least of all, artistic concerns. At the same time, curating creates borders. Equipped with symbolic or even legal authority to include and exclude certain bodies in official and cultural memory by fostering or hindering their visibility, curating describes a process by which different codes and value systems are negotiated in the aesthetic realm. In this context, a complex texture

7

See Pirkko Husemann’s (2009) study on the artistic practices of choreographers Xavier Le Roy and Thomas Lehmen and the complex relationship between observation and participation, and between distancing and over-distancing when entering the field of study as a dramaturge and artistic collaborator.

8

The practice, history, and theory of curatorship have been discussed extensively in recent years (for an overview of the scholarship on curating in the performing arts, see Malzacher, Tupajić and Zanki 2010). Within the framework of this study, I will primarily draw on my own practice as a dramaturge and curator specializing in experimental and research-led processes in independent as well as institutionalized contexts.

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of interaction and interdependency among artists, institutions, markets, and audiences is activated and maintained through media, discourse, and theory. Thus, philosopher Stefanie Wenner and artist Jan Ritsema remind us how the curatoras-caretaker appears as a Janus-faced figure: “Curare is a poison extracted from plants and used by South African Indians for hunting. It paralyses the muscle system of an animal struck by an arrow dipped in curare and ultimately leads to respiratory standstill. […] Cura rei familialis is the Latin household, curare is Latin for arrange, care for, attend.” (Wenner 2009, 46) Moreover, “curare is a substance taken from certain plants (lianes) in the amazonian forest especially chondodendron tomentosum and strychnos toxifera they provoke a paralysation of the muscles it has been used by indigenous indo-Americans and aboriginals to endure the arrows quite some programmers, curators as they like to call it today, go for this paralyzing, paralyzing the brain muscle by curating known aesthetics by curating the recognizable.” (Ritsema 2010, 6)

Despite the potentially positive associations, the toxic quality and the creeping effects of curating that both quotes address indicate how supporting artistic practices might cater to prevailing aesthetics and politics that keep artists and their work in their place. I have mentioned in the introduction to this book that from 2010 onwards, dance and performing artists from the Middle East have experienced increased visibility in the international arts circuit; indeed, the figure of the curator is well established in Middle Eastern arts markets, as well, particularly in the Gulf but also in Ramallah and Beirut as internationalized hubs of the regional art scene. This development and the practical opportunities for production and touring that it has generated can be positively viewed as a timely reaction to political, social, and epistemic shifts in the arts, and therefore contribute to a much-needed dialogue. Yet, the poisonous potential of curatorial caretaking emerges when local specificity and complexity is confronted with (notably Western) politics of programming on the basis of the economic imbalances and dominant epistemic historiographies that define the international arts market. Recognizing that these dynamics pose the same risks for curating in arts as they do methodologically in qualitative research, I would like to take

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correspondences and ruptures between academic and curatorial research as an opportunity to advance the questions of what it is that we are actually taking care of in our critical examinations, and on what premises and at whose expense. In addition to recognizing these biases and ethical challenges, recent debates in critical feminist social sciences and political philosophy have revisited the concept of care itself. In the context of the study at hand, I am specifically interested in analytical efforts that frame care not primarily as an expression or result of weakness or vulnerability, but as a distinct and situated position from which to act, think, and move.9 In line with this idea, philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa rejects normative, moralist, or idealistic notions of care that would uphold clear distinctions between those who give and those who receive care. Rather, in her attempt to make the concept of care fruitful in the academic realm, she defines it as an immanently relational practice that involves “bodies, ourselves, [and] our environment” (2012, 212) alike. Arguing that heterogeneity and interdependency represent irreducible dynamics in every given intellectual (and I would add artistic) exchange, Puig de la Bellacasa outlines four relational figurations that define every research process at the outset: thinking-with, writingwith, dissenting-with, and thinking-for. She elaborates: “Thinking-with makes the world of thought stronger, it supports its singularity and contagious potential. Writing-with is a practical technology that reveals itself as both descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility.” (2012, 203) I contend that Puig de la Bellacasa’s categories can, in principle, be transferred to curatorial and artistic work, particularly with regards to her conception of a collectivity that would not exhaust itself in working towards consensus and final results. Here, she comments more specifically on the relation between the researcher and the research interlocutors: “Because ‘nothing comes without its world’ we do not encounter single individuals, a meeting produces a world, changes the colour of things, it diffracts more than it reflects. [...] How do we build caring relationships while recognizing divergent positions? How do those we study perceive the way we think-with their practices?” (2012, 207) Insisting, with reference to Donna Haraway, that all research processes are always collective, she supports a methodological position that critically questions the possibility and the limits of generalizing and objectifying knowledge. In other words, the notion of care that Puig de la Bellacasa advances implies that knowledge and its production are always situated and specific, procedural and dynamic, and relational and mutually constructed.

9

For indicative positions in the debate, see Braidotti 2006a, b, 2011; Povinelli 2011; Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016.

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Caring, both as an academic and a curatorial premise, requires taking responsibility for the ideas, people, and bodies under research while also being careful not to overinterpret, emotionalize, or generalize our experiences and findings. At the same time, combining curatorial and academic methodologies might result in conflicts of interest that stem from different levels of involvement with the artists and the field, different regulatory elements and power dynamics at work, aesthetic preferences, or other aims or objectives driving the respective research activities.10 Although I readily disclose these potential shortcomings in the study at hand, I argue that this combined approach does not solely represent a shortcoming. Rather, the specific and, in my case, long-term proximity engendered by a practice-based and multiscalar interaction among artists, curators, and researchers allows for a specific kind of dense and detailed knowledge that is subsequently meaningful for the theorization of the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. Notably, it enables a repetition of certain findings or observations, and thus introduces opportunities for the rapid correction and refinement of analyses. The Bias of Expertise: Artist-Researchers In the empirical material, the notion of expertise constitutes an important epistemic framework for negotiating who holds authority over certain experiences, narratives, and representations of borders and collectivity, and who can legitimately account for and theorize them. In all three cases, the artists incorporate research to define their practice on both conceptual and practical levels. While the artists unanimously insist on positioning their practices in the field of arts (in contrast to science or politics, for instance), they define their approaches as research-based or research-led.11 These qualifications demonstrate the artists’

10 This resonates with Gerhard Kleining and Harald Witt’s work on qualitative heuristic approaches in psychology and social sciences. In what they describe as a “concept of the research process [that] involves seeing dialogue as a specific form of dialectic” (2000), they affirm the possibility of recognizing and reacting to the development of concepts and hypotheses during the research process, and of integrating paradoxes and chance as important starting points for qualitative explorations. 11 These case studies appear within a broader trend in contemporary Arab artistic practice that examines the possibilities of integrating archives into artistic working processes. In the context of Lebanon, Mark R. Westmoreland points to the ways in which artists have dealt with the post-war crisis of representation by “utiliz[ing] documentary practices to advance experimental forms of evidence” and questioning the

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openness to other realms of inquiry and willingness to use methodological tools and analytical procedures from qualitative social sciences in their working processes. They rely on oral history, conduct interviews, do archival work, and adopt other practices that intersect with classical fieldwork methods (e.g., observing, drafting, sketching, and talking). Furthermore, their artwork itself conducts theory, whether through theoretical concepts that the artists directly address, colleagues from different scientific fields with whom they collaborate, or frames of reference and discussion that they evoke directly or indirectly. The next chapters will explore in detail how theory, in the aesthetic articulations that the artists offer, is actually generated, actualized, and reformulated. Against this backdrop, referring to the artists as “artist-researchers” might seem adequate and comprehensive.12 Yet, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group do not claim to produce knowledge that adheres to scientific standards.13 Most significantly, they do not presume to generate verifiable facts or information. Rather, they describe their work as attempts to provide artistic alternatives to existing, often hegemonic or monopolized narratives, images, and cultures of memory. In the specific geopolitical and cultural context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, their artistic engagement in research can thus be interpreted as singular acts of empowerment that work against structural restrictions on the accessibility and circulation of knowledge. Methodologically, this carries the risk of the artists and the researcher entering into a mode of concurrence in formulating and defending their respective findings, interpretations, and

“generative possibilities enabled by crossing disciplinary borders between anthropological and artistic modes of social inquiry” (2013, 717). 12 For the concept of the “artist-philosopher” that I indirectly reference here, see the research project Artist Philosophers. Philosophy as Arts-Based Research at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Böhler 2014-2017). 13 The blurring of the lines between artistry and academia is exacerbated by the fact that all of the artists, alongside their artistic activities, are actively engaged in educational and academic research contexts. Notably, El Khoury of Dictaphone Group completed a PhD at the Royal Holloway University London and Saleh is, at the time of this study, enrolled as a candidate in PhD through practice at the University of Edinburgh. All artists hold MA degrees from different institutions and are regularly involved in academic contexts as workshop leaders, lecturers, and authors.

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positions; moreover, it might result in competing efforts to monitor how the artists’ work should be received and evaluated (see Husel 2016).14 The coexistence and blurring of different epistemic and methodological traditions, perspectives, and interpretive frameworks that the empirical material exemplifies have been subject to a wide-ranging debate in the academic and practical fields of contemporary arts. Across different disciplines, the relationship between arts and sciences and the status of theory and theorizing in each practice have been examined, notably under the heading of “artistic research.”15 In this discourse, distinct positions vary, from conceiving art as a form of thinking to analyzing the theoretical assumptions that are already intrinsic to and embedded in every piece of artwork. In an attempt at systematization, curator and critic Simon Sheikh advances the following distinctions: “1. Research into artistic practices and materials, or, 2) research as artistic practice, or, finally, 3) research that is artistic, i.e., an aesthetic approach to science.” (2009) While the discussion on artistic research has outlined points of contact and distinction between both realms, questions about the respective criteria, application, and evaluation standards—about what actually marks the difference between artistic and scientific approaches—remain controversial. Different scholars have equally pointed out that the increased focus on knowledge production in the arts and the subsequent institutionalization of artistic research, notably in Europe, has introduced novel economies of power, politics, and values. These developments might impact the recognition and relevance of an artist in the scene, affect funding schemes and cultural politics,16 and determine the artist’s competence to innovate or experiment, to generate

14 In the context of this study, the artists have been made aware of my analyses of their artwork yet have neither interfered with nor censored interpretations that might not fully correspond to their intentions. 15 For more on this debate, see de Man 1986; Rogoff 2003; Hlavajova, Winder, and Choi 2008; Gielen and De Bruyne 2012. In the context of dance and performance studies, see Louppe 1997; Noë 2004; Corin 2006; Brandstetter and Klein 2007, 2013; Manning and Massumi 2014. 16 See Holert 2011; Lilja 2012. The trend of artistic research involves the development of specific formats like lecture-performances (see Peters 2011; Rainer 2017) in the field of contemporary dance and choreography, and is mirrored in funding schemes that involve educational and mediation activities as a substantial part of an artist’s practice. Cultural historian Tom Holert (2011, 40) points to a paradox that emerges in the process of institutionalizing artistic research while claiming its subversive potential and capacity to stay “free” from market politics.

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new knowledge, or to engage in public debate through their artwork. They also introduce economic criteria of standardization, measurability, and originality into the creative process. Thus, in a tightly defined and internationalized market of contemporary body-based arts, doing artistic or arts-based research has, to a certain degree, become an aesthetic and economic brand. Against this backdrop, I am less interested in ontological differences between artistic and scientific modes and modalities of knowledge production; rather, the methodological question that I would like to put forward in my analysis of this empirical material is: How do art and aesthetic experiences address and generate theory differently? (see Klein and Noeth 2011) Significantly, in the interviews, none of the artists used the term “artistic research” in conjunction with their practices. Beyond merely personal preferences, this rhetorical absence might reflect the institutional origin of artistic research within contemporary arts education in different Western countries. This observation does not ignore or seek to downplay the strongly research-oriented practices that Middle Eastern artists across different disciplines and genres have been developing in particular since the 1990s. Yet, it might be indicative of epistemic imbalances and the prevalence of hegemonic structures in the educational sector of the arts that I will pursue later in this chapter.17 Do Borders Sit in Places? Framing Research as Conflict Arts research is subject to additional complexity when framed by geopolitical and cultural contexts that are popularly defined by conflict, whether understood as open confrontation or structural violence. Scholars have pointed to the general insufficiency, reductionism, and stereotyping that come with analyzing a region’s artistic and academic outputs through the lens of crisis. Such a perspective reduces the cultures under discussion to animosities and contradictions, furthering a narrative that views conflict as either inevitable or ephemeral (see Abu-Rish 2013; Sontag 2005). Nevertheless, the geopolitical histories of Lebanon and the Palestinian West Bank introduce specific challenges into the

17 This general assumption must be contextualized by the fact that all of the artists featured in this study undertook at least part of their studies in Europe or the US. In addition, research-led and process-oriented formats are prominent within the contemporary generations of Lebanese and Palestinian artists; thus, they do not represent an exception. Notably, artists have adopted methods from anthropology and ethnography in order to open up political analyses in arts and to rework epistemological criteria in the process (see Westmoreland 2013, 722).

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research process of this study. In the process of collecting data from an environment marked by confrontation, occupation, and war, the researcher quickly faces the impossibility of not taking a position or of staying on the ‘safe’ side. While I rarely faced targeted censorship18 or outright refusals of information, I frequently was asked to declare my personal and political positions, as well as the purpose of my investigations, through direct and indirect inquiries about my agenda (i.e., the interest of my research and the context in which it is implemented) or my network (i.e., when approaching interview partners).19 Over time, these inquiries provoked from me both implicit and explicit instances of self-representation that necessarily shape the evaluation of this empirical data. For example, I became increasingly aware of my own performance and that of my research partners when they remained silent, withheld responses, or overemphasized information. In retrospect, I read these performative elements of staging and inhabiting certain personal and political positions as a process of mutual negotiation. Here, the fact that my engagement with the artists is embedded in a long-term exchange helps to reduce and assess these dynamics. In addition to language and discourse, affective and corporeal forms of expression heavily influenced interactions with research partners and other institutional or political authorities: for example, facial expression, gestures, or corporeal and somatic modes of attentiveness that were interpreted as affirmations or rejections of a specific standpoint. Political scientist David Romano reminds us that even though a researcher’s proximity to or distance from the field might vary during the research process,20 it is crucial to “remember that conflict zones are not places of free intellectual belief and objective discourse” (2006).21 Moreover, we must acknowledge various practical limitations that potentially affect the collection of data, whether administrative and bureaucratic restrictions (e.g., the issuance of permits that

18 Direct censorship occurred in only one instance in which empirical data consisting of recordings, photographic material, and printed information was seized and partially deleted following extensive questioning by Israeli border authorities during a crossing. 19 Despite our different motivations, self-identifications, and levels of engagement, my interlocutors and I coherently use the term “Palestine” as a distinct form of expressing our personal and political positions on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. 20 In a similar vein, sociologist Larissa Schindler mentions the necessity of “keeping the distance to what happens flexible” (2016, 401). 21 David Romano points to the necessity of constantly reassessing one’s own position in the process, stating: “In the Middle East, the issues of religion, gender, and IsraelPalestine are especially touchy, and you should not assume that you know the viewpoint of the person with whom you are speaking.” (2006, 440)

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regulate the mobility of all research partners in Palestinian cities and villages, or nonnegotiable travel bans between different countries) or more symbolic and intangible boundaries that influence accessibility to the field. Underpinning all of these considerations is the question of how much risk and engagement researchers want and are prepared to take in the research process.22 For instance, compiling scientific records and subjective interpretations of findings can lead to political and social repercussions for research partners, particularly in a post-Arab Spring context in which the engagement of artists, journalists, and intellectuals in investigatory practices has become synonymous with anti-authoritarian activism or activities. This pressure on researchers mirrors tightened territorial and symbolic border politics. In the context of her own empirical work in Egypt, media studies scholar Helena Nassif states: “This awareness that researchers have become security threats and that academic community is punishable has transformed fieldwork […]. This shifting field is not limited to Egypt, for being the subject of securitization processes is taking shape globally, and is certainly having multiple influences on research processes and researchers.” (2017, 50)

On Catering Expectations Violence, as exemplified in the experience of the border, reinforces the question of ethics and renegotiates ethical principles, highlighting the personal and political responsibilities of the researcher or artist. As a prominent voice in the debate, writer, filmmaker, and political activist Susan Sontag reflected on the witnessing of conflict and violence by photographic and visual means. Noting the representational power of technical and artistic devices, she reminds us of the economy and industry of image making that influence and condition our analytical investigations. Thus, she calls for a critical assessment of what we are actually documenting and discussing. According to Sontag (2003), this process must be critical of how we might contribute to the “machinery of war” (or, in the context of this study, to the machinery of the border) by trivializing atrocities through overrepresentation, by glamorizing violence as spectacle, or by advocating a soft

22 In the research process leading up to Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, outright risks to safety and security have been modest. However, the more subtle risk of harming preexisting relationships with interlocutors has been substantial. See Seth Holmes’s long-term ethnographic work, where he discusses issues of exposure and risk taking (2013a, b).

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humanism that lacks scientific foundation.23 Sontag argues for contextualizing our observations and findings rather than considering them as independent or singular documents.24 In the context of archives, theorist of photography and visual arts Ariella Azoulay (2015b) points out that representations never fully account for the complexity of decisions made at the moment when documents were produced. As such, it is essential to reflect on our own relation to and involvement in these documents’ construction, on the general instability of their meaning, and on the incompleteness and partiality of every analysis. Commenting on visuals-as-evidence, architect Eyal Weizman (2016) advocates the inclusion of before and after versions of any image being analyzed in order to come closer to the emotions, affects, or intentions that are not or cannot be depicted by a single frame. These theoretical perspectives illustrate the extent to which artists’ as well as researchers’ aesthetic and analytical decisions about what to show, which experiences to construct, and what contexts to operationalize are immanently political decisions. The analysis at hand must grapple with the biases implicit in studying situations of conflict and experiences of borders, as well as with the recent prevalence of border-related subjects in arts and academia. This generalized risk of commodification results in an obligation to engage in a sensitive process of critical reflection regarding the agenda, the aims, and the ends of our inquiries; namely, who benefits25 (whether materially or symbolically) from a specific research effort and who assesses its relevance26. The question of expertise at stake here is

23 Also see Narrating War, a project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, curated by Carolin Emcke and Valentin Groebner in Berlin (2014). 24 On that note, see Eyal Weizman (2016), who undermines the importance of including the various contexts that condition a document in the analytical process by accentuating the risk of a “teleological framework” guiding our interpretations. Specifically, he recommends “to be wary and not to be too religious when looking at images of sufferance and wounded bodies.” 25 Curator Marc Sealey (2016) contests the danger of “making a moment for yourself” when working artistically, as curator, or a researcher within situations of crisis and conflict. 26 As a doctoral research project, the aims and character of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, as well as its theoretical focus on collectivity, have been developed within the framework of Loose Connections: Collectivity at the Intersection of Digital and Urban Space at the graduate school of the University of Hamburg between 2015 and 2017. While this context has been marked by a general openness and distinct support of interdisciplinary work, it relied on a predominantly Western corpus of references and

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further provoked by the fact that this study draws primarily on original empirical material which, to a large extent, lacks independent verification or fact checking that would allow for further contextualization of the findings. Moreover, limits to the amount of time I could spend in the field as well as challenges posed by my Arabic language abilities certainly influenced my perception of experiences of the border and of collectivity. Indeed, these linguistic concerns extend to the composition of the study itself and its accessibility for Arabic readers, insofar as it and its source materials are predominantly in English. Against this backdrop, the parallel notions of conflict and responsibility complicate what we decide to include in and exclude from our scientific accounts, and in which language we communicate these accounts. On the one hand, we risk imputing a certain normality to the situations and events that we study in our writing, thus washing out important differences or collectivizing findings in an effort to make things comprehensible. On the other hand, we risk overinterpreting lived experience, thus creating unbalanced analyses. These methodological challenges cannot be fully resolved or bypassed; however, I commit to acknowledging the complicity in moderating and maintaining borders that arise through my repeating, mimicking, imitating, and staging powerful representations of those borders. In addition to these concerns about assimilation and appropriation implicit in my analytical process, I am attentive to the ways that expectations, empathy, and moral judgments; the search for logics and certainties by the researcher; hegemonic discourses; continuations of heteronormative or postcolonial asymmetries; and exoticization of experience impact my research process. Thus, any efforts to address shortcomings in the analyses must include reflection on which topics are to be left uncommented, where biases are to be made explicit, and when outright disengagement is advisable. On Bodily Grounds. The Informative Potential of the Sensorial In addition to archival research and literature review, this study’s empirical data have been collected in different phases of fieldwork that I will describe in detail later in this chapter. At this point, however, I would like to comment on the importance of the sensory—and the corporeal in particular—to the research process. Given that Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects seeks to methodologically implement bodies as research tools and perspectives for its inquiry on borders and collectivity, reflections on the embodied dimension of knowledge (as well as

epistemic traditions. Acknowledging this context, I am invested in integrating additional (and notably Arab) voices into the study when relevant and accessible.

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on the status of my own bodily experience as a researcher) become highly important. A variety of disciplines have addressed the embodied and corporeal qualities of writing—that is, of translating findings from research into words and documents. For instance, reflecting on her translations from Arabic to English of Syrian women’s accounts of living under siege, writer Lina Mounzer points out that every act of translation, whether across languages, disciplines, or from lived experience into the aesthetic realm, comes with different acts of framing. Significantly for this analysis, she describes the visceral and corporeal dimensions of this process: “It is the translator’s body, almost more so than the translator’s mind, that is the vessel of transfer. […] Translation is not just about transposing words from one language to another. But translating a feeling, a way of seeing the world, from one experience to another. I think of the word to transplant. A seedling from soil to soil. But also an organ from body to body. The procedure must be as delicate, as cognizant of the original conditions of creation in order to nurture and to ensure a continuation of life.” (Mounzer 2016)

In my reformulation, Mounzer not only emphasizes the performativity and constructedness of every representation, experience, and analysis, but also sees the individual and the collective as blurred in the very act of “transplantation,” as she terms it. Speaking of the collective in this context should not imply that the experiences of individuals are the same, can be easily equated, or are generalizable. Rather, the analytical value that Mounzer attributes to the corporeal and sensorial—to small movements, awkward encounters, or stereotyped gestures— lies in their challenges to preconceived assumptions. Similarly, practitioners of ethnography have pointed to the impact of “common sense” (Hirschauer 2010, 210-11) in conducting qualitative research, noting that empirical data generates a specific kind of knowledge that is not primarily cognitive, theoretical, or linguistic, but often implicit and latent, and grounded in practical, everyday experiences. Along these lines, recent debates on research methodology in Middle Eastern contexts increasingly recognize the significance of the sensory—emotions and affects, from the visual to the olfactory—in qualitative research and fieldwork. This development is contextualized by anthropologists Samar Kanafani and Zina Sawaf who note the theoretical and scholarly sidelining of the sensory in a region where political representation and narratives continue to predominate (2017, 3).27

27 Also see Nassif 2017, 49-54. For a gender-sensitive perspective, see Altorki and Fawzi El-Solh 1988.

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Despite these recent scholarly developments, reliance on the sensory has been criticized as a poor basis for comparison and for overemphasizing the subjectivity of the researcher. While Lila Abu-Lughod questions “whether these approaches represent a retreat from the political” (2017, 69), she nevertheless insists on the epistemic, political, and strategic potential of revalidating the senses in the research process, particularly in conflict-ridden contexts. With recourse to her own anthropological work, she states: “If living in violence is about silences and relief and about reading faces, moods and signs, then we can better see how the ways experts turn violence into a knowledge industry using disembodied discourses of violence” (2017, 68). Accordingly, it is the distinct relational qualities and configurations that bodies, affects, senses, and experiences open up between respective research partners and their extended environments that constitute methodological assets. For example, referring to her inquiries in Egypt in 2016, media scholar Helena Nassif contends that “[a key] effect of fear in my fieldwork is relational” (2017, 50). She explains that sharing her own experience of fear put her in touch with her interlocutors in a specific way, shifting the conversation in new and unexpected directions. In the research process leading up to Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, I recall different bodily experiences of tension, stress, or anxiety when crossing the border, and a distinctly visceral and corporeal sense of alignment with (or exclusion from) certain communities. Sharing these moments with my research partners revealed the parallels or discontinuities in meaning, space, and power between these personal experiences and broader scales. Provocatively, anthropologist Roosebelinda Cárdenas emphasizes that the relational serves as a necessary reminder that “the alleged separation of the field and home is a figment of the colonial imagination. In other words, it is but a colonial reiteration of the spatial, economic and embodied privilege that has historically been available only to a select few” (2017, 72). In my reading, this implies that there is a collective dimension running through individually lived affects and embodied experiences, and that this might shed light on the realities being explored. It is important to note that acknowledgment of the sensory, the affective, and the corporeal does not require that individual, body-bound border experiences represent true or authentic information. Indeed, they are to some degree always constructed, performed, and mutually authenticated by the research partners involved. In the context of his work with Lebanese filmmakers and mixed-media artists, Mark R. Westmoreland (2011) reflects on knowledge that emerges from the intersections of art and ethnography, and what he describes as a shared set of practices and methodologies. By elevating the potential for exchange between the fields from mere mutual comprehension, comparable knowledge, or

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mimicry, Westmoreland seeks to strengthen both the performative and the aesthetic dimensions of the everyday (including the impossibility of representing the latter in its entirety), as well as the anthropological qualities of artistic inquiries. Thus, he emphasizes the necessity of a more intense exchange between anthropologists and artists without conflating their respective positions and structures of legitimization, arguing: “These contemporary art practices provide means for apprehending the performative aspects of quotidian experience, embodied meaning, affective intensity, and agency of objects and images. These are ideas that are likewise central to anthropological understanding. […] It is particularly important to consider these new renderings of ‘reality’ in societies that have undergone forms of violence or trauma that undercut realist notions of truth and evidence.” (2011)28

Thus, turning to the strategies and modes of inquiry that artists deploy in their own work might help to validate the sensorial in research, thus destabilize overdetermined historical narratives and representations. Moreover, Westmoreland sees the potential for such an approach to question the intellectual authority and imaginaries with which researchers equip themselves, particularly in contexts where epistemic imbalances are at work, as I will discuss in the next section of this chapter. To Unlearn what has been Learnt: On Epistemic Disobedience We cannot afford to contribute to orientalist or otherwise colonizing depictions of the places and people we love, knowingly or unknowingly. Roosebelinda Cárdenas 2017, 71.

In the interviews, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group reflect on how knowledge is produced at the intersection of the local and the international in their own practices. They mention, for example, that much of the

28 For the Lebanese context, Mark R. Westmoreland outlines the boundaries of both artistic and ethnographic practices: “In the face of personal and communal suffering, media saturation, ideological machinations, historical density, and inaccessible lived experiences, neither art nor anthropology can hope to represent something as abstract as the ‘Lebanese civil war’.” (2011)

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academic research on the region is published in English and thus is only accessible to a specific readership; that Middle Eastern cultures and societies are often evaluated on the basis of concepts from Western epistemologies; that the circulation of information is subject to varying restrictions; and that knowledge production is often linked to specific confessional, political, or ethnic projects that color the analytical results. These statements reflect practical conditions, values, and norms of knowledge production. At the same time, they open up questions about its epistemic premises. Different disciplines in post- and decolonial theory have engaged in a variety of methodological and conceptual efforts to unravel normative legacies and hegemonic structures.29 In order to sketch out some of the key arguments of this debate, I would like to focus on Walter D. Mignolo’s (2007) call for “epistemic disobedience” in the context of the problem of agency that I will address in the subsequent case study analyses. With a background in semiotics, Mignolo grounds his argument in a historical examination of the close connection between knowledge and power. He outlines four mutually articulated domains on the basis of which the matrix of colonial power is formed and in which the control over knowledge appears as a decisive political factor: “1. The appropriation of land and the exploitation of labor; 2. The control of authority […]; 3. The control of gender and sexuality […]; 4. The control of subjectivity […] and knowledge.” (2007, 478) On this basis, he shows that colonial histories have resulted in epistemic imbalances that even today afflict academic research. Notably, concepts and analytical categories that stem from Western epistemologies are transferred and applied to subjects and people from non-Western contexts, a process that Mignolo describes as epistemic violence and that represents a methodological challenge for this study, as well. For instance, it must be acknowledged that academic scholarship on body-based artistic practices (and dance in particular) has largely been developed on the basis and in the framework of Euro-American epistemologies. With regards to the idea of conflict that I addressed earlier, political theorist Tarak Barkawi (2016) analyzes the epistemic history of the concept of war. He shows, for instance, that war studies are still based to a large extent on Euro-centric ideas and historiographies (for example, the idea of a sovereign nation-state, or the clear distinction between times of war and peace which war disrupts), within which war is imagined as a conflict between distinct communities. This epistemic precondition falls short in light of

29 For references to critical debates on the colonial dynamics of curating (i.e., selecting, creating perspectives, and discovering within unequal power dynamics), see Lepecki 2017.

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the more complex and nonbinary forms of collectivity that characterize Lebanese and Palestinian societies. Prerequisites to Reemerge In connection to this, Walter D. Mignolo points to the geopolitical imbalances and processes of inclusion and exclusion that result from such hegemonic dynamics, questioning who is included, who participates, and who is legitimized and authorized to generate knowledge.30 Furthermore, he describes how the implementation of these imbalances is both based on and at the same time maintains and reproduces collectivization. With specific reference to Latin America, he holds that people from the global South (as opposed to people coming from the West) are, in academia, often addressed collectively. In other words, they are treated as tokens—as representatives of their respective cultures—and denied the ability to function as “theoretically minded person[s]” (2009, 2). This dynamic— of becoming a spokesperson for overarching themes, positions, and identities— resonates with experiences of collectivization and stereotyping that many Arab artists face in international performing arts, as my practice as curator suggests. In reaction to this, Mignolo (2013) calls for a process of unlearning what has been learnt:31 a process of “de-linking” knowledge and power that is, according to him, necessary to enable other situated and local epistemologies to “re-emerge.”

30 In a similar way, sociologist Emmanuel Schegloff (1997) reflects on the position of the researcher in empirical studies and the risk of reproducing what he terms “theoretical imperialism” (1997, 167). Consequently, he outlines the necessity to create “room for the concerns displayed by the participants themselves, the terms in which they relate to another, the relevancies to which they show themselves to be oriented” (1997, 174) before engaging with our research partners and environments, in order to deconstruct different kinds of “a priori” that define our supposedly critical inquiries, such as preconceived notions of relevant texts and contexts, or even the likeliness of the results. 31 Tom Waibel, coeditor of the German translation of Mignolo’s writings on epistemic disobedience, summarizes what such a process of decolonizing Western academia might entail: “First, Europe, as the geo-historical center of thought, will be decentralized; the epoch of the Enlightenment will be understood as a specific knowledge regime with vast linkages; third it will be acknowledged that the world is becoming more and more peripheral represents a politico-epistemological fact; and forth the (modern) thought will be seen as an immanently ambivalent process that cannot be separated from processes of colonization.” (2014, 102; author’s translation)

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Consequently, he comments on the initial precondition for such a process of decolonization: “De-linking cannot be performed, obviously, within the frame of the theo- and the egological politics of knowledge and understanding. For, how can you de-link within the epistemic frame from where you want to de-link? De-linking is the reverse of “assimilation”: to assimilate means that you do not belong yet to what you are assimilating. […] The process of delinking needs a different epistemic grounding that I describe here as the geo- and the body politics of knowledge and understanding.” (2007, 461-62)

Decolonial positions such as the one that Walter D. Mignolo represents have been criticized, in turn, for encouraging homogeneous ideas about the distribution of knowledge and power by not challenging binary constructions such as Occidental and non-Occidental epistemologies at the very outset. On that note, Mignolo insists that his project of epistemic disobedience must not be conflated with or reduced to an anti-Western initiative, stating: “The west/east divide is not ontological.” (2013) Rather than reproducing exclusive, binary geopolitical or cultural categories, his call for epistemic disobedience is invested in countering all forms of abstract and universalistic epistemologies, whether epistemic, aesthetic, or confessional. It is engaged in “shifting the geography of knowing and sensing, [in] unveiling the injustices of the past and projecting global and pluri-centered futures” (2013).32 Thus, according to Mignolo, for different epistemologies to “re-emerge,” we need to not only change the contents but also the terms of conversation— “[s]hift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation, and by so doing turning Descarte’s dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms human beings.” (2009, 2)

32 Mignolo’s argument is grounded in a close historical reading: “But what is not fine is to expect the universalization of western localities and sensibilities, simply because you cannot universalise the local without erasing the localities of others. That was and is the problem with the Euro-centered idea of modernity.” (2013) Thus, he points out the diversity of the decolonial: “The de-colonial path has one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally.” (2009, 3)

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In my reading, this shifts the focus from examining concepts, ideas, and contents that undermine our inquiries to examining the strategies and practices that we deploy to implement and maintain them. It also means, as Mignolo spells out, to make those who are marginalized or not included in prevalent epistemologies and their respective institutions the starting point of our inquiries. This geopolitical effort to resituate knowledge holds a distinctly corporeal dimension, as well, and entails distinct work on the body politics of knowledge production. He explains: “Body-politics is the darker side and the missing half of bio-politics: body-politics describes de-colonial technologies enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing them as less human was a radical un-human consideration.” (2009, 16)

Mignolo attributes analytical and practical recognition to bodies—in a physical and epistemic and symbolic sense—in the process of decolonization and acknowledges, furthermore, the impact of intersecting immaterial borders, such as racial or gendered ones, within the configuration and distribution of knowledge. As the quote indicates, the work to be done on existing border dynamics is, however, not only a territorial matter in a literal sense.33 More significantly, Mignolo includes sensing and the senses in the process, and thereby validates the importance of analyzing how knowledge is imagined, projected, and aestheticized—how epistemologies build visions and construct how we experience the world. Consequently, he takes into account the agency of activists and agents situated outside the institutionalized field and its economic registers, notably artists and cultural workers, and states: “Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil disobedience.” (2009, 15) With regards to the study at hand, this idea reinforces the hypothesis that the artists and the aesthetic

33 See the reference that Mignolo makes here to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967) and Gloria Alzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and their distinct consideration of the impact and agency of language, writing, and reading in decolonial processes (2009, 7). See also Mignolo’s analysis of cartographic practices in which he illustrates how mapping and naming have functioned as border practices, both on an epistemic as well as a material, territorial level. For instance, he points to the impact of fiction and arbitrariness in the process of de- and reinscribing power and sovereignty, notably in favor of legitimizing the “mission of development and modernization” of the West, exemplified in the fact that different versions of maps coexisted simultaneously (2014).

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experiences that they create might provide a powerful tool in the process of decolonization, as well. The Right to Research Mignolo’s approach is characterized by a distinct effort to reposition the epistemic as both a political and civil issue. This engages with what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has conceptualized as the problem of “the right to research” (2006, 167-77). His study on the Mumbai-based, nonprofit organization PUKAR, for instance, explores contexts in which certain types of knowledge are unrecognized as such and in which education and research outputs are not equally distributed and accessible. In this context, research is not a privilege or an additional cultural asset. Rather, Appadurai defines it as a basic requirement for citizenship and as a capacity with democratic potential. Describing research as a “right” sharpens Appadurai’s claim and accentuates the connection between epistemic imbalances and a person’s resulting ability to participate in society, culture, and art (and, consequently, in official memory and archives, the consideration of certain voices in strategic planning, etc.). As a consequence, he insists on the need to develop alternative sets of techniques to conduct research and produce knowledge—to develop “the capacity to distinguish knowledge from rumour, fact from fiction, propaganda from news, and anecdote from trend” (2006, 168). Significantly, with regards to the study at hand, knowledge, as he points out, should not be reduced to something that is only accessible through language, but something that is embedded in the realities of people and their respective practices. Hence, both Mignolo and Appadurai are invested in validating and reclaiming alternative interpretations of history, land, and knowledge. Decoloniality as well as the right to research are therefore not confined to the state. Rather, accentuating the importance of collective and practice-based acts and reflection, they represent distinct matters to be resituated and negotiated in the social, artistic, cultural, and activist spheres. The artists’ work in this study might open new sensibilities in investigating individual as well as collective possibilities “to aspire,” as Appadurai puts it (2006, 176)—ways of working toward the need to “de-parochalise the idea of research” (2006, 168). In the following case study chapters, I will take on the relationships among knowledge production, society, and politics that Appadurai and Mignolo propose, and I will discuss what of the artists’ strategies can be understood as gestures of “epistemic obedience” or “civic disobedience”, respectively.

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2.2

AESTHETIC EVIDENCE. WORKING WITH ARTISTIC CASE STUDIES

The empirical body of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects consists of three artistic case studies analyzing the live sound installation Contingency (2010) by Abbas and Abou-Rahme, the interactive performance Free Advice (2015) by Saleh, and the lecture-performance Nothing to Declare by Dictaphone Group (2013). The artistic works act as heuristic materials, functioning as access points into the entangled experiences of borders and of collectivity, as well as the role, status, and agency of bodies within those experiences. This methodological approach foregrounds both the strengths and weaknesses of relying on artwork and aesthetic experience as data for theoretical inquiries. On the one hand, art is a powerful imagining of reality. Its agency rests in the value that individuals and communities place in it: in the ways it is used, for instance, to implement or defend borders and collectivity (see Lageira 2016, 5). On the other hand, art results from myriad formal and sensorial reformulations in which social and political realities enter an iterative process of translating and framing: a process, that, in turn, is equally characterized by both normative orders and a poetic surplus—a sense of incommensurability—that surpasses preconceived meaning and realities (see Steinweg 2009). Consequently, it would fall short of the mark to reduce the artistic works at hand to mere illustrations, metaphors, or symptoms of the phenomena about which they speak. Moreover, within the framework of this study, the use of the term “evidence” in conjunction with bodies does not reference juridical, forensic, or evidentiary paradigms: “The notion of evidence is not approached as a transparent window that provides unmediated access to reality. Neither [is this an attempt to] call for a return to the body as the last resort of authenticity and immediacy.” (Ertem and Noeth 2018, 15) Speaking of evidence, therefore, does not aim to reveal truth but to make “incongruences, dilemmas, gaps, miscommunications, and distortions, [and] that, which is withheld, silenced and concealed” part of the analysis (ibid., 15). 34 In line with these reflections on aesthetic evidence, theater scholar Gerald Siegmund observes a recent shift in the field of contemporary dance and choreography, contending: “Experience in a first approach to the meaning of the term […] needs to be understood in opposition to the traditional function of art

34 As Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and Zeina M. Barakat ask: “Significantly, in a narrative, what is more important is not what is being said but rather what is not said. Who is the ‘other’? What is the history, culture, traditions, religion, etc.? Why does he feel that way?” (2015, 299)

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as a system of representation.” (2013, 82) On that basis, he takes the observation that artists and scholars alike have been increasingly interested in more open, contextualized, and relational approaches to their subject matters as an opportunity to redefine the significance of contemporary aesthetic experience. Notably, Siegmund argues that next to formal and stylistic elements of aesthetics, the perception, reception, and the conditions in which artistic works are embedded need to be considered in their respective analyses.35 Significantly, Siegmund assumes that aesthetic experience is always a social experience, as well. He is careful, however, to not conflate the politics and the poetics of these different realms or to imagine aesthetic, political, or social practices as mutually illustrative. In my application of this general approach to aesthetic evidence, I do not see the performativity and processuality that it introduces in the analyses as a methodological shortcoming. Rather, I ponder the potential of artistic practice to open up different modes of appearance through which the subjects under analysis are re-actualized and recontextualized from different perspectives.36 The Epistemic Potential of Imagination and Experience The question of evidence, or, more generally speaking, of the informational potential of artistic practice and aesthetic experience has been explored in connection to Lebanon and Palestine/Israel across a broad range of disciplines. In his study on documentary and research-based practices in the Lebanese post-war context, ethnographer Mark R. Westmoreland speaks of “experiential evidence” (2013, 726) capturing the agency of artistic work. He argues that the epistemic potential of aesthetic experience in the Middle Eastern context consists of softening and challenging stark, persistent, highly symbolic, and often hypermediatized narratives and images. Commenting on the complex realities in Palestine/Israel, social scientists Adi Mana et al. describe how collective

35 Gerald Siegmund proposes to differentiate among the following dimensions when analyzing an artwork, particularly stage performances: the material dimension of the artwork, the dimension of intermediality, the representational dimension, the dimension of embodiment, and the narrative dimension (see 2013, 87-88). 36 In a similar vein, Eyal Weizman positions his concept of forensic aesthetics: “Forensic aesthetics is the mode of appearance of things in forums—the gestures, techniques and technologies of demonstration; methods of theatricality, narrative, and dramatization; image enhancement and technologies of projection; the creation and demolition of reputation, credibility, and competence.” (2012, 10)

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representations and narratives37 function to create social order and allow individuals to position themselves in a context that is determined by emotionally loaded, empathy-driven, and highly normative and identity-related interpretations of the past and the present that keep individual bodies, experiences, and voices in place, as well. According to them, “the common memory is organized to sets of values that guide the evaluation of events in the past, exposing some of them and omitting others” (Mana et al. 2015, 274)—a dynamic that, as Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and Zeina M. Barakat describe, is intensified over time and solidified by conflict: “In times of conflict, the national narrative would dominate the personal narrative and would not allow it to be different from it. […] Whenever conflict arises, narratives diverge and multiply. Their purpose it to demonize, delegitimize and dehumanize ‘the other’ and to emphasize the rightness, authenticity, legitimacy and justice of one’s own claim. […] Narratives are dynamic in their formation state, but over time, they usually become static.” (2015, 299)38

37 “Narratives may be divided into different categories: a) individual versus collective narratives; national narratives (how we see ourselves) versus reflexive narratives (how we see others); soft narratives (historical) versus hard narratives (religious and political); d) mythical narratives versus factual narratives; e) static narratives (peace) versus dynamic narratives (conflict); f) legitimate narratives versus illegitimate narratives.” (Dajani Daoudi and Barakat 2015, 301) 38 For the Palestinian/Israeli context, Dajani Daoudi and Barakat explain: “In times of conflict, narratives include: incitement against ‘the other’; negative images of ‘the other’, negative stereotypes in describing ‘the other’; use of derogatory terminology within the text of the narrative such as thief, ugly, stingy, etc. […] In peace times, narratives include: positive features and traits of ‘the other’; friendship and cooperation with ‘the other,’ a human, multidimensional, individual approach in narrating the events; the empathy for ‘the other’ in telling the narrative.” (2015, 299) Stressing the psychological dimension of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Mana et al. point to the agency of strong negative intergroup perceptions and emotions and corresponding identity strategies and models of positive and negative distinction (Mana et al. 2015, 275-78). Importantly, they highlight that most studies maintain the distinction between Israel and Palestine and do not sufficiently take into consideration the inner fragmentations existing in both societies.

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I would like to accentuate here that this assumption of a categorical ‘other’39 impacts academic as well as artistic research alike: “Wherever you stand, there is an unbalanced situation. [...] This frame of reference defines and sets boundaries around thinking on Palestinian/Israeli issues. It is Israel-centered, approaching the conflict generally from an Israeli perspective and seldom recognizing the existence of the legitimacy of a Palestinian perspective.” (Daoudi and Barakat 2015, 304)40 This problem of perspective is complicated by the fact that arts and culture have historically been effective means of engaging in the production, experience, and aestheticization of collective identities and that the struggle over imagination is at the heart of both art as well as politics. In the following case studies, I will show how these already mentioned moments of destabilization and re-signification41 are especially relevant to the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel and to the concepts of the border and of collectivity. Correspondingly, questions of legitimacy and truthfulness are at the core of the artistic case studies at hand: which kinds of representations can bodies produce beyond generic gestures and movements? Who represents whom, and who is authorized to define the aesthetics and the contents of past and current experiences? How close can and should art come to reality, and how much subtlety can criticality embrace while staying effective? How can we negotiate individual artistic expressions within the collectivities they evoke and within which they are installed?42 Who defines the terms of these alignments,43 and whom do these

39 I posit that this tendency to think through binary and largely nonnegotiable schemes of otherness is, in principle and despite all differences, to some degree transferable to Lebanese society and its intersectarian and intercommunitarian composition, as well. 40 This is also a linguistic and discursive phenomenon, whereby essentialist, homogenizing, often strongly exclusive and nationalist formulations like “the Arab,” “the Palestinian,” “the Israeli,” “the refugee,” and “the exiled,” among others, blur and occlude personal features and opinions (see also Dajani Daoudi and Barakat 2015, 304). 41 Philosopher Carolin Emcke speaks of “performative strategies of re-signification” and points out that incomprehensible elements, things that we might reject or that might cause irritation, are potentially part of any encounter, as well (2016, 213 and 215, author’s translation). She sees these moments as opportunities to face individual and collective errors of historical injustice and to “forgive one another” (2016, 198; author’s translation). 42 Speaking in the context of public monuments, martyr memorials, and alternative forms of artistic expression in Tunisia, Middle East scholar Charles Tripp highlights the artwork’s capacity to invite “people to align their own memories collectively,

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terms serve? Informed by his artistic and archival research on Lebanon, artist Walid Raad points to the potential shortcomings that come with relying on experience as an analytical category: “We think that the historians […] seem to have been well aware of the difficult epistemic project they faced—writing histories of the Lebanese civil war. […] This difficulty derives not simply from the ‘plurality’ of experience, as determined by manifold class, sexual, gender, religious, ideological and political locations; more fundamentally, it remains difficult to describe specifically what we mean when we speak of ‘the experience of’ the civil war. […] How do we represent traumatic events of collective historical dimensions when the very notion of experience is itself in question?” (quoted in Westmoreland 2013, 726)

For what follows, it is important to keep in mind that experiences themselves are constructed, formed, imagined, and subjected to essentialisms, ideologies, norms, and values, in both everyday practice as well as artistic articulations. Yet, as the case studies will show, the potential—indeed, the responsibility—of scientific as well as artistic research lies exactly in creating moments of doubting,44 in demonstrating nuances, gradations, shades, degrees, contradictions, and interconnections that demarcate different modes of making meaning. On that basis, I will now outline the criteria for selecting the case studies and combining them as a sample, introduce case studies as a methodological tool, and subsequently comment on the epistemic preconditions of working with aesthetic evidence. Methodological Reflections on Case Study Work While scholarship on case studies is traditionally the terrain of organizational and social sciences, as well as practice-based disciplines such as architecture and design studies, I mobilize the methodology for artistic works. Moreover, I

possibly even to refashion those memories in a way that tallies with the overall intention behind the artistic intervention” (2014, 49). 43 See as an example Egyptian theater maker Laila Soliman. In her acceptance speech for the 2011 Willy Brandt Prize for outstanding political courage, she addresses the necessity of acknowledging power relations that come into play when Western institutions evaluate the agency of Arab bodies in ongoing political processes (Soliman 2011). 44 Carolin Emcke explicates: “To look at operating modes always means to show where something could have been different, where someone could have made a different decision, where someone could have intervened.” (2013, 19, author’s translation)

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assume that artistic works, as dynamic fields of knowledge, are capable of operationalizing the research questions and hypotheses at hand. Of course, the cases do not provide neutral or stable evidence; they are context-bound and always specific in the ideas and predicaments that they rely upon and advance. They reflect normative and ideological structures and they bear theoretical presumptions and latent elements that generate sense, and that require analytical disclosure. As such, case studies have been criticized for their lack of rigor and reliability. Notably, the role of the investigator in the construction of meaning limits the generalizability and validity of such data (see Yin 2009, 18).45 Yet, I consider that the informational value of the cases surpasses their uniqueness and that the mode of reasoning embedded in each artistic case allows for analytical generalizations. The decision to base this study on a multi-case research design is further motivated by the expectation that the cases do not provide complimentary or similar evidence. I presume, rather, that they stipulate different aspects of the problematic, rendering the theoretical inquiry more complex.46 Criteria for Selecting the Artistic Case Studies These case studies are united by the fact that all of the artwork deals, in different respects and with different degrees of intensity, with specific experiences of borders and of collectivity in the context of Lebanon or Palestine/Israel. The pieces were all created between 2010 and 2015 and since then have been presented in different Arab countries as well as in artistic and educational contexts in Europe and the US. Abbas, Abou-Rahme, and Saleh are Palestinians, whereas the members of Dictaphone Group (El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal) are Lebanese citizens. All belong to a younger generation of mid-career artists who are—at the time of this study—between their mid-twenties and mid-thirties.

45 As for the present study, the empirical material has not been assigned to different coders. However, regular discussions of the analytical procedures and findings with different peer groups in formal and informal settings provided feedback on the intercode reliability throughout the process; that is, feedback on the trustworthiness of the coding and categories developed by the researcher in case study work. Here there are two levels of feedback-loops: focused discussions or lectures, and again, curatorial projects in which some of the aspects were up for debate. 46 This speaks to the theoretical replicability of the empirical material: “In a theoretical replication, each single case’s ultimate disposition also would have been predicted beforehand, but each case might have been predicted to produce a varying or even contrasting result, based on the preconceived propositions.” (Weizman 2012, 10)

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Even though the research interest of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects is not oriented towards biographical questions,47 the artists’ proximity in age suggests a shared awareness of the social and political processes that have affected the Middle East both historically and more recently, and which impact the artists’ experiences of borders and collectivity.48 During the period in which the empirical material was collected, the artists were in no direct collaboration or exchange, but took general note of each other’s work. It is important to note that not only do the formats of the three works differ, but so do the contexts in which the artists engage. While Abbas and Abou-Rahme primarily interact in the field of visual art, Saleh’s work is mostly situated in contemporary dance and choreography. Dictaphone Group, by contrast, intervenes across different disciplines, combining visual art, live performance, and urban research. Thus, even though the artists are in dialogue with similar aesthetic, social, political, and economic environments, traditions, and practices, their artwork is not affiliated nor directly comparable. In addition to this, the artists’ production processes have developed over extended periods of time and within differing thematic contexts. Furthermore, each of the artistic works employs different media, settings, and formats, and each addresses different audiences and reacts to the contexts in which it is received. What motivates me to combine the artworks in an empirical sample is the contention that all three cases place bodies and movement at the core. This shared approach will guide my consequent dramaturgical analyses of the

47 In the context of experiences of borders and collectivity, biographical research might focus on reconstructing and analyzing the artists’ lives or explore the influence of generational, familial, descent-based, or other factors that condition their sense of belonging. However, I have integrated relatively little biographical context for Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group in the analyses of the data. As the analytical project of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects does not aim to reconstruct the artworks or the artists’ intentions, I have not sought my interlocutors’ consent to the findings and the interpretations that I advance. Rather, the feedback loop with the artists was limited to double-checking the case study analyses for the correctness of the provided information and factual mistakes or misinterpretations that might have occurred (for this methodological approach, see Kohlbacher 2006). 48 Examples include the artists’ relationship to formative collective events such as the First and Second Intifada, the Lebanese Civil War, or Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006 that are mentioned in the empirical data, as well as their own experiences of migration and exile.

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pieces.49 Moreover, as the following discussion of the conceptual design and the dramaturgical strategies of the artists will illustrate, the three cases share a process-driven and research-led approach, reflexively turning to their own materiality, conditions, theatricality, and staging. Notably, all of the artists place emphasis on reflecting and working on the status and impact of their work in society and politics, yet they all distance themselves from what has been theorized as “applied theater” (see Warstat et al. 2017). In short, this term refers to artistic forms of theater and performance that pursue social transformation or foreground pedagogic or therapeutic aims in their work (i.e., community or social theater), and that are primarily concerned with empowerment, emancipation, and the role of the spectator as an active participant in the creative process.

2.3

CORPUS OF EMPIRICAL MATERIALS AND ANALYTICAL METHODS

The corpus of data is composed as a mixed-media sample. According to the principle of triangulation, a variety of sources of evidence and paratexts are combined and examined by means of different methods and perspectives. The main documents are: • Video recordings of individual performances (Dictaphone Group, Saleh) and

an edited video-version (Abbas and Abou-Rahme) of the artistic works. • One semi-structured, narrative interview per case that I conducted with the artists and subsequently transcribed. In addition, notes from fieldwork and participatory observation in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, my own lived experience of the artwork under discussion as an audience participant and curator, and records from parallel archival research (e.g., articles, photos, reviews, texts, public talks, lectures, and program booklets) complete the empirical data. These documents serve primarily comparative purposes; the video documents, in particular, record the aesthetic experiences and verify the findings of my case study analyses. In addition, a wide range of conversations has been conducted with choreographers, performers, festival directors, scholars and educators connected to the field of body-based arts in

49 See recent studies dedicated to understanding “practice” respectively “praxis” as methodological and conceptual frameworks in artistic and creative processes: Matzke 2012; Kunst 2015; Klein and Göbel 2017.

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Lebanon and Palestine.50 Finally, autoethnographic data from encounters, border situations, and performance visits reflect my position as a researcher in the research process. These additional materials flank and contextualize the main corpus of material, but have not been analyzed systematically within the framework of this study. During the research process, the evaluation of the data and the development of theory have been interwoven and mutually formative, particularly with regards to theoretically grounding the study. Preliminary theoretical propositions, expectations, preexisting knowledge, and probabilities were disclosed, adapted, and reformulated. Corresponding to the polyphony of the empirical material, different analytical methods have been applied for the qualitative evaluation of the documents. In particular, as the following sections will detail, this includes the dramaturgical analysis of the artistic works as well as qualitative, topical analyses of the interviews that I conducted with the artists. This approach seeks to place emphasis on the contexts in which the case studies have been created and produced: the political, social, economic, and other predicaments of their production, the normative and ideological framings at work, and the discourses that are implicitly or explicitly addressed. Here, the following layers of reflection can be analytically distinguished in the discussion of the artwork while being entangled, interlinked, and complementary in practice: a) the conception and context of the artwork,51 b) the translation of its parameters and formative elements into artistic practice and process,52 and c) the lived experience of the artwork as well as its media depiction. This broader conception of the artwork results from the study’s substantial interest in the intersections among art, society, and the public that the case studies can illuminate. In order to analytically grasp this dimension, it is thus insufficient to limit the analyses to, for instance, audiences’ reactions to the artworks, or to focus only on their conceptual design. Rather, I rely on a practicebased approach to case study work that acknowledges as interdependent dynamics both the production of evidence and the querying of the practices of evidence

50 To protect their personal data and confidentiality, the names and affiliations of these additional research partners will not be disclosed here. 51 This includes the politics, values, and prerequisites underlying and conditioning the artists’ decisions; the political, social, economic, and other reference systems and affiliations that they subscribe to or reject; as well as the curatorial and disciplinary environment that the artwork targets and is presented in. 52 This entails describing the strategies, procedures, and compositional and structural principles deployed in the artistic projects; questioning how they are implemented and operationalized; as well as reflecting on the format of the work.

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making. In other words, I suggest to integrate into my analyses not only the results and contents but also the strategies and procedures that generate my findings. Measuring Proximity and Distance: Fieldwork The empirical data has been collected between 2014 and 2016 in a continuous yet irregular exchange with the artists, as well as through concentrated research trips undertaken in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel.53 Throughout this process, my position as researcher and my being-in-the-field, physically as well as analytically, changed and developed. Much of my familiarization with the context mirrors classical problems of naturalization, discovery, and intervention during empirical work and their impact on my subsequent analytical capacity as a researcher (see Hirschauer 2010, 214). Looking back, the initial, purposeful entry to the field was marked by open observation and personal immersion, trying to understand and become familiar with protocols, habits, and normative behavior and subsequent strategies of interaction (whether in artistic, official, or everyday contexts). In this first phase, the collection of primary information focused on the artists and their work, as well as the cultural and geopolitical environments they are in dialogue with. During this period, I continued to develop, specify, and stabilize my research hypotheses, key concepts, descriptive categories, and methodology in response to the sociopolitical realities under analysis. Here, experiences of irritation and alienation but also fascination were a regular part of this process. Repetition also played an important role—the repetition of certain tropes, vocabulary, and situations that allowed me to better differentiate the case studies and the experiences of borders and collectivity that they reference. Here, I relied to a great extent on the informal circulation of knowledge in existing and temporary circuits with the artists as well as with other agents and institutions in the field. This was of particular importance, given that structures and networks for the presentation, mediation, and organization of body-based forms of artistic expression are, at the time that this study was undertaken, in a phase of fragmented

53 The fieldwork was spread out over a period of two years with two intensive phases: a first phase in April to May 2015 involved formal and informal encounters with a broad range of artists and art institutions, as well as political institutions and NGOs. It was followed by a second period of fieldwork in March to April 2016 that intensified and focused my inquiry. The fieldwork was organized according to the accessibility of the field (as determined by permits, security concerns, and funding) and the availability of interview partners.

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development in both Lebanon and Palestine. Beyond mere networking, which operates similarly within artistic communities and peer groups in other contexts, I would like to highlight the importance of elements like trust and reliability in the research process. This is not to be conflated with uncritical acceptance of the interpretations and information offered to me by my research partners; however, sensitivity to power becomes essential when experiences of borders and collectivity become concrete or personalized. To be more explicit, oblique and insensitive treatment of data might lead to legal or social consequences for the research partners involved.54 The process of setting proximity and distance during fieldwork established a sense of security in collecting and evaluating the empirical material. In the subsequent stage of the research, my collection of empirical material became more focused, informed by archival work and the conducting of qualitative interviews with the artists. Performance Documents: From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical Analysis Video documentation of Contingency, Free Advice, and Nothing to Declare constitute one of the main pillars on which my analyses of the empirical material are based. In the case of Saleh and Dictaphone Group, these are unedited and unpublished recordings of individual performances that I also attended in person. In the case of Abbas and Abou-Rahme, the document is an edited video version produced by the artists in parallel to the original live sound installation. Grounded in my own live experience of the artistic works, the video documents are evaluated by what I define here as dramaturgical analysis. In an experimental methodological move and based on my own professional practice as a dramaturge, I propose to transfer dramaturgy as an analytical function that is developed and already present within any creative working processes to the realm of social science and qualitative empirical research in particular. This situates dramaturgical analysis in close proximity to other practice-based approaches to research that have been developed in the fields of dance and performance studies and that take artwork and aesthetic experience as their starting points.55 It shifts, I argue, the analytical focus of the artwork from the level of representation and narration

54 Possible repercussions might include censorship, travel bans, or wide-ranging legal consequences. Thus, the questions of when not to use information (e.g., when the context is missing), where to withdraw, and when to be cautious to not insert observations in Western analytical categories lie at the core of the research project. 55 See, for example, Brandstetter and Klein, 2007; Klein and Goebel, 2017.

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to the level of experience and strategies. Acknowledging the body- and movement-based approach that my case studies share, I will hereafter turn to dramaturgical concepts and practices that have been developed in the field of contemporary dance and choreography. After sketching out key developments and features in that realm, I will then propose an operative definition of dramaturgy and dramaturgical analysis for the purpose of this study. Applied Dramaturgy In recent years, the issue of dramaturgy in dance and body-based performing arts has gained renewed attention in scholarship as well as in educational contexts and artistic processes. Yet, despite all efforts that have been made consequently to classify dramaturgy, artists and scholars alike, as dramaturge Pil Hansen observes, insist on preserving a certain openness and indeterminacy in the definition (2018, 191). She reads this as the effect of the diversity of working models and aesthetic approaches, as well as the process-orientation that characterizes much body-based and choreographic work today, resulting in the ultimate situatedness of every dramaturgical practice.56 The need to reexamine the idea of dramaturgy and its aesthetic, social, and political conditions mirrors recent developments wherein a self-reflexive, highly knowledgeable, and loosely connected community of artists have pushed the disciplinary boundaries in their works. In reaction to and as a consequence of a world ‘in search of’, they have been dealing with more open ideas of oeuvre and interpretation, have created room for collaboration in self-organized artistic processes, and have recognized their audience as an active part and coproducer of performative situations. Furthermore, they have redefined the relationship between theory and practice and have appropriated spaces that have emerged among definitions of roles, divisions of labor, and economic processes of distribution.57 These survey observations highlight the relational and transversal

56 For instance, dramaturgical work and thinking encompasses tasks as different as those of an aesthetic advisor, a ‘first viewer’ or an ‘outside eye’, a curator, a mentor, a spokesperson, a production or tour manager, or a mediator or communicator (whether embedded within the artistic team or within the audience or society at large). The work is also come close to that of a writer, an archivist, a researcher, a co-performer, a financial, marketing, or PR manager, or, even, a friend. This list is neither exhaustive nor exclusive, yet it hints at the variety of capacities and qualities that comprise the term and that are combined anew in every artistic and creative process. 57 This also reflects, as philosopher Bojana Kunst elaborates, changes in cultural politics and the economic environment of contemporary dance production; notably, the shift

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quality of dramaturgical practice and suggest making dramaturgy’s multiple environments a part of the analysis.58 Still, I argue, it is movement—as a concept and as a practice—that is applied on animate and inanimate bodies and that is at the core of dance dramaturgy, redistributed by rhizomatic, improvisational, notation- or score-based modes of composition. It is also important to note that these observations refer primarily to the European context. Even though dance dramaturgy only appeared as a distinct role from the 1980s onwards, as the field has been increasingly institutionalized59 it has often been described as a derivative of institutionalized European theater history. As such, different scholars critically pointed to the genealogy and privileges of knowledge that this lineage might bring into dance dramaturgical discussion and practice (see van Imschoot 2003; Lepecki 2005; Hansen 2018).60

from working in permanent companies to different models of independent, projectbased, and interdisciplinary work (see Kunst, quoted in Behrndt 2009). 58 Dramaturgical practices include structural-compositional forms of dramaturgy, which highlight questions of form or visuality; narrative forms of dramaturgy, which focus on the establishment and development of narration, personae, action, and other latent structures of sense making; and theoretical-philosophical approaches to dramaturgy, which entail conceptual, concept- or discourse-based positions, and collaborations between artists and theorists. 59 In the European context, this institutionalization takes the form of the development of infrastructure, dance houses, venues for presentation, production centers, funding schemes and, more recently, educational programs focusing on dramaturgy, as well as the proliferation of professional, independent companies. This development of dramaturgy in contemporary dance in Europe can be traced back to a number of distinct yet influential collaborations between choreographers and dramaturges from the 1980s onwards (see Hansen 2018, 188-189). For indicative accounts of the development of dramaturgy in dance, choreography and body-based performing arts, see Bleeker 2003; Turner and Behrndt 2007; Romanska 2014; Hansen and Callinson 2015; Georgelou, Protopapa, and Theodoridou 2016. 60 The term dramaturgy was introduced and established in the context of German drama theory and theater in the eighteenth century. In this early, text-based tradition, dramaturgy was primarily concerned with structural elements and described a comprehensive theory of playmaking and its corresponding rules and practices of composition and organization. Correspondingly, classical elements of dramaturgical analyses that aim at elucidating the elements of theater-making include topics such as time, space, rhythm, movement, descriptions of personae and narrative, and the relationship between music and movement. Dramaturgical work has often been described as

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From this perspective, procedurally applying a Western tradition of dramaturgical thinking to Lebanese and Palestinian artistic works might be seen as a mere reproduction of the epistemic imbalance to which I critically referred earlier. Moreover, the artists do not specifically use the term “dramaturgy” when speaking about their work or working processes in their interviews or other selfauthored texts (with the exception of Saleh who, during our interview, describes a “dramaturgical line” in her piece). Nor does “dramaturgy” have a direct linguistic equivalent in Arabic. However, alongside other dramaturges and scholars, I contend that on a practical level dramaturgy has always been an integral part of dance and art-making.61 By framing dramaturgy an analytical function in a creative process rather than a mere job description anchored in a specific tradition or lineage, I place dramaturgy in proximity to what performance study scholar Adrian Heathfield describes as “dramaturgy without a dramaturge”: “Dramaturgy might be better conceived of as a form of responsibility towards (and in response to) that which is immanent in a given performance, its phenomena and forms of representation. […] Dramaturgy, no longer belongs to the theater, not to dance-theater, it is a practice spanning diverse disciplines and cultural sites. Wherever there is a performance taking shape there are a set of dramaturgical questions being asked and dramaturgical principles being tested. […] Dramaturgy, then, without a dramaturg, becomes the movement of relations through a constellation of questions, approaches, and responses to the matter at hand.” (2011)

This immanent relationality of materials and perspectives eschews the boundaries between the inside of a creative process and its external conditions in favor of the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Thus, dramaturgical practice and analysis is not primarily invested in describing supposedly stable,

analogous to practices of translation and correction and has been challenged by process-oriented ways of working (see, for example, Brecht 1948) and by what has been conceptualized as “post-dramatic theater” (see Lehmann 1999; see also Umathum and Deck 2019). 61 In this context, Pil Hansen speaks of “pre-dramaturges” (2018, 189). The practice of dramaturgy that exists beyond its discursivization and theoretical conceptualization that she references here is further evident in the diverse notation systems that conceptualize and systematize the moving body in time and space, as well as autobiographical writings, manuals, and manifestos by modern and contemporary dancers and choreographers in which they explicate their working processes and conditions (see Duncan 1908 and Humphrey 1958 as historical examples).

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comprehensive, or imitable systems, gestures, or movement patterns or in examining the structural logic of an artwork.62 Rather, originating from and triggering manifold encounters between bodies, it exists always in response to the contexts and conditions in which any artistic practice is implemented and with which it is in dialogue. It exists always as applied dramaturgy, within contexts and conditions that are continuously reformulated and actualized in the creative process and the aesthetic experience that it generates.63 Consequently, as a methodological tool, dramaturgical analysis is not limited to the hermetic reading of a specific performance document; rather, this approach places emphasis on the worlds that the artistic practices are grounded in and illuminate. Speaking of applied dramaturgy in the context of this study places collectivity and collaboration at the core of my reflections. Different authors have argued that the collective quality of dramaturgical analyses is key to its understanding and have advanced the belief that dramaturgical practice can be shared by or travel between different bodies and people in the process. It is not limited to the person identified as the dramaturge.64 Thus, the redefinition and specification of the practice and concept of dramaturgy in the field of contemporary dance, as outlined here, does not primarily refer to recognized expertise. Moreover, it is invested in how meaning emerges in the interaction between animate and inanimate bodies and holds a distinct corporeal and sensorial dimension, as well. Along these lines, Hansen introduces the notion of agency into the discussion: “A concept of agency that captures what something or someone does, what it affects, and how new possibilities are brought to the world. […] This agency is not an expression of

62 For similar approaches that challenge the understanding of dramaturgy as a predominantly rational activity, see Peter Stamer’s idea of “performative dramaturgy” (Stamer 2010) and Jeroen Peeters’s concept of “physical dramaturgy” that he developed in close collaboration with choreographer Martin Nachbar (Peeters 2010). 63 I therefore would like to emphasize the role of interdependency and relationality in dramaturgical practice (see Noeth 2015). As for the position of the dramaturge, they inhabit an in-between and mobile position, stepping away from any pretense of objectivity and neutrality yet keeping their distance and not coopting the position of the artists in the research process. 64 “Dramaturgy does not belong to a subject or to a resolved temporality. Dramaturgy, if it is anything, is a practice that enables us to shake off intentional fallacies and disrupt economies founded on notions of individualism. […] One might say it is a form of responsiveness, of speaking of and with the event that leaves its traces there and elsewhere.” (Heathfield 2010: 106)

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the knowledge of a dance dramaturge, but rather a distributed awareness of what choices do and how they effect the emerging work.” (2018, 185, 197)

Towards a Definition of Dramaturgical Analysis In summary, within the framework of this study, I conceive of dramaturgical analysis as a practice of decision making and problem posing—a conceptual approach of negotiating parallel and coexisting physical, intellectual, political, social, and other movements. This includes the thresholds and the periphery of the artwork: the becomings of form and of meaning. Dramaturgical analysis also entails a physical, corporeal dimension and acknowledges the fact that the analyst—the researcher—is part of the analyzed—the researched—event or experience. It means more than binding together separate elements or achieving consensus. Rather, it is about tracing and understanding how simultaneity and heterogeneity are handled, how shifts and changes are operating, how meaning is created, and how the responsibility of all parties involved is defined. Dramaturgy resists images, readings, and categories that are too quickly or too simply designed, or too comfortable. Instead, the continuous reassessment of our own predilections and dislikes, experiences and expectations, values and economies, curatorial framings, logistics, and infrastructural factors needs to be part of the dramaturgical process. This refocuses dramaturgical thinking on analyzing practices of decision making and strategies for action that are at work in the process of creation: the formative elements, the politics, poetics, and protocols that operate both in the production as well as the reception of an artwork. It looks at how decisions are made, how elements are implemented, and how a problem, phenomenon, or audience is addressed,65 rather than focusing on the efficiency of the artwork (e.g., in conveying a specific message). Dramaturgy in this sense is a potentially political tool of intervention and implication, and my focus on dramaturgical strategies seeks to place emphasis exactly on the applicability of these ideas.

65 Drawing on my own practice as a dramaturge, this includes the following questions: How are thoughts, experiences, images, bodies, etc. constructed? How are elements deployed and implemented in a specific context? How is information positioned? How is space produced and distributed? How is involvement and participation conceived of? How are bodies constituted as sites of power? How is the coexistence of materials, influences, bodies, movements, and spaces organized? How is a temporary community created, and how can we say “we” alongside the “I”? How, and for whom, is an artwork made accessible? How can the unexpected, mistakes, dilettantism, that which evades control, attention, and institutions be grasped as specific forms of knowledge?

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Introducing dramaturgy in this study on bodies, borders, and collectivity questions its potential as a tool for analyzing content. This approach does not try to ignore or conflate epistemological specificities, norms, and values that characterize both artistic as well as scientific knowledge production and methodology. Yet, it acknowledges that both perspectives are entangled in the artwork and observable through different acts of translation. First, the artists translate specific realities and specific experiences of borders and collectivity into the aesthetic articulations that they produce. Second, as a researcher who is analyzing the artwork, I reframe their interpretations according to research interests that might diverge from the artists’ projects and intentions. This initial interlocking of positions and perspectives equally encompasses critical reflection on the analyst’s own participation in the process of making meaning. Consequently, dramaturgical analysis does not provide a universal or neutral tool, but must take into consideration the limitations of its applicability and of the generalizability of its findings resulting from such collaboration. Applied to the mixed corpus of empirical material at hand, dramaturgical analysis seeks to carve out information about the material and symbolic environments within which the body-based artistic works are situated, and to integrate a corporeal, bodily, and visceral dimension into the analysis. As a consequence, the phases of conceptualization, production, research, mediation, documentation and discursivation of an artwork are also of interest in the following. Specifically, I suggest shifting the analysis from a performance text to its context. In order to apply dramaturgical analyses on the cases under study, particularly to the analyses of the performance documents themselves, I therefore focus on the dramaturgical strategies that the artists develop in their works in order to address, construct, challenge, and represent the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. Speaking of strategy here reflects the vocabulary that the artists themselves use in the interviews and in their writings to describe their respective working methods and procedures. Furthermore, the term seeks to loosely connect artistic strategies with political or activist strategies that are in dialogue with each other to varying degrees in the empirical material. Interviews and Transcription Alongside the dramaturgical analyses of the performance documents, semistructured narrative interviews with the artists constitute the main components of the empirical material, and here I discuss how the interviews have been conducted, processed, and interpreted with a qualitative, content-analytical approach. I led one interview per case study, either in person (with Abbas and Abou-Rahme,

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and Saleh) or via Skype (with El Khoury and Saksouk of Dictaphone Group). The face-to-face interviews took place in private or semi-public settings, such as the artists’ apartments (with Abbas and Abou-Rahme) or on the premises of the Goethe Institute in Ramallah (with Saleh). In both cases, the interviews were largely unaffected by outside disturbances. As for the Skype interview, two members of Dictaphone Group were in a café in Beirut during our conversation. Thus, the level of interruption was more significant due to background noise that influenced the flow of the conversation, and visual communication was only partially available due to a weak internet connection. The interviews ranged in length from forty-five to one hundred minutes and were captured by a voice recorder with the interview partners’ prior consent. The interviews were all conducted in English. As all research partners are highly proficient in English, particularly when used in their respective fields of practice and expertise, I consider the limitations to the quality and depth of the exchange resulting from the choice of language to be negligible. However, speaking in English did not contribute to identifying relevant terminology in Arabic. Staging the Encounter: Interview Politics The interviews are embedded in a series of informal exchanges between the artists and myself prior to this study. This circumstance led to a general awareness and mutual interest in the respective inquiries of all research partners involved in the project. It also reduced, I assume, the level of self-performance between the research partners. This general atmosphere of prior acquaintance is evident in the interviews and must be kept in mind in regards to the artists’ openness to explicate ideological frameworks, power politics, their own political positions, and, at times, personal concerns. In evaluating these latent or explicit structures of sense, critical analysis can only be approximate—especially when the oral accounts and the realities that they refer to are removed from their original contexts and resituated in environments where levels, degrees, and expressions of ideology function in different ways. For example, what might seem to a Western researcher like a strong reaction on a particular political issue might be perceived as a moderate position in the specific local context. Rather than interpreting or even judging my interview partners’ intentions, I seek to limit myself to description while negotiating the responsibility of having their trust.66 At the same time, even though I was committed to maintaining an investigatory

66 See Harry Hermanns who speaks of the challenge of “fairness” (2000: 361) and of open and covert “solidarisation” (2000: 365), both of which I see as influential elements in the research process at hand.

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perspective in the interview situations67 and minimizing the blurring of roles, the impact of this specific precondition on the interviews cannot be ignored. First, it influenced the interaction between the research partners by enabling a certain directness and ease in communicating with each other; second, it introduced, overtly or covertly, information, terminology, and assumptions that originated from previous encounters. Thus, some preconceived hypotheses and topics were already determined when the interviews began. These pre-negotiations, as I will discuss in detail in the following case study chapters, most distinctly concerned the political positioning of all participants, notably with respect to the Palestinian case.68 The risk of the researcher’s active intervention in preconfiguring and directing the interview is evident here. Yet, from a methodological perspective, qualitative social researcher Günther Mey, in discussing problem-centered approaches to interviews, points to the benefits of the intersection of inductive and deductive elements (i.e., preexisting knowledge and knowledge that is generated) in the course of meaning making.69 In what he describes as a “reciprocal and mutual process of validation” and a “more active way” (2000: 9-10) of interviewing and learning, Mey sees the benefits of this approach as a co-construction of sense. Also, he acknowledges the potential for a high level of intervention and participation during the interview process to provide transparency regarding the research question. In other words, the dialogical element of this approach can inform the researchers themselves about the politics of their methodology. It might reflect back what is not considered and left out, or conversely, expected and

67 The general research question of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects is directed toward the theorization of the experience of borders and collectivity. It is important to note, however, that this formulation is aware of its analytical construction and does not defend a homogeneous or universal reading of how borders and collectivity are experienced (see also Mey 2000, 4). 68 Georges Devreux identifies and describes the often unarticulated and underlying verbal and nonverbal dynamics—whether power relationships, friendships, or networks—that operate in interview situations, noting their value in instigating irritation and dialogue and thus their potential to trigger intensity, provoke a reaction, or carry positive or negative expectations (see Devreux quoted in Mey 2000, 13). 69 Mey points out that, generally speaking, problem-centered interviews dynamically combine questions that invite narration with questions that generate material and information, and that the dynamic of the situation is key (see 2000, 8). Andreas Witzel (2000) also describes problem-centered interviews as immanently deductiveinductive, acknowledging that the research partners co-create meaning in the process.

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taken for granted. Or, it may reveal latent structures of sense or specific ways of orienting the dialogue (Mey 2000, 9) and making it accessible to analysis.70 There is, however, a fine line between adopting an investigatory approach and being suggestive, as the interviews sometimes illustrate. With recourse to the debate on subaltern theory, artist and writer Hito Steyerl reflects on the power politics and normative structures at work in documentary and interview practices (see 2008; 2015). She references the distinction that Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Godin make in the context of their film, Tout Va Bien (1972), in the sequence depicting an interview with a female factory worker; namely, the difference between allowing a research partner “to bear witness” and creating the possibility for them to “be understood” (Steyerl 2008, author’s translation). This highlights the status that an interviewer attributes to their research partner and their openness to incorporate the research partners’ formal, aesthetic, and situational perspective in the interview situation. Similar to Walter D. Mignolo’s point on epistemic disobedience, it also addresses the agency of preconceived expectations, most explicitly when considering testimonies as truth or even actively intervening in the ways that interviews are conducted in order to make research partners sound true. As a consequence, Steyerl reminds us that rather than providing facts, interviews at the most generate probabilities that open up counternarratives and contrasting experiences. Interview Design and Method of Transcription The interviews were designed according a problem-centered approach, responding to the fact that the research partners knew each other beforehand. Thus, the interviews distance themselves from narrative-biographical approaches (for example, detailed reconstructions of specific events or experiences, or trauma research) that are typical of social research on Lebanon and Palestine/Israel.71 This methodological approach instead aims at acknowledging the interview partners the artists—as competent speakers on their artwork as well as on the problem of borders and collectivity with which this study engages. It positions them

70 This process is exemplified by the moment in which I introduced the term “collectivity” in the interviews with El Khoury and Saksouk. Both interlocutors questioned the clarity of the term in the context of our discussion and offered alternatives such as “community” and “collaborators.” 71 In the geopolitical context of Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel, for instance, narrativebiographical approaches often aim at reconstructing specific contexts by focusing the interviews on the biographies, family histories, or personal experiences of exile or refuge, etc.

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as experts that are able to provide information that is relevant for the development of theory on the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. In all three interviews, I employed a basic questionnaire but did not follow it meticulously or conform to a strictly chronological approach. Yet, it offered a structure for comparing the discussions in the subsequent evaluations. In an effort to keep a sense of openness and allow the interview partners to guide the exchanges, these questionnaires served more as blueprints than as unshakeable structures to be followed. The interviews opened with a short sequence reminding the artists of the purpose and framework of the interview and in which capacity or role they would be addressed,72 and since the interview invitation was issued via email or in person prior to the encounter, this sequence was either very short or skipped entirely. Subsequently, the interviews developed alongside a structured catalogue of questions that was eventually tailored to the particularities of the individual cases. The first section focused on gathering information about the specific artistic works under discussion (e.g., facts and details of their creation, their production processes, or the presentation of the artworks in different contexts). The purpose was to situate and contextualize the selected pieces within the artists’ corpus of work. Second, I introduced the main theoretical concepts and hypotheses of the study—namely, bodies, borders, and collectivity—in an effort to understand how the artists assess these terms, which registers of language and which references they evoke, and how they might offer counternarratives or a new set of directions to my inquiry. This procedure focuses the interviews but also simultaneously implements a set of inclusions and exclusions in further developing them (see Dresing and Pehl, 2013, 10). The third part of the interviews emphasized the relationships among the artists’ work, society, and the public; notably, the distinction between artistic, social, and activist engagement. The interviews ended with an open narrative, providing space for associations and open-ended questions, and picking up and relating to ideas and topics that had been generated during the conversation. Next, I transcribed the interviews in full and with simple descriptions.73

72 Harry Hermanns (2000) points to the possibility to change or challenge roles that results from the methodological openness of the problem-centered approach. With respect to the artists in this study, roles such as political activists, private persons, researchers, etc. all are related to different power politics. 73 The interviews were transcribed in a literal manner, word-for-word, in which open endings, repetitions, vowel sounds, and signals of comprehension are noted as they appear in spoken language and are kept in the transcription. Punctuation was entered where appropriate. In contrast to conversational analysis, pronunciation or rhythmic

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The qualitative evaluation of the interview transcriptions aims to extrapolate information to identify and develop the initial hypotheses of the study. Therefore, I proceeded in two steps: in the first round of interpretation, I foregrounded the key terms of the study, focusing on how and on what grounds the artists defined or understood them. A second reading identified and extrapolated diverging and supplementary ideas, differentiations, and contexts that the artists introduced in the conversation. As there is no visual account of the interviews (video recording or photos), nonverbal aspects such as facial expressions and gestures are not considered in the interpretation of the material. The next step concerned the integration of selected interview passages into the main text of the study. Here, there are two primary modes of application. Some passages are quotes that actively introduce concepts, terminology, or questions of the artists into my analyses. Others are quoted to illustrate, confirm, or complicate analytical findings that I advance in the case study analyses. In transferring interview passages from the transcriptions to the main text of the study, I kept the original language and articulation. A peculiarity occurred in the two interviews conducted with paired interviewees (most intensively with Abbas and Abou-Rahme and, to a lesser degree, with El Khoury and Saksouk). Here, the individual voices of the interview partners overlapped and intersected at times, as when one person began a sentence and another completed it, or when a collectivizing “we” of “they” was used. These passages provide mostly complementary rather than controversial information, and might illustrate the artistic collaborators’ routine in speaking together about their work. At the same time, in my interpretation, this reflects the dynamic quality and the artists’ level of engagement in the interviews and its

patterns and their effects on the dynamics of the conversations have not been taken into account. However, distinct emotional reactions were explicated and described verbally in brackets. Furthermore, pauses or interruptions that are longer than fifteen seconds are marked in the transcripts. Each transcription begins with a short case summary indicating relevant information: place, time, date, as well as particular elements that influenced the interview, its process, and atmosphere. The full transcription text was structured according to numbered sequences by imitating the units of meaning generated in the interview. The paragraphs have time codes indicating in the recording and detailing the beginning of each sequence. Each speaker’s intervention starts in a new line, corresponding to the distribution of speech; it is prefaced by the acronym representing the name of the speaker. For reasons related to private data protection, the artists, however, did not authorize publication of the full transcriptions of the documents.

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contents.74 In the subsequent case study chapters, in-text quotes will be assumed to be taken from the interview transcripts, unless otherwise indicated. All other sources will be referenced distinctly and separately. Organization of the Data and Structure of the Case Study Analyses In the following, the findings from the qualitative analyses of the case studies on Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group will be presented in three separate parts. Therefore, different materials and analytical methods, as explicated earlier, will be combined. This procedure does not ignore the disparity in density and the diversity of media that come with the respective documents and the partial incompatibility and incoherence that might emerge when bringing them into dialogue. Nonetheless, I see analytical potential of such a parallel reading in the tensions and ambivalences and in the correspondences and intensifications that might emerge from these cross-readings and that might destabilize familiar readings of borders and collectivity. Unless otherwise indicated, the interpretations of the artwork and their contexts are my own and may not necessarily correspond with the artists’ own intentions or positions. This is particularly relevant to the politics and ethics that I analyze in the case studies.75 Supplementary information is added to the analyses of the findings when necessary in order to situate the data in context, avoid deliberate misperceptions, or explicate theoretical ideas inherent in the material. All three chapters are formally structured in the same way. In the introductory sections, the artwork and the empirical documents that serve as the basis for qualitative evaluation will be specified and presented. This opening paragraph is followed by a summary description of the artworks based on the concrete performance documents at hand. Two subsequent paragraphs focus the analysis

74 As a way to mirror this dialogical quality of supporting and completing each other’s arguments, I refer to these passages when quoting them in the main text with a plural “they.” This does not ignore that the interview partners carry distinct voices; yet, it supports, alongside the artists’ self-descriptions, the impression that their accounts are complementary. 75 Here, I understand politics (i.e. politics of production and creation, politics of circulating knowledge) as specific, applied, and everyday conditions, predicaments, and frameworks that operationalize the political. Speaking of the political references the macro-level structural and symbolic elements that ground, legitimize, and accommodate politics.

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on two of the key concepts of this study: borders and collectivity. This perspectivation prepares the theoretical and comparative discussion of the findings that follows in Chapter 6. The final part of each case study takes on the question of how agency, and particularly the agency of the body, can be understood and conceptualized from the analyses of the artworks. As I mentioned earlier when introducing dramaturgical analysis as a methodological tool, the movementcentered, body-bound, and performative strategies that the artists deploy in their work hold political and social qualities to different degrees and with different levels of intentionality. Thus, the text is structured according to key dramaturgical strategies that I identified from the analyses.

Artistic Case Studies

Chapter 3 Artistic Case Study Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Contingency (2010)

Even before I emerged from childhood, I seemed to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing but to fight for an IMPOSSIBLE escape. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, 2013b.

Possible and impossible escapes, changing territories, and border effects—, “issues to do with the politics of desire and disaster, spatial politics, subjectivity, and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power,” as they put it in their biographical statement—have been recurring motifs in the work of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2018, website). Both were born in 1983; partners in life and work, they have collaborated artistically since 2007.1 Since 2012, they have been based in New York City while maintaining strong personal and pro-

1

Abou-Rahme was born in Boston and grew up in Jerusalem and Shefa'Amr, a predominantly Arab city in the northern district of Israel. Abbas was born in Nicosia, and grew up in Cyprus and Ramallah. According to Kevin Jones (2015, 106), “[b]oth born in the diaspora, they were swiftly brought into the Palestinian fold. Abbas’s family moved from Cyprus to Amman when he was 13, and he subsequently spent much of his time in Jerusalem, which is where Abou-Rahme grew up, having moved there from Boston with her family when she was three.”

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fessional links to Palestine. In recent years the artists have experienced a significant rise in curatorial and public interest in their work.2 With backgrounds in sound and experimental film, the artist duo works across a range of image-based, installation, and performative practices3 and, as this case study will illustrate, from a research-led approach that relies methodologically on archival research, found footage, oral history, and fieldwork. For the most part, the aesthetic and discursive outcomes of their creation and production processes are organized in corresponding series in which they explore specific ideas or materials over a period of several years (e.g., The Incidental Insurgents, 2012-2015; And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2016-ongoing). Their methods are collaborative and vary across different projects and contexts: “Our working process begins as a series of conversations, these lead to research, and the form comes much later. The research informs the form. […] Collaborative practice is significant for us as a way of working, and as a position. We also collaborate with other people, other artists. […] We are, in our practice, interested in something that is collaborative and that is not just about individuality, or about an ‘artist’s ego.’” (quoted in Gresle 2014)

This artistic case study on Abbas and Abou-Rahme proceeds from the work Contingency, first shown in 2010 at the Beirut Art Centre as part of Homeworks V, an international cultural forum curated and produced by Ashkal Alwan.4 Contingency adopts the format of a live, walk-in sound installation performed in loops. In its installed version, individual visitors or small audience groups are invited to inhabit and move through the space without specific temporal restrictions. By foregrounding this piece as a case study, I am linking the strategies that the artists employ in Contingency with the broader body- and movement-based

2

They received, among other awards, the Sharjah Biennale 12 Art Prize in 2015 and

3

See the artists’ work with the musical collective Ramallah Underground (2005-2010)

the Abraaz Group Art Prize in 2016. and the performance collective Tashweesh (in collaboration with musician and performer Boikutt). Important artistic influences that they mention range from artists like Walid Raad, Nam June Paik, and Dana Birnbaum to video jockeys, musical pioneers, and experimental filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Adam Curtis (see Holert 2015, 359). 4

Contingency, 8 mins. four-channel sound installation, minimum 3-LED tickers, aluminium sheets, dimensions variable. It debuted from April 21 to May 1, 2010 in Beirut Art Centre as part of Homeworks V (2010), produced by Ashkal Alwan.

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conceptual approach that animates this analysis. My discussion of the artwork and the contexts in which it is embedded is structured upon a mixed sample of empirical data. The dramaturgical analysis of the piece is based on the video documentation of Contingency produced and edited by the artists. Filmed from a single, static camera angle, the nine minute and fifteen second document does not take into account the visitors’ interactions and presences that characterize the installed version of the piece. As with most of their work, the sound installation is primarily presented in visual arts contexts (i.e., biennials, galleries, museums, etc.).5 In addition, an interview that I conducted with Abbas and Abou-Rahme in 2015 represents a main source of reference6 which builds on previous informal encounters and dialogues between the artists and myself, and which explains the occurrence of explicit or indirect references to prior, external conversations during the exchange. Furthermore, the interview is characterized by a strong dialogical quality that mirrors the artists’ style of bouncing words and ideas back and forth and finishing each other’s sentences by interjecting, reformulating, or clarifying information—a process of building thinking together. Further reviews, articles and exhibition catalogues complete the data. The link to reality runs deep in Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work, which often departs from personal and intimate or lived and present-day experiences. Thus, they incorporate scenes or encounters, details, field recordings, found footage, or texts that they author or extract from various literatures to address broader topics or overarching contexts. In Contingency, they situate the question of how space and spatial politics are produced and distributed in the everyday by taking the Qalandia checkpoint as the origin of the sound installation. One of the largest Israeli-controlled military sites, the Qalandia checkpoint is situated between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Al-Ram, and Qalandia refugee camp. It

5

E.g., Palestinian Pavilion/Venice Biennial (2009), 5th Jerusalem Show (2011), Istanbul and São Paulo Biennial (2013, 2014), Sharjah Biennial (2015), and Gwangju Biennial (2014), among others. For an overview of their work and further publications, see Abbas and Abou-Rahme (website).

6

I first met Abbas and Abou-Rahme in 2012 before collaborating with them as a curator and editor from 2013 onwards. Notably, this concerns the invitation of their lecture-performance The Incidental Insurgents to Tanzquartier Wien (June 20, 2013) and the subsequent publication of a related piece in the periodical SCORES that I co-edited (Abbas and Abou-Rahme 2016). The video documentation of Contingency is available for view at https://vimeo.com/35809043. The interview between Abbas, Abou-Rahme and myself took place on September 21, 2015, in New York City. In what follows, all quotations of Abbas and Abou-Rahme are from that interview, unless otherwise noted.

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functions as a barrier and a portal separating the inhabitants of Ramallah from the northern part of Jerusalem and Palestinian cities further south. It is also one of the most documented sites in the Palestinian West Bank, thereby producing strongly fetishized, hyper-mediatized, and repetitive imagery. The following annotated description of the video documentation of Contingency introduces the artwork for subsequent analysis and focuses in particular on the dramaturgical designs and strategies that the artists deploy. Contingency (2010) The video documentation of Contingency opens with a dark screen that might evoke associations with the darkened gallery space in which the live version of the work is originally presented. It is interrupted only by a blurry red dot, surfacing in the dark in pulsing movements for about the first five seconds. The red light is followed by a sound-only sequence that strongly conditions the further perception of the artwork through repetitive, rhythmic, low frequency, and damped sonic patters that are occasionally disrupted by nonhuman utterances and distinct, punctuated, electronic sounds. It elicits a closed, somewhat sterile, and abstract space, with occasional moments of creeping alertness. This first part of the soundscape then integrates a second, recurring motif of bird chirps and twitters arising and gradually intensifying, giving the scene a sense of spatiality. The animal sounds impute a concrete and everyday quality to the situation and implicitly reference the fact that elements of the Qalandia checkpoint’s infrastructure—its fences and the shuttered parts of its roof, for example—are open to the weather. This sonic pattern as well as the red light from the introductory sequence constitute the dramaturgical frame for Contingency, as they mark the beginning and the ending sequences of the video documentation. Beginning after about a minute, intense ticking and occasional distinct metal sounds build on and dominate the acoustic and sensorial experience of Contingency. In a subliminal and abstract sense, they open up associations with gates, turnstiles, metal grids, and other machinery of the border where the original sound footage was collected. As the video documentation develops, the aforementioned sound motifs and patterns resurge, swell, and intertwine with each other in sonic patterns, fragmented by several blackouts on the screen that last for only mostly for a few seconds only while the sound continues.

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Fig.1: Contingency (2010)

Copyright: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

This soundscape constitutes the sensorial texture upon which the artwork develops. Against this backdrop, a significant shift in perception happens after about two minutes into the work when the scenery changes and a hazy red light interrupts the black on the screen. The source is neon lighting installed under four separate LED text panels mounted atop the walls and framing the room.7 This moment introduces two key dramaturgical principles that recur in different configurations and intensity in the subsequent portion of the sound installation: the use of textual elements and the implementation of different strategies of layering and editing. In the piece, different words and phrases in English move across the LED screens in changing rhythms and arrangements, sometimes partly in capital letters, with a composition that simulates synchronicity and coherence, mirroring, repeating, and doubling each other.8 At other times, the text changes directions and different passages counter and disrupt each other, flickering, like warning signals, and coming to a halt. These textual movements are reflected on an acoustic level with singled-out elements of human speech in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, instructions, and barely-comprehensible utterances piercing through

7

Only two out of a total of four LED panels are visible in the video.

8

The most distinct example is the repetition of the word “fingerprints.”

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and reemerging in the soundscape. Through the editing and layering strategies that Abbas and Abou-Rahme apply, the original sources of the sound material remain unclear and unremarked upon.9 By installing this element of openness and indefiniteness, the artists enable the audience to imagine, remember, or project different encounters and allow for multiple and potentially contradictory interpretations of the scene. However, the diction and the pitch of the words suggest conversations from a situation characterized by authoritarian and hierarchical control. For instance, large parts of the texts adopt the form of instructions, orders, or questions; terms and phrases such as “border,” “search,” “ID,” “fingerprints,” or “open the bag,” to name but a few, encourage associations with the concrete experience of border crossing. The atmosphere that is created throughout the piece ranges from neutral and spacious to distinctly tense and confrontational; it evokes mechanical and machine-like interactions, the presence of natural environments, as well as strongly abstract and virtual ideas. Contingency dwells at the intersection and communication of different layers of sonic, visual, and sensorial elements. The corresponding changes of media primacy that condition the perception of the sound installation create, especially in the live version, a very visceral and somatic experience. The viewers’ (or visitors’) listening comprehension, movements, and perceptions are constantly reoriented and subtly choreographed by the distribution and movement of the sound among four loudspeakers.

3.1

BORDERS

Contingency is part of an earlier phase in Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s career in which, reflecting a long-term thematic interest in borders, they intensively explore the impact of political and colonial structures on individual and social bodies.10 In the interview, they point out that the piece marked an important turning

9

Throughout the entire piece, the only moment when the audience can locate the experience geopolitically is when “Are you going to Jerusalem?” flickers on the LED panels.

10 For their works that deal with the idea of the border, see Collapse (2009), Lost Objects of Desire (2011), or The Zone (2011). In relation to Contingency, they state in the interview: “When we first started our projects, we were incapable of filming anything. That’s why we used archive a lot. Found material and archive. And then Contingency actually allowed us to start filming. […] Obviously the political moment also allowed

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point in their artistic development, as they began to fundamentally question the potency of image-making. Contingency was first presented in 2010, two years after the artists’ return to Ramallah11—a moment that they describe retroactively as a radical rupture, “a feeling of deep, geopolitical fragmentation of sorts, a stagnation” (quoted in Gresle 2014). This personal diagnosis reflects large-scale transformations that affected the Palestinian community after the end of Second Intifada in 2005. Many Palestinian political institutions and parties that operated in vital domains of society prior to the uprising gradually changed function. In a highly ambivalent way, for instance, the Palestinian Liberation Organization transformed from a movement of liberation for the Palestinian community to an authority and a security regime.12 Abbas and Abou-Rahme reflect on how these changes impacted both the official narrative of Palestinian self-conception as well as the political and ideological frameworks conditioning the construction of Palestinian collective identity:13 “All of a sudden you were not talking about resistance and liberation, you were talking about security and the state. Technocratic figures were projecting consumerist images, as if it were some dream-state we were going to reach.” (quoted in Jones 2014, 110) These shifts concerned the status of bodies, as well: rather than being seen in their individual representational and corporeal capacities for action, bodies were gradually turned into elements to be organized, disciplined, and kept in place. Correspondingly, the Palestinian Authority actively implicated bodies and their artistic expressions in this process of sociopolitical transformation in which changing political agendas, increasingly impactful neoliberal developments, and drastic urbanization in Ramallah intersected. In reflecting on this period, Anani states that arts have been used not only to contribute to the reconstruction of a

us to pick up the camera. That was really something that informed our image practice later on and the way we film, and the way we were able to film Palestine again was precisely through trying to make this kind of space strange again, because it has been repeated and made normalized? And it even starts to disappear gradually.[…] The images start to appear post-Contingency, actually.” 11 Both had left Palestine between 2000 and 2005 to study abroad. 12 In the process, the Palestinian Authority took over control functions that the state of Israel outsourced in the West Bank. 13 This concerns notably the changing role and function of the Palestinian Authority, which, particularly post-Oslo, attempted to mastermind the idea of Palestinian national resistance and promote a project of collective state building with Ramallah as its de facto capital while life under occupation continued.

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collective Palestinian cultural history and memory, but also to instill “a narrow narration of ‘the good life’ and serve to distance the middle class in Ramallah from its long history of surviving Israeli occupation,” and to work towards a new social structure in which “the notion of freedom is linked to the capacity to consume” (quoted in Toukan 2014, 209). Thus, whether overtly or implicitly, artists were confronted post-Second Intifada with the need to respond to expectations, both from their own community as well as from the outside, related to the active promotion of a new type of collective representation of Palestine and Palestinians: a profit-oriented, highly mediatized, and symbolic type of imaginary that had simultaneously supporting and suffocating effects. Fig.2: Contingency (2010)

Copyright: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Residual Effects: The Everyday of the Border The production process of Contingency, as Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe it in the interview, transfers the experience of border crossing from the physical and infrastructural space of the border zone to the aesthetic realm. Over several months, they recorded the routine soundscape of the Qalandia checkpoint waiting area with handheld devices, “[b]asically by secret […], passing through the checkpoint and recording with like really shitty recorders, phone stuff, small recorders, it was very low-fi recording.” These technical conditions resulted in the mediocre quality of the collected recordings and explain why large parts of the

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human voices and utterances in Contingency seem distorted and alienated before any editing process. I interpret the artists’ choice to develop the installation on an actual border soundscape as a decision to situate the experience of the border not as exceptional but within the realm of the everyday. While the checkpoint soundscape captures the limitations on mobility and movement and the impact of colonial realities, it simultaneously presents these dynamics as structural features to which Palestinians are exposed. This approach is supported by the concomitant dramaturgical decision to move away from the primacy of vision in Contingency, i.e., from the aforementioned generic imagery that is commonly associated with border-related issues in the Palestinian/Israeli context. By foregrounding sound as a site of power and violence, 14 Abbas and Abou-Rahme direct attention to the immaterial effects of borders and their corporeal, visceral, and somatic articulations. Borders, thus, appear in their durability and persistence, as processes rather than distinct events. In line with this, the artists speak in the interview of the “residual effects” of borders—in my words, their accumulation; their remnants; their continuous, lingering, and enduring qualities; their impact and their after-effects; their unavoidability; and their danger, too. Here, the manifested and material realities of borders become indistinguishable from their long-term effects and the ways they settle in personal lives, in imaginations, and in bodies that, both at the Qalandia checkpoint as well as in the live sound installation, inhabit a provisional space between the ultimate dispossession of agency and the possibility for subversion. By focusing on the structural qualities of the border, the artists’ approach hypothesizes that borders exist in various extensions and amplifications, and that they are not stable but constructed. In Contingency, the experience of the border, of control, and of discipline are primarily amplified on a sonic and embodied level. This is especially important in the Palestinian/Israeli geopolitical context, where these mechanisms, together with technologies of surveillance and control are strategically used in everyday life in order to sustain the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories (see Tlalim 2017a). Thus, borders are always already there long before and long after the actual event of a crossing. In connection with this, Abbas and Abou-Rahme mention how borders condition one’s vision and imagination, and point to borders’ long-term traumatic and

14 Also see artist Lawrence Abu-Hamdan’s (website) research on forensic listening, as well as artist Amund Sjølie Sveen’s work (website), particularly the performance Sound of Freedom (2011) on sound as sites and tools of power.

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psychological effects15 when describing how they experience the process of entering or leaving Palestine/Israel. According to Abou-Rahme, “[t]here is a very distinct feeling that you have when you arrive to either an Israeli military checkpoint, to the airport, or the bridge where, in a moment, even your own body stops being yours. You really feel that you lose autonomy over your body.”16 Thus, the experience of the border is often displaced in time and difficult to trace back and locate; it rearticulates memories, stories, and acquired knowledge and is projected into the future realm where it is conflated with fictions, projections, and imaginations of the border yet to come (see Gresle 2014). It also translates, as Abbas illustrates in his description of crossing Israeli checkpoints by car into performative actions. He gives the example of staging or rehearsing one’s appearance at the border to enhance the probability of a successful crossing. Significantly, the success of these efforts is shaped by factors that range from the verbal presentation of one’s cause to equipping oneself with indicative artifacts or adopting specific gestures or looks. For example, it ultimately depends on corresponding acts of authentication through which authorities and fellow border crossers legitimize each other’s performance. What becomes clear is that limiting the analysis of the border to its infrastructure or the moment of physical confrontation between bodies is not exhaustive. Nor does conceiving of the border as a clearly detectable line or distinguishable event in the first place sufficiently capture its experience. Rather, these observations from Contingency emphasize the very constructedness and flexibility of the border. As Abbas and Abou-Rahme contend: “Border-crossing has always been something that’s, obviously, very constructed, in Palestine that’s something that’s fluid, something that’s moving, so the line is always moving; you see how a crossing even begins to take shape.” They continue to explain: “And not just that, even when they built the wall, the wall was built in a way where it can be taken down very easily, it can move, that’s why there are pieces that come together. You can kind of take them apart and bring them a bit closer, and closer, and close them up again, […] they are not cemented into the ground. You can disconnect them, and move them, and then reconnect them.”

15 The artists further note the extended impact of the border “even if you think about visuality, the line of vision.” 16 “The bridge” refers to Allenby/King Hussein Bridge, located close to Jericho and linking the Occupied West Bank to Jordan. For Palestinian ID-holders, it is the only site of official border crossing, as their status denies any access to Israel and thus any travel to or from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

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The fluidity that is evoked here references two kinds of border conditions. There is a fluidity in the material instability and adapatability of Qalandia checkpoint’s border infrastructure. In the context of Israel’s overall geopolitical project of territorial expansion, mobile or “flying” checkpoints are frequently set up and relocated, often inside the demarcating lines that officially define Areas A, B, and C of the Palestinian territories (see Weizman 2007). These spatial politics are prone to conflict and regularly result in mutual and often violent operations to reconstitute and reclaim land by Israelis and Palestinians alike. Secondly, the fluidity of the border also describes the bureaucratic environments and operative practices at work. It alludes to rapidly changing and, to some degree, arbitrary legal and organizational frameworks (e.g., conditions for the issuance of permits) that regulate border crossing for Palestinians. In summary, the shifting movements and residual qualities that Abbas and Abou-Rahme accentuate in Contingency depict the border in its highly reactive and environmental qualities and ask for a reassessment of its very definition in the context of Palestine/Israel. Scattered Movements: Editing as Compositional Principle In their artistic re-articulation of the original sound material compiled at the Qalandia checkpoint, Abbas and Abou-Rahme rely on different principles of sound and textual editing as well as work with visual blackouts (both in the live version as well as in the video documentation) to alter, vary, and play with the content in Contingency. These dramaturgical strategies are grounded in the artists’ respective backgrounds in sound and experimental film, “just editing hours and months of recordings from the checkpoint, and sort of isolating, whether it’s isolating different sounds, or isolating through conversations, through moments that were happening.” By layering, sampling, assembling, overlapping, and merging materials, they translate the actual experiences at the border into aesthetic experiences,17 creat-

17 Abbas and Abou-Rahme contextualize their combined strategies of editing and circulating knowledge in their work on virtual and digital archives: “The internet is an immense and expanding environment, permeated by and permeating the most intimate parts of our offline/online lives. In the sea of material(s) that shape this environment, seemingly endless inscriptions and mutations produced by virtually anybody and everybody infinitely circulate, creating an afterlife of images, sounds, and text. It’s an afterlife of our experiences, as material as it is ephemeral: perpetually producing and obliterating incredible archives of the contemporary. And here we are as artists. A small part of this surge of activity. Searching/downloading/sampling/cutting/pasting/

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ing sensorial patterns that influence both the sonic and the visceral, embodied perception of the artwork as well as visitors’ genuine movements through the installation space. Therefore, working with continuation and contrast is of particular dramaturgical importance here. As the example of the text flickering on the LED-panels exemplifies, while some sequences establish a certain coherence and synchronicity between the single text elements, either through associations between the written and acoustic files or through the development of meaningful sequences, others evade any attempt to make sense. Rather, they instill in the experience of the artwork a sense of fragmentation and isolation.18 In addition to this, Contingency is structured around a series of blackouts in which vision is temporarily taken away and the perception of the visitors moving through the live installation is reoriented. As a result of these editing principles, the artists create a strong sense of rhythm that introduces cycles of focus and disturbance, and density and vacuum to the experience of the artwork. In an itinerant process, meaning is affirmed, reversed, and discarded and the visitors, in my interpretation, are invited to engage in alternative imaginings of the border and their own border experiences. The scattered movements produced by editing are supplemented and countered by repetition: circular and periodically recurring sound, text, and visual elements that introduce a corporeal and visceral sense of continuity to the experience of Contingency. These dramaturgical gestures and movements of recurrence—re-peating, re-addressing, re-formulating, re-assembling—that the artists lean on also reference, in my reading, the idea of return: the quotidian experience of returning to the checkpoint where the occupation is normalized, but also the persistent idea of returning to the homeland as a key motif in both the Palestinian as well as the Israeli collective narrative and identity.19 In the interview, Abbas and Abou-Rahme support this interpretation:

mutating/inscribing/copying/documenting/uploading/posting/blogging/tweeting/Instagramming/creating spontaneous archives of the moment.” (2014b, 225) 18 I argue that this is in dialogue with an inner fragmentation of Palestinian society that is based not only on internal distinctions (categories such as ethnicity, religion, race, gender, political affiliation, wealth, etc.) but also on differing statuses of citizenship and residency permits for Palestinians living within a complex patchwork of overlapping regulatory frameworks. 19 Abbas and Abou-Rahme identify the problem when stating: “Photographers find their photos as soon as they arrive. They don’t dig. They don’t look beyond what’s there? So that’s why again the photo of a checkpoint would not have sufficed to anything. Because we have all seen this, it’s bare, it’s raw.”

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“Like kind of myth-making, and counter myth-making, [the border is] a fiction, myth, and wish. For us, this kind of space of projection, it’s really interesting. What is and what could be. Like the idea of returns, for example, returning to the site, […] to where you have never been, for example. And as a Palestinian, as refugees, the ideas of refugeedom, and like returning to a place that you never been to.”

To summarize, when the experience of the border is placed in conjunction with the idea of return, the former appears in its utmost ambivalence. Equipped with a certain sense of familiarity and recognition, the experience of the border represents a moment of being caught in a kind of unstoppable loop without escape; always there, always yet to come, in “deadly repetitions” (Abbas and Abou-Rahme quoted in Gresle 2014).20 Docile Bodies: The Visceral Experience of the Border By turning to the everyday and the residual effects of the border in Contingency, the artist duo, as discussed earlier, draws attention to the structural qualities of the border and the ways in which it unfolds and operates. Notably, they shift the focus to the bodily dimension and long-term consequences of the border. “The occupation is not something that’s external to me, it is something that is incredibly internalized. And it’s not only internalized in the sense of how you feel psychologically. It is very very material, very bodily, visceral. It’s an incredible visceral experience. And that’s why the idea of slow violence was so significant to us because, these are the things that are very often very absent in the way you think about these kinds of experiences.”

This excerpt from the interview foregrounds the gradual extension of the border in time, space, and one’s mind and body—an assumption that matches my own experiences of border crossing during fieldwork. At that point, Abou-Rahme, in the interview, directly references the concept of “slow violence” that literature scholar and activist Rob Nixon (2013) developed in the context of his research on indirect, delayed, nonexplosive, and nonspectacular forms of violence (notably, environmental calamities). For Nixon, slow violence encompasses structural and systemic understandings of crisis and conflicts, and questions individual and collective agency in the process.21 In line with this, the artists, in their accounts,

20 “The return to a site is a way of imagining a space that has been erased.” 21 The concept of “slow violence” has been the subject of previous conversations between the artists and myself.

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move to some degree away from the formal and infrastructural aspects of the border in order to foreground its immaterial, symbolic, and imagined elements in the analytical picture. Significantly, Abbas and Abou-Rahme propose the border as an experience that is distinctly internalized and visceral, bound to the body both as the object as well as the subject of border experiences: “And really, how to get through this time, as a person, forget even as an artist. […] You are not just in what very often just feels like this theatre of constant crisis, constant trauma. So much of what is being done in the Arab world is incredibly performative, so much of it is about you seeing that kind of total deconstruction, and things are completely disintegrating, it’s really like a melt-down. […] Because of the performance of it, the videos, the beheadings, it was all about showing you this. […] The presence becomes very significant, […] physically, the body, the body becomes very significant. Because it’s always broken, it’s mutated.”

Additional passages from the interview take up and deepen the qualification of the border as a body sensation. The artists speak about “a very bodily, visceral” experience that “really touches on your skin.” Or, with regards to the feeling that the border produces in their lived experience, they describe how “you lose autonomy over your body,” and elaborate: “You have to kind of disconnect your mind and body just to pass through, to just function, follow the machine. Keep no eye contact, follow orders.” At different moments in the interview they use the term “docile body,” a body that I picture as a controlled, taught, easy-to-manage, pliant, and conformist one; a body that exists in awareness of the real danger that, from a Palestinian perspective, is always present in the physical act of border crossing. Moreover, alongside connotations of obedience, passiveness, and submission, the idea of docility comprises the ability—or lack thereof—to learn, to train, to rehearse, or to stage one’s behavior; in other words, the degree to which an individual or collective is actually entitled to empower themselves at the border. The term “docile bodies” equally evokes Michel Foucault’s chapter of the same name in Discipline and Punish (1977). The artists do not explicitly reference this source in their accounts. Yet, I posit that Foucault’s summary argument—that, from the eighteenth century onwards, docility represented a new scale of utilitarian control, exercised on a structural level by disciplining how bodies were able to position themselves and operate in a given space—applies, in principle, to operating power politics and the disciplining of bodies in the Palestinian/Israeli context, as Contingency exemplifies.

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In continuity with this, Abbas and Abou-Rahme unfold how different layers of experience and perception are interwoven in Contingency: “There is a very strong connection in our work between the material and the immaterial, the psychology of the moment and inner thoughts; and then the material moment, the physical, bodily manifestation. Being within the space of the installation is quite bodily and physical. But what we are trying to get is not just the physical but also the immaterial.” (quoted in Gresle 2014)

The artists echo this immaterial element in the interview where they distinctly comment on the importance of absence—of absent bodies—for both the actual crossing of Qalandia checkpoint and its artistic articulation in the sound installation. They state that “so much of the authority and the power of the soldiers now was happening through the sound, it was happening through the architecture of the space, the machinery of the space. […] But even the architecture of the space was producing a kind of sound, and then you had this disembodied voice.” This statement must be understood within the context of temporary Israeli military practices at the Qalandia checkpoint at the time that the original sound material for the installation was collected. In reaction to the Second Intifada and in the course of implementing the post-Oslo peace process, Israel sharply limited and partially suspended the physical proximity of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian border crossers at certain borders. In other words, this meant that there was little or no direct contact between Israelis and Palestinians until the crossing was effectively completed. However, even in the physical absence of bodies, the presence of the Israeli military was assured by acoustic and visual forms of control, mediated through technological devices like screens and loudspeakers.22 While remaining unidentifiable as individuals and literally untouchable, the collective political Israeli body was, from a Palestinian perspective, made inescapable by the purposeful use of absence. Against this backdrop, the actual bodies

22 In a similar vein, in his comment during the opening of the Palestinian museum, literature scholar Karim Kattan said: “Absence is the crucial feature of our Palestinian-ness. No matter who we are and how we end up being called—West Bank, Gaza, 1948 Palestinians, refugees inside or outside, diaspora kids, third-generation Americans—we all carry absence like a yoke. We slouch. It defines the way we perceive our love lives, our families, our friendships, our cities, and our nation. Whatever the reason was that the museum opened with no exhibition, it seemed a fitting opening. There is nothing to see. It is a moment in time, a space where we can feel both proud and sad. It is a celebration and a dirge. It is our exile made manifest.” (2016)

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that interact at the Qalandia checkpoint stay visually absent in Contingency, while creating an embodied experience of the actual border crossing for the visitors.23 This dramaturgical strategy introduces a paradoxical and contradictory element that echoes both the real and the aesthetic experience of the border, factoring significantly into the subsequent theorization of the experience of the border.

3.2

COLLECTIVITY

In different contexts Abbas and Abou-Rahme explain that they often draw on personal and lived experience to initiate critical reflection on more general aesthetic, social, or political concerns. Yet they are careful to clarify that their work does not solely communicate their individual positions, but rather seeks to address something that they describe as “common”: “Really, we don’t see it in this kind of ‘you have the personal and the political, then you have the collective, the public,’ absolutely not. These things are constantly happening in the same moment, in the same space, they are created in the same space. […] And this really goes back to think about that relationship between the political, the body. In a way that is very intimate, that’s very personal. It’s not about some kind of abstract notion. It’s rather about how the body is such a significant site.”

This intrinsic link to something that is more than a single person’s project or idea, to something situated beyond the individual, finds expression in different ways. On the level of the immanence of the work, this approach is mirrored in the historical and archival perspectives that Abbas and Abou-Rahme integrate into their research processes by combining different sources, media, and materials and addressing a specific question or phenomenon from a plurality of voices. Furthermore, in terms of creation and production processes, their interest in the shared is also reflected in their choice to regularly collaborate with other artists and thinkers and to contextualize and mediate their artistic outcomes in formats such as artists’ talks, workshops, and self-authored texts, thus putting them up for conversation and development. Yet, while the search for something common appears as a welcome and conscious extension of the artists’ wish to dialogue with society through artistic practice, the empirical material provides different

23 The interlocking effects of absence and presence are repeated to a certain degree in the live experience of Contingency, where fellow visitors are barely recognizable due to the darkened atmosphere created in the installation.

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examples where collectivity and collaboration might not always be a choice, but rather a dynamic that is inflicted on Palestinians as artists and citizens. Caught in Loops: The Unavoidability of the Collective In the data, Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe the inverse effects of collectivity—that is, collective alignments that happen outside of their direct and full control or without their consent—in two realms: the impact of what they refer to as the “Palestine industry” (quoted in Holert 2015, 349) on the arts, and how being Palestinian is rendered discursive in media and popular representations. What becomes clear from the dramaturgical analysis of the case study so far, however, is that, with Contingency, the artists are not invested in an authentic reconstruction or documentation of the Qalandia checkpoint. Instead, by decontextualizing meaning through the practice of editing or by suggesting parallel sensorial frameworks for interpreting the situation, they direct attention toward slippages and ambivalences in the aesthetic experiences and the interpretations of the border and of collectivity that they provide. This position of challenging monolithic readings raises broader questions on representation in the context of Palestine/Israel. Reflecting on their own careers, Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe a high level of standardization and streamlining that shapes artistic practice in a more or less pronounced manner: “In the beginning of our collaborative work, we found ourselves unable to produce new images. Faced with so many representations of Palestine from the media and artists engaged in the ‘Palestine industry’, we felt that the images coming out of Palestine began to stagnate, to deactivate rather than activate. We also rejected the ghettoization and the constructed singularity of the Palestinian issue. For us the unbearable living conditions in Palestine were always to be seen in relation to precarious living conditions all over the world.” (quoted in Holert 2015, 349)

What the artists allude to here is the influence of strong, highly collectivized, tightly controlled, and normatively loaded representations of Palestine and Palestinian collective identity. This extends to the notion of the border which, in the Palestinian/Israeli context, is inextricably linked to images and narratives of walls, checkpoints, and road blockades. Here, the artists point out the consequences that these dynamics have on the agency of Palestinians both on an individual and on a collective level. When these representations and experiences are omnipresent, collectivized, and repeated in generic loops, they risk losing all significance and impact and producing stagnation. Crucially, these dynamics are

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not exclusive to external forces such as cultural institutions, mainstream media, or political discourses that might repeat stereotypes in an uncritical or purposeful way. Rather, practices that streamline collective identity and specific versions of bodies are also part of the Palestinian community itself—a community that continues to perpetuate a prescribed repertoire of narratives, images, and gestures in an effort to stabilize a homogeneous idea of what it means to be Palestinian. The experience of the border serves as a clear site where belonging is negotiated in collective terms and where your body, to quote from the interview, “stops being yours.” Moreover, the artists’ lack of belief in overarching narratives, expressed by turning towards found footage and small-scale observations, might be read as a comment on a long-standing and forceful historical alliance between artistic practices and political organizations in Palestine. In their artistic work, Abbas and Abou-Rahme thus interrogate existing archives and their accessibility in order to propose alternate usages or construct more dissonant counter-archives.24 Correspondingly, in Contingency, individual and collective perspectives blur and shape-shift, and visitors are left to continually position themselves. In line with this, the artist duo further undermines the importance of placing Palestinian issues within a larger and rhizomatic context of colonial politics and violence. Without denying the singularity of each case, I read their position as a reminder to not conflate the necessity of artistic action with ideological acts of fetishization that would place Palestine-related issues out of context. In the Palestinian context, this process of aligning oneself with (and demarcating oneself from) real or imagined collectives pervades all domains of life: “And that’s what it is about in Palestine. That’s what you understand so funda-

24 Here, Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s artistic project of destabilizing canonical and authoritarian knowledge mirrors a broader interest in the archival by different artists and arts institutions in the field of contemporary arts in the Middle East in recent years (see Downey 2015): “It seems to us that the artist (ourselves included) as archivist, assembler, collector, or sampler of sorts, is no longer as central as it once was. […] Maybe we could say that the activist-as-archivist has replaced the artist-as-archivist. Not only are activists shaping events on the ground, they are at the same moment producing and circulating counter-narratives through images, videos, sound, and text. […] The very act of producing dissonant archives, in real time as events unfold, is now understood by insurgent citizens as a fundamental way of rupturing the spectacle of power, not of simply sharing information. It’s not only that they defy power through splintering the official archive—it’s also through the very archival act that this defiance is being performed.” (Abbas and Abou-Rahme 2014b, 225-26)

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mentally, what you are experiencing in your most kind of interior moments is also then resonating with a common, shared experience.” Abbas describes how this mechanism is institutionalized on a broader scale, stating that “as a Palestinian, that’s a violence that we are facing every single day. Just by being Palestinian, you are faced with this discursive violence. You are continuously told who you are, how you should feel, how you should react, how you should behave. And you begin to believe that, you begin to take it on.” Significantly, he describes as “violent” the everyday conflation of communitarian features with essentialist identity politics created by mainstream media, undermining their inescapability. This aligns with my earlier methodological argument regarding the impossibility of inhabiting a neutral or un-situated position when doing research on Palestine/Israel, and the necessity of creating awareness and engaging in decolonial practices in our artistic and scientific inquiries. Thus, I argue that the artists’ dramaturgical decisions in favor of more incongruous, inconsistent, and dissenting accounts of Palestine/Israel are not merely artistic decisions, but also political ones in reaction to involuntary acts of collectivization. Movements of Address Moving through the symbolically and territorially contested space of the border, particularly in the Palestinian/Israeli context, is not only a matter of citizenship status or nationality. Rather, as Contingency dramaturgically explores, it is also a matter of what may be called address—the strategies that are applied at the border to collectively and individually appeal to and instruct bodies. For instance, the mobility of bodies depends on how and in what capacity an individual border crosser is addressed and assessed by the authorities in charge as well as by the members of their own community. Correspondingly, Abbas and Abou-Rahme establish different modes and principles of address in the ways that they deal with text and sound materials in Contingency. To illustrate this dramaturgical approach, the following text gathers several transcribed excerpts from the text flickering and running on the LED panels in the piece’s video documentation. Rather than coherently reconstructing the scene, the text functions to give an impression of how collectivity is operationalized in the environment of the checkpoint. The capitalization of letters and the splitting of the text fragments in parallel and partly overlapping columns loosely imitates the organization of the two LED panels visible on the screen:

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COME HERE COME HERE YOUR BEEPING STOP HERE COME HERE STOP YOUR BEEPING

COME HERE COME HERE STOP YOUR BEEPING

WHERE IS ID? ID WHERE The machine is going to ring, Sundus It’s going to ring and they will search you

WHERE IS ID? Are you going to Jerusalem?

The sound is not clear I can`t hear the sound I can`t hear

Put your things on the belt We have to keep the order Tell him to turn the machine on What do you mean he’s refusing

Pull it out he’s telling you to pull it out Move on girl, move on Don’t allow anyone in

The door opened didn’t it? ONE BY ONE One by one…

YOUR FINGERPRINTS YOUR FINGERPRINTS …

The English text that is moving across the LED panels is complemented by Arabic and Hebrew phrases in the sound file. It evokes the actual bordering bodies at the checkpoint that are visually absent, with the exact constellations, context, and conditions of the border, as well as at whom the words are directed, are left unexplained.25 Most of the short sentences remain unfinished and words are isolated, making it hard for audiences to make sense of the imagined encounters and confrontations. The dominant forms of address are orders, instructions, and, to a lesser degree, questions. As I described at the beginning of the chapter, different strategies of fragmentation, disruption, and repetition are applied on the

25 The only moment in which an instruction is clearly personalized is when the name “Sundus” is pronounced: “The machine is going to ring, Sundus […] It’s going to ring and they will search you.”

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text and utterances, working against coherence and comprehension. Still, the texts and especially the tone, pitch, and physicality of the voices—the distortion, insistence, and tension—anchor the situation as they encourage speculation about the dialogue and encounters that might have taken place at the border. In Contingency, visitors are invited to find their path through the acoustically and verbally scattered information, and belonging is up for negotiation. The fact that individuals and entire groups and communities stay largely anonymous in the process can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, it might be read politically as a comment on the fact that certain bodies, notably those of Palestinians at Israeli-controlled borders, are, to different degrees, collectively deprived of agency and thus not recognized as citizens with individual human rights. Here, anonymity represents a political and a dramaturgical strategy of addressing a body as an always-collective-body and ultimately blending it out and making it invisible. On the other hand, considering Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s wish to juxtapose the Palestinian case with other instances of inequality and injustice, their decision to portray border situations abstractly can be interpreted as an opportunity for more general points of connection and dialogue with audiences beyond the specificity of the Palestinian/Israeli context. Moreover, this approach points to more structural mechanisms defining the border as a place of sovereignty and control. This general approach is exemplified in the way that the artists conceptualize audience participation in Contingency. In addition to being invited to linger, passively observing and perceiving the work, the audience finds itself encouraged to more actively move through space and make sense of the materials with which they are confronted. They are animated to connect with their own border crossing experiences as citizens and as individuals. Significantly, the anonymity, indefiniteness, and irritation that the artists employ in Contingency resist the reduction of checkpoint crossings to explicatory models that rely on us/them binaries such as that between Palestinians and Israelis. Such identity-related mechanisms are strong and in this specific context, undeniably present. Yet, as the empirical data and my own fieldwork suggest, these mechanisms are complicated by everyday life and the experience of collectivity that is always in the becoming. Thus, as I see it, the moments of paradox and contradiction that Abbas and Abou-Rahme create in the sound installation evoke much more complex and heterogeneous versions of both communities. They question how roles, responsibilities, and violence are constructed, distributed, and eventually travel between different bodies in the experience of the border. The challenging of popular representations of borders by juxtaposing the artists’ own experience of the border with the aesthetic experience that they create allows visitors to active-

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ly seize power over reigning collective narratives—to challenge normalized and familiar narratives of border crossing. Significantly, this highlights the performativity of becoming-collective at the border through acts of performing, staging, and experiencing oneself at the border, and interdependent acts linked to recognition and authentication. The political, thus, sits not only in the borderrelated content of Contingency, but also in its sonic, corporeal, textual, and symbolic movements of address—of gesturing towards—individual and collective bodies yet to come. The Negative Construction of Collectivity As mentioned previously, the experiences of dis-identification that Contingency evokes must be placed in the historical context of the artists’ return to Ramallah; namely, the aftermath of the Second Intifada and its repercussions for the Palestinian community at large.26 In the interview, Abbas and Abou-Rahme retrace the instability and inconsistency that this period introduced into Palestinian society and the simultaneous demand to reinvent oneself as an adaptation to a changing political and social environment. Notably, they recollect two specific observations from their lived experience at the checkpoint and under curfew. These quotes give significance to the body as a site of power, resistance, conflict, and agency. To start with, as described above, they recount the suspension of the physical presence of Israeli soldiers during border crossing, explaining: “You stop seeing the soldiers, you would only hear their voices through the intercom kind of thing. They see you, but you don’t really see them until you pass.” In connection to this, Abou-Rahme accentuates the particular importance of bodies in the process, stating: “They saw that contact was a point where a kind of resistance would be possible. There is something in the physicality, in the body.”

26 “When we left Palestine, there was still a discourse of resistance, or perhaps the remnants of it—a discourse of resistance and liberation. It was the end of the transformation of the PLO in an authority. Before, the idea of the PLO was of something very much alive, as a part of community. When we returned, the failures of the Second Intifada had solidified and this marked the end of the PLO, or the end of the idea of the PLO. This was a quite radical turning point in terms of the Palestinian narrative, or the discourse which was shaping the narrative.” (Abbas and Abou-Rahme, quoted in Gresle 2014)

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Additionally, the artists describe strategies and incidents of “self-policing” and “self-disciplining” that intensified considerably at the Qalandia checkpoint after the Second Intifada and that were partly exercised on bodies: “This space that used to somehow precisely have the potential of these bodies becoming collective body, resistant in just one moment, from just one interaction between a soldier and another person […]. It was extremely shocking to arrive at the checkpoint and have us police each other.”

In other words, the physical absence of the occupiers’ bodies during the Palestinian experience of border crossing induced a situation in which the Palestinian collectivity turned against itself. Collective identity, thus, was no longer primarily constructed in reference to a clearly depicted, real, or imagined other. Instead, a negative process of accentuating differences in one’s own community arose, generating fragmentation and difference among Palestinians.27 In the interview Abbas and Abou-Rahme elaborate:28 “We were really trying to think through, at that time, these different mechanisms of subjugating this kind of collective body work, […] of what we felt was a whole kind of political community that was being taken apart.” In connection to this, Abbas evokes another memory that exemplifies the internal fragmentation in the Palestinian community. He recalls curfews imposed by the Israeli authorities during which the attention, suspicion, and surveillance among neighbors grew considerably.29 The self-policing at the checkpoint and under curfew illustrate how Palestinians eventually adopted regulatory practices toward each other, monitoring each other’s behavior and mobility or enforcing orders and commands. In the process, they heightened the

27 Abbas speaks of the “absurdity” that characterized the situation at the Qalandia checkpoint “because there were Palestinians on both sides.” 28 In the interview, Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe different forms and situations of confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians from their own experience. However, when asked about the specific material used in Contingency, they responded: “Well, there was actually only one [confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians], the rest was like actually self-policing, a lot of self-policing. That was very interesting.” 29 “The checkpoints themselves fragmented the community, right? The checkpoints, and then, at some point during the Second Intifada, it was the checkpoints along with the curfews.”

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alienation and mistrust within a community under occupation,30 exacerbating existing lines of brittleness and fragmentation.

3.3

DE-NORMALIZING BODIES: THE IMPOTENCY OF IMAGES

The evaluation of the case study thus far suggests that Abbas and Abou-Rahme share a sense of politics grounded in personal experience. In line with this, they explain: “Our work is full of something that is not resolved. Because that’s not something that is actually resolved in our lives.”31 Yet, while taking on the provisional and unsettled as a driving force for their artistic practice, they reject readings that would characterize their artwork as activism or reduce it to its representational capacities of defending or affirming a certain cause. As engaged artists from the Middle East, they oppose hasty categorizations and critically reflect on the risks of aiding or subjecting their artwork to “outside” objectives. Abbas remarks, “I am not under the illusion that I am making some political thing when I exhibit,” and Abou-Rahme explains how they see their work as an artist duo: “It is not about art and activism, or art and social practice. We have so many issues with that. […] I don’t think that saying that means that the body of work that you are presenting cannot also do something, cannot also activate things. That’s something different. But I really take issue with this idea that it’s activism in that moment […]. I find it incredibly problematic, constantly framing things within the realm of art, as an artist, as an artwork. There is a lot of these things in Palestine, and people have serious distain towards it. […]

30 Yazid Anani, describing another aspect of Israel’s spatial politics and the subsequent fragmentation of the Palestinian community, identifies a collective state and feeling of “learnt helplessness of Palestinians […] The paralysis of freedom of movement and its intended consequence of severing Palestinian memory from its territorial sensibility and claims to land” (quoted in Toukan 2014, 211-212). 31 The artists elaborate: “As individuals or as part of a kind of a common, a common moment where we are trying to find a different way of living and like, of being in the world. All the time trying to think of either, how we can begin to open up our kind of imaginary in different ways whilst still engaging with the issues, with the problems, and not turning away from them. […] That friction is there in our practice as artists, as people, as people who are incredibly engaged in trying to imagine a kind of different way of being in the world but still very much implicated, you know, in the market.”

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They are very suspicious of it. It incidentally makes it kind of into a safe zone: ‘oh, it’s just an artwork’.”

This quote from the interview makes clear that Abbas and Abou-Rahme reject any framing that would limit their work to direct change or, for instance, to a coherent analysis of the problem of borders or collectivity. Rather, they prefer to speak about their impact as “activatings,” which they qualify as being small. Abou-Rahme elaborates: “I mean so much of our practice is really in thinking about like how you actually can imagine for possibilities of activatings. It’s very small sometimes. A very small gesture, but it is a gesture to try to activate something. Or see the possibility of the activation.”32 I would like to connect this with an earlier passage in the interview where Abbas describes their approach in a more general way with regards to the representation of the checkpoint: “And so in our work, [we were trying] to somehow de-normalize those spaces, to make them abnormal again. […] To make them strange again, to make the experience of the checkpoint not as a kind of normal thing that we have to do everyday.” The artists link the idea of de-normalization to the question of the potency or agency of art. With regards to Contingency, Abbas and Abou-Rahme further explicate the relationship between the social and political realities of the checkpoint and their artistic practice: “We have seen the checkpoint so many times, and it’s a very well documented space. But images of it are so repeated and representational that they stop having any meaning. People use the checkpoint so frequently that it becomes mundane and normalized as a space. We were interested in the idea of de-normalizing it. How do you make it a potent space again. Not just the image of it, but the experience of it.” (quoted in Gresle 2014)

32 Abbas and Abou-Rahme continue to reflect on how this concern to activate small things translates into their work and into “how we try to think about the political in relation to our work, and how we draw from things that come from our own direct experience. […] We are really interested in the lived experience as something that is significant rather than things that are just sort of in a certain abstraction. So, what is the practice of actually living through things like that, [and] what are the possibilities that start to emerge? In a way, research in Palestine is interesting like that, because so many of our projects involve a lot of research, involve going out to very simple places and meeting people, talking to people and having conversation, […] Not necessarily that that then is visible in the work, but it’s a very important part of the process for us. That interaction is a very important process. Because it’s about almost circulating and re-circulating different ideas. Different ways of looking at things.”

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The notion of scale is important here—specifically, the scale on which Contingency is operating and the impact that it might have in a given cultural or geopolitical context. For example, Abbas and Abou-Rahme express doubt when reflecting on the pertinence and relevance of presenting exhibitions in Palestine, especially in Jerusalem. While they describe a general desire to bring information into circulation, to provide accessibility, and to share knowledge as driving forces for their activities, they question if this presentation format offers adequate and sufficient possibilities for local Palestinian communities to engage in their work and to instigate discussion among the Palestinian community in Jerusalem.33 Rather, they contend: “The Israelis have made the landscape strange and alien, yet it has become accepted and invisible. We use the strategy of making things strange, of de-familiarizing them and exposing the absurdity.” (Abbas and Abou-Rahme quoted in Jones 2015, 110) In connection to this, they situate their reflections on the potency of imagemaking in the broader context of what they view as a crisis and process of radical disillusionment happening in Palestine (and indeed elsewhere in the Middle East). Titling their work Contingency suggests a certain potentiality and estrangement—a reflection on likeliness and probability, on predictability and occurrence. But it also suggests the absence of certainty and the dependence on chance and fortuitousness. It introduces a quality of suspension between something that has already happened and something that is still yet to come. It opens up the experience of the border to feelings of déjà-vu, to the realms of science fiction, and to the order of dreams. The artists’ strategies lay open the prerequisites, politics, and protocol that define and regulate the experience of the border and the entangled experience of collectivity. I interpret this not as an effort to wash or level out existing imagery, but as a way to question and recontextualize our experiences in a contemporary environment. Supported by the physicality and performativity of the experience provided in Contingency, this attitude brings the question of agency back into everyday life, into small details, and into bodies. Mixing facts and fiction, media, time, and space in their work highlights, as they put it, the potential of the present rather than legitimizing the past.

33 “I mean, is what is needed in Palestine an exhibition? Because we went to so many exhibitions where it was the same elite, NGO people […]. In the research that we did and that we are doing now, we are trying to find different ways to physically and digitally circulate, to produce a certain body of knowledge.” As an example for such a counter-strategy to existing representational formats, they prioritized working with practices of anonymous publishing as a way to circulate ideas in Palestine.

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Against this backdrop, de-normalization as a way of acting out artistically is not only a dramaturgical but also a political strategy.

Chapter 4 Artistic Case Study Farah Saleh: Free Advice (2015)

“Nothing is for Free” read the pieces of cardboard held by two audience members standing next to each other, arranged in space by choreographer Farah Saleh.1 Resembling a picture constituted by living bodies, this temporary tableau vivant references the title of the interactive performance—Free Advice—about to take place in a mid-scale training studio for dance. The two words present a game of loosely placed associations, resonances, and playful speculation: free or for free,2 variously invoking freedom of speech and expression, freedom of movement, freedom to participate in the performance, freedom to engage in (or abstain from) society, freedom putatively attached to money, and so on. Purposefully situated within the protected frame of a performative event, the words address capitalism and liberation, and negotiate concepts of bodily freedom as well as boundaries and limitations to that freedom. Tellingly, an audience member reflected on her personal experience of the piece in a post-performance discussion: “As if we were almost scared to be free” (Saleh 2015c). In Free Advice, Saleh confronts us, individually and collectively, with the question of what we might refer to and experience as “being free.” She arranges

1

Saleh is a Palestinian dancer and choreographer. Born in 1985 in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, she moved with her family to Jordan in 1990 and then to Ramallah in 1996 after the Oslo Accords. During the Second Intifada in 2003, she left the Palestinian West Bank in order to finish her studies in linguistic and cultural mediation at the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. In 2009, she moved back to Ramallah and commutes between the West Bank and Europe (see Saleh, website).

2

Both the title of the performance Free Advice, as well as the cardboard sign, stage a play on words in Arabic, in which the meanings of “free” and “for free” intersect.

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situations where affective, felt, and sensory dimensions of freedom tentatively converge with more abstract ideas of human rights and citizenship, and questions how to aestheticize, choreograph, communicate, and claim freedom and solidarity by artistic means. In this second case study, I will examine what Free Advice conveys about the experiences of the border and of collectivity. A video documentation of the piece3 and the interview4 that I conducted with the artist are the main empirical documents for the analysis, supplemented by additional texts authored by Saleh and other writers. The data has been collected over a period of two years during which I was able to attend several live versions of the performance. Although this analysis takes one single performance of Free Advice as its starting point, I am highlighting a multiplicity of perspectives insofar as Saleh takes, to different degrees, the specificities of every environment into account when setting up the performance in space.5 Free Advice was researched and produced during two artist residencies in Ramallah and Vienna between 2013 and 2014.6 However, it is inspired by and processes a situation that Saleh encountered in March 2013 while walking in New York City. There, she observed a seemingly homeless man who had installed himself in the street and was holding a cardboard sign offering “Free

3

The present description and analysis of Free Advice is based on a video documentation (Saleh 2015) of the performance that took place on May 23, 2015, at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. The document was shot by the venue for archival purposes; it was neither edited nor published, but was made available for this research.

4

I interviewed Saleh on April 27, 2015, in Ramallah at the premises of the Goethe Institute in the Palestinian Territories. In what follows, all quotations of Saleh are from that interview, unless otherwise noted.

5

This concerns the way that the audience is guided through space during the performance, the curatorial framework within which Free Advice is embedded, and the setup of the piece’s dialogue. Furthermore, Saleh modifies the instructions given to the audience in reaction to the context. Hence, in personal conversations, she stresses the in-process character of the work and describes it as “ongoing.”

6

Saleh presented her work in 2013 at Tanzquartier Wien in Vienna during the threemonth artist-in-residence program KulturKontakt Austria, offered by the Federal Chancellery of Austria. She has been further supported in the creative process by Sareyyet Ramallah Cultural Center in Palestine. This production structure responded to a lack of funding for artistic processes in Palestine; however, according to the artist, the content of the work also drove this decision, as it deliberately extended the discussion that she sought to initiate into different cities and societies. Further research phases were undertaken in Providence, Rhode Island, and Budapest, Hungary.

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Advice.” Saleh reports in the interview that passersby occasionally stopped and talked to the man while she kept at a distance. She describes this unknown person as “out of the system, so really zero, zero possibilities,” and notes that his action left a strong impression on her. The primary impulse for Free Advice arose from the “absurdity of the situation” of someone with nothing offering something and opening up to responsibility, participation, and involvement in society—a situation in which the “madness we live in that becomes ordinary.” In conceptual terms, the everyday encounter on the street functions as a faits divers: a marginal, accidental detail specific only to an individual’s situation. Yet it raises important questions about the conditions of participation in society and the effects of increasing economization on that participation, factors that Saleh has taken as an impetus for the development of her piece. The process of creating Free Advice began in public, urban space. Dressed casually and equipped with a cardboard sign saying “Free Advice” in Arabic or English (depending on the cultural context), Saleh went to the streets of Ramallah, Palestine; Vienna; Austria; Budapest, Hungary; and Providence, Rhode Island. She stood in various squares or other central, vibrant, and densely populated areas. Occasionally, a cameraperson or photographer accompanied her at a close distance for the sake of documentation during the three to four hour sessions. In our interview, she explained that her aim during this phase was to initiate an exchange with people whom she encountered randomly. She first addressed the passersby through gestures, facial expressions, or her gaze. Once this initial contact was established, the interaction became verbal, and Saleh informed her interlocutors of the purpose of her presence in public space and the project more broadly, if asked. With reference to the Palestinian part of the research phase, she paraphrases the essence of this exchange: “I am open for any advice you need from me, and I want your advice also […] about how can art come back as before, really be a part of the Palestinian society.” In what follows, I will describe the overall development of the interactive performance with a focus on the dramaturgical design and strategies that Saleh deploys. Free Advice (2015) Dramaturgically speaking, Free Advice is structured in four intersecting sequences. At the beginning, audience members are gathered in the small foyer of Tanzquartier Wien, a presentation, production, and research space dedicated to contemporary dance and choreography. While the crowd of around forty people gradually enters, Saleh is already standing in the space, holding a cardboard sign on which “Free Advice” is handwritten in black, bold, and capital

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letters.7 While the audience assembles loosely around her in a semicircle, she engages in subtle movements, welcoming and addressing the public casually with direct yet patient looks. It is in this initial scene that she sets the attitude and the atmosphere for what follows: a playful but serious experience of curiosity and uneasiness that develop when the relationship between the performer and the public is not clearly defined. Gradually, she expands her gestures and the looks that she directs at individuals in scale and intensity, changing their orientation and direction.8 Throughout this entire first part, she plays with a cardboard sign, following its movements, materiality, and weight; balancing it, holding it above her body, throwing her body weight against it, experimenting with it as an extension of her extremities, pushing it away, and finally coming to a standstill. Fig.3: Free Advice (2015)

Copyright: Noémie Solomon

After about five minutes, the light in the studio is dimmed and a three-minute montage of images, scenes, and stills from her initial on-site research is projected onto the wall of the studio, showing individuals or small groups of people— male and female, different generations—approaching and talking to her. It is

7

At the beginning if the piece, a member of the production team of the venue raises his voice to announce that Free Advice is an “interactive performance,” but then asks the audience not to move around. This instruction is particular to the performance at Tanzquartier Wien and has not been repeated in subsequent presentations.

8

Choreographic work with the gaze plays an important role in Saleh’s other artistic projects, notably the video dance installations A Fidayee Son in Moscow (2014) and Cells of Illegal Education (2016).

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evident from the background environments that the scenes have been collected in different cities; yet, further explanations or concrete indications are not provided. In addition, the sound of the montage is so low that the verbal exchanges between Saleh and the people on the streets are barely audible. What these sequences do, however, is transfer the atmosphere of the encounters from the public to the performance space, consequently triggering imagination and speculation. With the video coming to an end, Saleh takes an audience member by the hand, a dramaturgical signal for the rest of the audience to migrate to a neighboring studio. As in the initial space, there is no seating or further stage equipment, thus maintaining the invitation to move around and assemble freely.9 In this second part, about ten minutes into the performance, Saleh performs a series of playful, energetic, expressive, palpating, twitchy, and rhythmical movements and gestures. Using, at some moments, compressed breathing or occasional utterances, she develops repetitive and eruptive movement patterns, playing with flows and breaks. The choreographic language evokes improvisational and somatic practices, interspersed with postures from classical dance (e.g., arabesques or relevés that she loosely quotes in her movements). Combining her own body language with elements from different dance styles (notably dabke), Saleh reworks the impulses from the research phase into interactive action, thereby traveling between a pedestrian10 and a more aestheticized movement vocabulary (such as pronounced jumps and gesturing). During this whole sequence, the cardboard sign transforms from an object into a kind of partner in the performance. She tears it into pieces that she distributes to some of the audience members. She uses additional props like cloth, fake jewelry, or two gymnastic balls to visually arrange scenes that remind the audience of family

9

Saleh recounts: “It’s what I call my dramaturgical line. The beginning, with the footage, it’s the introduction to the piece, the introduction to the idea. It’s like the starting, before I transfer the experience, the dialogues into the performative space, […] all the thoughts that I had even before going to the streets. It’s like ‘I really want to go, but I am afraid from going and from having this contact.’ Then I take you to the world […] where we can exchange dialogues.”

10 Starting with her dance piece Ordinary Madness (2013), Saleh describes her use of pedestrian movement as a way to “reach the people.” Even though she does not make this connection explicitly, this approach references a long tradition in contemporary dance exploring movement practices in public, quotidian spaces and environments, and questioning the status of trained, virtuous bodies in dance.

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photos, wedding proposals, or the spatial order of a demonstration.11 In summary, Saleh mingles with the audience members and arranges and disturbs existing constellations, redirecting them, for example, from a half-circle assembled around her to more dynamic formations in space. In my interpretation, this nonverbal dramaturgical strategy functions to instigate movement and to focus and disperse the public’s attention in order to encourage everyone to change roles and perspectives. Fig. 4: Free Advice (2015)

Copyright: Noémie Solomon

Some of the audience members actively participate in the actions that Saleh offers and take on her impulses. Others refuse to collaborate by avoiding her gaze, turning away, or reacting with irritation. After about half an hour, a recorded female voice delivers instructions variously based on the current performance, everyday items, and explicitly political contexts. Here, for the first time in Free Advice, there is an explicit reference to the Palestinian context, as the following transcription of the questions illustrates: “If you feel confused, please sit on the floor.” “Those who are wearing their favorite pants, please go to the center of the room.” “If you are wearing a pink scarf, please turn ten times.” “Those who are not happy with their jobs, choose a corner and stand there.”

11 For example, by introducing another cardboard sign that reads in red letters “Nothing is for…”, combined with a torn piece of the first cardboard, Saleh arranges two audience members in space to form the sentence “Nothing is for Free.”

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“Those who want to get married, or have children, but don’t have enough money, raise your left leg.” “If you support a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel, say ‘ah!’” “If you are afraid of neo-Nazis in Europe, please go stand next to the door.” “If you don’t like what’s going on around you, and you want to change the reality, but you don’t know how, please leave the room.” “If you don’t like what’s going on around you, and you want to change the reality, and you know how, please leave the room, too.” (Saleh 2015)

During this sequence, members of the audience react to the instructions, while others remain passive along with Saleh, who observes the situation while sitting on the studio floor. With the last instruction,12 everyone is asked, as earlier, via a similar physical gesture to move back into the space where the performance started. Here, in the third part of Free Advice, a video shot earlier in the evening is screened, showing Saleh and the audience members during the first part of the performance. Dramaturgically, this visual recording marks a cycle, as the same medium—video—is used both at the beginning and at the end of the interactive part of the performance. Moreover, this dramaturgical strategy establishes an associative connection between the audience members and the people on the street during the research phase. In my experience of the performance, the projection introduces an enjoyable but also slightly disturbing moment of self-reflection, as everyone is confronted with their experience as both a spectator of and a participant in the performance.13 The last part of the performance takes the form of a timed, twenty-minute dialogue between Saleh and the public where everyone is casually installed on the floor of the studio. After some introductory comments, she advances the exchange, asking the audience members for feedback, critique, and advice on the further development of the project and how “to have the piece grow,” as she puts

12 Saleh uses instructions as a dramaturgical element in other pieces, as well, e.g. in A Fidayee Son in Moscow (2014). She states: “For me, giving instructions is mainly a means for creating bodily and mental states in the viewer.” (quoted in Liosi 2016) 13 In the final sequence of the performance, audience member feedback on this scene and the surreptitiously recorded video differed considerably depending on the cultural context in which the work is presented. While several people in Providence expressed concerns about surveillance and about being watched, the audiences in Ramallah and Vienna reacted to the same situation with curiosity, indifference, or laughter.

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it. 14 In the version at Tanzquartier Wien, for instance, she explained that it is the atmospheres and exchanges from the streets that have inspired the creation of the material: discussions, for instance, on family structures, work-life balance, political concerns, gender issues, the idea of collectiveness, and the role and involvement of art in society. With a classical gesture, adopting the regular codes of theater and academic discussions alike, she closes the exchange with “Thank you very much for dancing, speaking, dialoguing,” to which the public reacts with applause.

4.1

BORDERS

The creation of Free Advice coincides with a moment in Saleh’s career marked by an insistent concern with her role as an artist and citizen, both in Palestine as well as other places in which she has lived: “I started thinking about me as a person, and who I am. So, I am an artist, and what’s my relation to society, and how can I occupy also an open space?” Correspondingly, Saleh expresses the desire to leave the closed space of the dance studio and reach beyond the elite audiences in cities such as Ramallah or Amman, to urgently open a discussion about social and political issues. It is a desire that runs through most of her projects and constitutes a driving force for her work on Free Advice, as well.15 It finds expression in the artist’s reflection on both the possibilities and limitations of participating in society, a dynamic that I will now explore.

14 As Saleh summarizes in different post-performance discussions, topics in Ramallah addressed early marriage; the political situation in Palestine; the one- and two-state solutions; inner divisions in society resulting from the occupation, from economic and political divisions, and from generational conflicts; the question of migrating; the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority; etc. In Vienna and Budapest, the predominant issues were related to work-life balance, money, and jobs. “Some advices were [bringing up the question] if we can start finding the playfulness of being together again, and a lot of people, when I asked how art can also be more integrated again, […] they were like: ‘maybe more funny’, a very simple and maybe very naïve thing, just a moment of lightness, when you breathe.” 15 Curator Nedjma Hadj-Benchelabi (2013, 33-35) develops the idea of urgency as a dramaturgical dimension in relation to the work of Egyptian theatre director Laila Soliman.

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Interacting: The Entanglement of Material and Immaterial Space Saleh signs Free Advice as a single-authored work; however, as the self-given label “interactive performance” suggests, collective experience plays a crucial role in both the creation and the implementation of the piece. It represents a key dramaturgical strategy that the artist deploys in different ways in order to instigate the collaboration between the audience members and herself as choreographer and performer. Throughout the performance, as the description at the beginning of this chapter shows, she devises different choreographic and text-based actions that encourage the people on the streets and subsequently the audience members to become actively involved in the performative situation. This includes encouragement to potentially change their positions and perspectives, both physically and figuratively. At some point, for example, she introduces two gymnastic balls into the space and invites the public to engage in an improvisational game with her and with each other as a group. At other moments, she turns to people individually or in smaller groups, trying to establish contact, ideally “almost one-to-one,” with the goal to “have a complicity,” as she puts it. As Free Advice evolves, the dialogue progresses and intensifies, and those involved alternate between spectating and collaborating with each other. As a result of this procedure, the urban space in which the research was implemented, the performance space in which the piece takes place, and the media space of the video recordings—the aesthetic and the everyday realms—are all negotiated during the performance. In the interview, Saleh distinguishes interaction from participation on the basis of the different levels to which agency and authority are distributed in the encounter between bodies and states: “To inter-act, this is between two things. Participation, it’s: ‘I ask you and you participate.’” Furthermore, she explains her intentions: “With this piece I mainly aim at tackling the social and political participation of artists and audiences. So, of course, gestures are involved, too, but people choose when and how to make them as the piece is about pushing individuals to make decisions and not to be passive in their society” (quoted in Liosi 2016). Thus, Saleh’s insistence on the collaborative character of the performance is a way to engage in a more general and critical debate on the premises of our living-together and as a statement against authoritarian or prescriptive positions. This parallels her work as an activist in Palestine, which I will discuss more in detail in the last part of this chapter. Accordingly, Saleh’s distinction between interaction and participation is relational and political at the same time. It evokes individuals’ actual and practical abilities to access and inhabit a given theatrical, urban, or public space; but

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furthermore, it reflects more broadly on the distribution of power that operates whenever the terms and rules of exchange are defined, whether in the theater or the everyday. It also concerns participants’ options and degrees of freedom to participation in the situation. Here, it is important to note that even though Saleh actively works towards a reconfiguration of individual and collective engagement in the performance, the impact of preexisting curatorial, economic, and social structures and codes that define every aesthetic space a priori cannot be ignored. Furthermore, the ways in which Saleh makes use of interaction do not (or do not merely) seek to establish complicity among all involved or to work towards a common goal or consensus. Rather than ignoring the moments of disruption and non-negotiability that come with the aesthetic experience of Free Advice, she purposefully creates and integrates them within the dramaturgical setup of the piece, making them an integral part of the experience of collectivity that she instigates. In my own experience as an audience member, the push towards decision making that accompanies the live sound instructions in the second half of the performance (for example) carries a sense of empowerment but also a sense of confusion and pressure to publicly take a position. What becomes tangible in this scene are individual and collective borders—the behavioral patterns, habits, codes, and values—that shape the relationships between people, particularly in moments of failing or unsuccessful communication between the performer and her audience.16 In dramaturgical terms, Free Advice might be interpreted as a blueprint of society—an artistic proposal that encourages reflection on what it takes to be and become part of a collective. Here, an image from my own experience comes to mind in which, at several points during the different versions of the performance that I attended, the audience informally assembled around Saleh in a semicircle, a spatial configuration that makes a loose yet highly symbolic reference to the idea and function of the Greek forum as a public, legal, and political space of negotiating contrasting ideas and opinions. Becoming Vulnerable Saleh asserts that Free Advice is “a physical experience to go through” not only for her audiences but also for herself. However, the awareness of bodily

16 Moments of failure occur when audience members refuse collaboration, reject eye contact, or do not comprehensively communicate or performatively follow instructions.

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existence that she points out in Free Advice, mediated by quotidian situations and problems, is not exclusive to the experience of the performance. Rather, when revisiting her research process in public space, she recalls nervousness and insecurity. Specifically, she mentions placing herself—her body—in al-Manarah Square in Ramallah to collect advice, explaining: “Normally girls are passing, passing by, they are not static in open spaces, […] whereas men are present in a more collective way. For me also on a personal level, occupying the street as a woman with this sign in the clock square, even if only for an hour—I felt grounded, like ‘I can do it.’ […] Usually the street is a passage for a woman, not a place where I can anchor, or sit. For me these moments when I go to the streets to move or dance or just to be there, on a personal level, socially and not politically speaking, it was something.” (2015c) Fig. 5: Free Advice (2015), field research in Ramallah

Copyright: Farah Saleh

This quote informs the experience of the border in several respects. It suggests that the artist’s individual experience of public space holds a collective dimension and, moreover, that it is clearly gendered. This becomes evident in the ways that bodies are expected to inhabit and to be present in public space: whereas men in Ramallah are mostly free to assemble, linger, and stay, women generally pass through the square. Against this backdrop, Saleh’s artistic decision to stand in the square during her research process can be interpreted as an artistic but also political decision—as an act of simultaneous fragility and empowerment that

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reveal and question how gender politics influence a person’s ability to partake in and move across the public sphere. Furthermore, standing, whether individually or as a group, is a well-tested means of exposing and criticizing normative orders and calls to mind activist strategies of blocking action, raising attention, or demarcating and reclaiming space (see Malzacher 2014, 145). Moreover, the decision to stand implicitly references a lineage of performance works that have explored the choreographic placement of bodies in public space as a strategy of claim-making.17 In the interview, Saleh further specifies how she related to eventual interlocutors during the research phase in public space: “There is an urgency to talk together. But it’s a decision to have me silent and listening, because I think it’s an invitation to talk more together.” (2015c) She describes her turning towards silence and listening as an attempt at “being alert” (2015c) that unfolds on different levels: listening to the comments and suggestions of people on the streets; listening to the audience’s reactions and their contributions to the discussion during the performance; but also, as she makes clear, listening to her own experience, needs, and boundaries. Thus, listening is not merely a refusal of verbal exchange; rather, it defines a communicative approach that privileges the sensorial, affective, embodied, and interpersonal through gaze, facial expression, gestures, and the open attitude that Saleh transmits through her body language. Listening, however, must not be conflated with passivity or with a lack of agency in a given context. Instead, it represents an active state of attentiveness, of encountering ‘the other’, and of enabling collective action. Furthermore, this approach facilitates reflection on the ways in which we come, and are, together. Alongside purposefulness and intentionality, it incorporates incidental, implicit, and indirect elements into the formation and experience of collectivity. In a post-performance discussion in Providence, audience member and visual artist Umberto Crenca brought up the connection among the aesthetic, the dramaturgical, and the ethical to the idea of listening. In relation to his own experience of Free Advice, he said:

17 Standing is connected to common strategies of resistance in direct and grassroots activism as well as in mass protests. Recent examples include Turkish dancer Erdem Günduz’s protest action in support of the Gezi Park occupation in front of Atatürk Cultural Centre in Istanbul, earning him the sobriquet “The Standing Man.” Historically speaking, choreographer Steve Paxton’s piece Magnesium (1972) can also be mentioned here (see Ertem 2013; Burt 2013).

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“I think the political component of the work might be the idea of vulnerability. When you are inviting somebody in, you are asking them to make themselves vulnerable. Much of your own presentation makes you vulnerable. Going out on the street and suggesting that you have advice. And in turn asking about advice is about vulnerability. And the extension of vulnerability to me is trust. To me, that’s the political statement: can we trust each other? You trust me that I am inviting you to something where you are not going to be harmed? Do you trust me enough to hear my advice? For me that’s the political comment there.” (quoted in Saleh 2015c)

The vulnerability that Crenca identifies creates an ambivalent dynamic of uneasiness, of being unable to read the situation, and of being asked to expose one’s position—moments that audience members as well as Saleh experience during the performance. Significantly, it is in this state of instability, in becoming vulnerable and allowing for trust, that he situates the political dimension of the work: the possibility of destabilizing one’s own assumptions and convictions in an encounter with others. Acts of Accessibility: Contemporaneity as Bordering Practice The question of borders and, more specifically, of symbolic, imaginary, and immaterial boundaries in Saleh’s work, is closely linked to the larger question of accessibility to art and culture. The creation and distribution process of Free Advice in the Palestinian context provides an analytical window into two specific kinds of border dynamics: the impact of contemporaneity in dance within the local artists’ community, and problems of acceptance and recognition of contemporary dance as a professional activity in Palestinian society. In the empirical material, the idea of contemporaneity in dance is contradictory: on the one hand, it provides an umbrella term that accommodates a wide range of bodies, forms of aesthetic expression, dance techniques, styles of collaborations, and other factors. On the other hand, it indicates the relevance and timeliness of an artwork, offering a label that is used in curatorial and institutional politics as well as in communication with audiences. The term’s openness (indeed, its vagueness) seems to make it particularly suited to different contexts and cultural environments. However, the canonical articulation of contemporaneity in dance also produces strong exclusions, particularly in the Palestinian context. This stems from the fact that predominantly Western cultures and experiences have influenced its development from the twentieth century onwards. Consequently, the initial epistemic imbalances, both conceptual and practical, embedded within contemporaneity in dance persist in the Middle Eastern dance-

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making context. This might explain the strong reactions from some Palestinian dancers and choreographers in different, mostly informal, conversations during my fieldwork, ranging from categorical rejection of the idea of contemporary dance as a reaffirmation of Western colonial and hegemonic structures to desires to align with what is considered an experimental and innovative lineage in dance history. Self-Descriptions Generally speaking, Palestinian artists and institutions often use the term “contemporary dance” to set themselves apart from “traditional,” “popular,” or “Oriental” forms of dance that are prevalent in the local context. What is significant, however, is that the demarcations indicated here are not geopolitical alone, as Saleh’s account shows. In the interview, she loosely summarizes informal discussions within the Palestinian dance scene that developed around the work by El Funoun Popular Dance Troupe,18 one of the most influential actors in performing and mediating dabke. From 2015 onwards, the al-Bireh-based group engaged in extensive archival and practical movement research both on-site and in direct exchange with dabke practitioners across different Palestinian cities and villages. They collected knowledge (oral histories, dance steps and variations, musical motifs, images, etc.) and memories about a dance culture that is primarily transmitted from bodies to bodies in direct exchange, i.e., by being performed in public settings or in the context of family celebrations. Consequently, they integrated selected findings from this research into their stage performances touring in Palestine and abroad in an effort to actualize and professionalize contemporaneity in their aesthetic approach. Significantly, the troupe has referred to their specific dabke style that emerged from this process as “contemporary Palestinian dance” in an effort to emphasize experimental and innovative developments in the field of Palestinian and Arab traditional and folk dance. The reactions from other dance practitioners to this discursive move were ambivalent. While some welcomed it as a much-needed recognition of dabke’s evolution and ongoing relevance as an art form, others fervently dismissed it as

18 El Funoun Popular Dance Troupe is a non-profit organization established in 1979. Their folklore and contemporary repertoire is mainly based on dabke—an ArabPalestinian traditional dance that exists in various forms (see El Funoun Popular Dance Troupe, website). Notably, most of the major companies and key figures in dabke have historically been or are part of political movements or parties; thus, aesthetics and politics are directly intertwined. For an in-depth discussion of the cultural history of dance in Palestine, see Rowe 2010.

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an attack on traditional Palestinian culture and memory. In my reading, this mirrors the ambivalent character of the idea of contemporaneity mentioned earlier. Yet, I argue that it is not just a dispute about aesthetics or about who holds authority and legitimacy over dabke’s interpretation; what is actually at stake is a negotiation of collective Palestinian identity and identification through dance. While this example illustrates bordering dynamics and inner divisions within the dance community in Palestine, Saleh mentions different limitations and restrictions that confront her when distributing and disseminating her pieces and artistic research in the Palestinian context. She emphasizes that making her work accessible and engaging in “a dialogue with a younger generation,” has been a core concern for her, going back to earlier projects such as Ordinary Madness (2013). In response, she has made active efforts to access schools and universities19 and thereby increase the circulation of her practice.20 Against this backdrop, Saleh explains: “There is a strong bond between my academic studies and my art practice because I’ve always attempted to mediate (socially and politically) between myself and the other, using the body as a tool.” (quoted in Liosi 2016). At the same time, she describes multiple problems that she faced in the process, such as concerns from school directors and institutional leaders that moral or religious values might be disrespected in contemporary dance performance or conflicts related to bureaucratic, organizational, or economic issues. Furthermore, she mentions receiving feedback that questioned the comprehensiveness and appropriateness of her work in a Palestinian context, and by extension, what is and should be part of Palestinian dance. She locates these processes of censorship, whether instigated externally or by the self, in the confluence of specific personal concerns with general conservatism in society, stating, “it’s really an obstacle to have accessibility.”21 The idea of contemporaneity in dance,

19 Saleh has worked as a teacher and educator with Sareyyet Ramallah Cultural Centre and as an adjunct lecturer at Brown University’s Departments of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Middle East Studies, among other institutions). Her engagement in educational concerns is also reflected in her BA thesis on the effects of music and art on children under military occupation. 20 Access to schools and universities in Palestine is complicated by the fragmentation of the educational system into public, private, and religious schools and the resulting proximity to political, ethnic, and religious institutions, parties, and contexts and their respective ideological environments and value systems. 21 Some Palestinian organizations, however, managed to access and reach out to schools and other educational environments through movement-related activities, notably the

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thus, beyond aesthetic and artistic concerns, conveys information about the basis on which society is regulated.

4.2

COLLECTIVITY

When asked in the interview to comment on what led her to embark on the development of Free Advice, Saleh identifies a need to learn “about the collective concerns of the people. Sometimes they think that those are individual, but what I found out from the research is that many people have the same concerns, ask for the same advice” (2015c). In connection to this, she shares a memory of her research phase in the streets in Providence in which she interacted with people in two adjacent areas of the city: a wealthy, highly-educated neighborhood close to the university campus and a downtown neighborhood marked by poverty and social tension. In both environments, her interlocutors introduced the problem of drug use into the discussion, but from very different perspectives. Whereas the former group explained drug use as a response to increasing pressure to perform in their jobs or educational programs, the latter related it to their exposure to escalating social tension, abuse, and illness. In Saleh’s reading, these distinct types of feedback exemplify how collective concerns are perceived in very individual ways, specific to one’s own context—a dynamic that prevents understanding and confounds efforts to address problems on a broader, intersectional scale (i.e., across economic, class-related, generational, and other divides). This raises questions on how the individual and the collective are co-constitutive and interdependent. I will discuss these questions along three axes: with respect to negotiations around Palestinian identity in the local dance scene and related practices of self-education; with regards to Saleh’s research on collective gestures; and by reflecting on the implementation of agonal dialogues as a distinct dramaturgical strategy in Free Advice. Acts of Translation: Recreating ‘Palestine’ in Dance One of Saleh’s main concerns, as I pointed out earlier, is the role and relevance of the artist and their work in today’s society. Alongside the actual impact of artistic work on the educational or societal realm, she reflects in the interview on how dancers, choreographers, pedagogues, and curators create or reject links to

Palestinian Circus School and the community dance project YANTE—Youth, Art & Levante.

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Palestinian culture and geopolitical history in their practices. More concretely, she redirects towards the ways in which Palestinian collective identity is imagined and constructed in the Palestinian dance scene though aesthetics, topics, or movement-practice. At this point, it is important to clarify that speaking of the Palestinian dance scene is a merely analytical construct; it does not suggest that individual agents and projects form a bound, homogeneous, and clearly identifiable community. Rather, this phrasing seeks to point out that there is a certain degree of connectivity and continuous commitment that links most agents in the field, despite the fact that the aesthetic and sociopolitical projects of the artists and institutions involved vary considerably and sometimes lead to internal divisions.22 The empirical data addresses the intersection of collective Palestinian identity with dance in two realms: first, the role of dance training and education in integrating the Palestinian context with one’s artistic activities; and second, the impact of external frameworks such as funding schemes and presentation patterns on creation and production processes. From Bodies to Bodies: On the Status of Locality in Palestinian Dance I have already outlined that, historically speaking, dabke represents a politically loaded form of dance that has long been an integral part of Palestinian popular resistance movements. Thus, as the political has been extended into the cultural realm (and vice versa), a collective body has not only been aestheticized, rehearsed, and preserved but also developed, debated, or rejected through bodybound and movement-centered practices. Individual expressions of movement have been intrinsically connected to the political collective—an effect that continues to influence creation and reception processes. Against this backdrop, Saleh reflects in the interview on her own experience of being part of the Palestinian dance community. Describing the different dance styles and teaching environments that have influenced her artistic development,23

22 The development and agency of the Palestinian dance scene, as well as its concrete conditions for producing, creating, and distributing work, cannot be discussed without taking into consideration different legal and political statuses and internal and external divisions that result from the on-going Israeli occupation (see Haddad King 2016). 23 During her youth, Saleh took several dance classes with El Funoun Popular Palestinian Dance Troupe and has been a member of the dabke and contemporary dance company at Sareyyet Ramallah. Both institutions tour and educate throughout Palestine, as well as internationally. In an interview, she states: “I tried dabke for a while, but I couldn’t relate to the staged form of it. […] And so, I concentrated more

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she states: “I am Palestinian and these are my movements, and these are my ideas, and it’s not European, it’s me. This is my street, and I want to be there”. I read in this quote a claim for presence, autonomy, and the independence from external, preexisting patterns, as well as a desire for her practice to react to the specificities of the Palestinian context. At the same time, it is critical to note that this alignment risks normativity, wherein artistic work is reduced to the geopolitical origins of an artist or essentialist ideas of culture—a mechanism that Saleh is well aware of. In order to clarify this grey zone between the wish for individual artistic freedom on the one hand and a collective, societal, or political engagement through arts on the other, she shares her personal experience of how practical and theoretical knowledge about dance has been acquired, passed on, and developed in the Palestinian dance scene. In summary, she depicts a process in which diverse techniques, movement practices, and body concepts have been fed into, reworked, and adapted by Palestinian dancers and choreographers. This can happen in two ways, either by (mostly) foreign guest teachers coming to Palestine to offer workshops or similar temporary formats of exchange and learning, or by Palestinians who went abroad for formal education, artistic residencies, or to live in exile and who subsequently brought their knowledge back into the local context. This process of intersecting acts of translation is, according to her, characterized by permeability on different levels: first, responsibilities are kept fluid insofar as individuals are assigned changing roles, such as student, teacher, performer, organizer, etc., depending on the context. Second, Saleh points out that materials “from outside” are often purposefully adapted to the local Palestinian context out of a need for “transmitting things to our own language;” a procedure that questions concepts such as originality and authorship in the arts, and that presents locality as an important element for the development of Palestinian dance today. She explains: “We started playing with the language when we did the choreographies. […] I don’t see it as the language of someone specific.” It is important to remember that these aesthetic and discursive acts of reappropriating and reframing knowledge about movement, whether across

on theatre and music (that I was already doing in Jordan) until the age of fourteen, until I found a ballet class at the Popular Arts Centre. When I turned sixteen I began contemporary dance with Nicholas Rowe in the same cultural centre and at Sareyyet Ramallah. […] The reason for this switch to contemporary dance had to do with the possibilities offered by this genre, to express my inner nature and thoughts with pedestrian and uncodified movements and forms, which weren’t conceivable with ballet and dabke.” (quoted in Liosi 2016)

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contexts or across bodies, also mirror the practical conditions of dance-making in the Palestinian context (e.g., the often-intermittent availability of dancers for training; the lack of space in which to train, rehearse, and perform; restrictions to mobility, etc.). At the same time, dance, I argue, becomes a field of practice and reflection in which ideas about Palestine and being Palestinian are not only represented, aestheticized, and discussed, but also experienced and brought about collectively. This process is characterized by the desire to thematically relate to local culture, the hope to transcend external representations of one’s identity, and the need to acknowledge the specific corporeal consequences that Palestinian realities introduce into the process.24 In the interview, Saleh illustrates this last point by referencing what she considers a tendency in Western contemporary dance to highlight the individuality of a specific dancer or choreographer working towards a recognizable, technically formed body. In relation to this, she comments on the Palestinian context: “You bring all the luggage you have, your gestures, and of course if we learn a phrase all together, then you have to learn the gesture of the other, but it’s not about lines […]. It’s good to have a technique, to go to the floor, and not to hurt your knee, but it’s not about having a school of a certain gestuality. […] I don’t think we need this either.”

The “we” that Saleh evokes in her statement can ultimately only stay unrealized when remembering the diversity of bodies accommodated by the idea of a Palestinian dance language. Furthermore, the dichotomy between Western and non-Western bodies does not exhaust the complex experiences of being-together that dance as a practice and as a concept provides.

24 Connecting to this idea, performance studies scholar Marc Boucai (2015) interprets Free Advice as an artistic proposal that is invested in countering and resisting “monolithic, non-varied, simplistic ideas and umbrella terms of identity,” of what he refers to as “this Arab body, this Arab performing body, this Arab body in public space.” (quoted in Boucai, Noeth, Saleh, and Solomon 2015) Notably, he mentions the interactive design of the performance and the change of spaces and perspectives as strategies that work toward the diversification and multiplication of voices and positions, ultimately allowing a break with normative codes.

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Dreams, with a Vision The operations of funding systems that support artistic creation, particularly in the Palestinian West Bank, offer another example of how Palestinian-ness is constructed in the arts. While these funding systems encompass a complex landscape of institutional and individual programs with distinct and intricate criteria and objectives, it is nevertheless true that funding is usually predicated on more or less explicit claims that artistic practice should contribute to a sense of collectivity in the Palestinian community and represent it to the outside world, despite internal and external divisions. This is especially true of the international NGO funding system that developed after the Second Intifada and, as Saleh mentions in the interview, framed artistic practice within peace-building activities. Despite their myriad preconditions, these mostly project-oriented funding programs represent important opportunities and openings for Palestinian artists that cannot easily be turned down. Yet, they force artists to balance their own artistic demands with practical and economic needs, as well as with an imperative to uphold the idea of a Palestinian collective identity. While these dynamics are not unique to Palestine, they operate in a context in which there is almost no alternative funding and still relatively little visibility for contemporary dance. The architect and researcher Yazid Anani points out how this structural mechanism is mirrored and amplified in the international arts market and its common representations of Palestine and Palestinian art. Citing the proliferation of international artists and curators coming to Palestine as an example of how the Palestinian case has gone global, he ponders: “Palestine has become a site for international curators and museums that are infatuated with ‘political tourism’ and all its visual symbols. The interest often results in solidarity visits to the West Bank, as Gaza is almost impossible to get in to. The segregation wall, the checkpoint, the victim Palestinian, the refugees, and the Israeli mighty militaristic machine become the only possible representations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. […] How can we meaningfully exhibit the intricacies and forgotten moments of artistic production and all of the different authors, frameworks, and bodies of knowledge that constitute it?” (quoted in Toukan 2014, 222)

Anani points to a high level of symbolism, repetitive imagery, and the seemingly unquestionable framing of artistic production from Palestine within the ArabIsraeli conflict that confront and contain artists. In a similar vein, Saleh is critical of being bound by expectations and obligations that label her work and practice as ‘Palestinian’. At the same time, she reflects on the potential benefits of working towards a set of artistic articulations that would be internationally recogniza-

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ble as Palestinian, and recounts discussions with her peers about the establishment and potential mission of a professional Palestinian national dance company. Notably, in the interview, she questions how to “convey a message about the Palestinian situation at the moment […] with a good artistic level,” and continues, “I don’t think a professional Palestinian company shouldn’t be touring […] and having a specific message in each performance. But it’s how you do it, why you do it. The biggest question always is the how.” This suggests that artistic work on collectivity risks being manipulated when compelled to be functional or purposeful. To this point, Saleh refers to the professional, state-funded yet independent Israeli Batsheva Dance Company Batsheva Dance Company, website). Batsheva, according to her, illustrates a widespread strategy in Israeli cultural politics whereby supporting the international exposure of Israeli artists or cultural projects in turn promotes a positive, liberal, and modern image of the state of Israel and Israeli society to the international community.25 From her perspective as a politically engaged Palestinian artist, she describes the strategic use of culture and the conflation of arts and politics as a forceful means of normalizing and whitewashing the occupation. Against this backdrop, she reflects hypothetically on the project of a professional Palestinian dance company, insisting that artistic concerns should stay at the core of such a collective endeavor:26 “I don’t think it’s bad that we should aim for a professional Palestinian contemporary dance company that tours, like, to do the propaganda, to do the job that Batsheva does for Israel. Like, it’s one of my dreams that we would have something like that, but with a vision.” I will turn to the conflation of arts and politics at the core of this dynamic later in this chapter and further explore the meaningfulness of aesthetics, imagination, and fiction for the experience of collectivity that these observations suggest. Collective Gestures In Free Advice, large parts of the movements, and the gestural material in particular, are developed through Saleh’s observations of the everyday, undertaken

25 In concrete terms, some of the measures supported by Israeli national cultural policy include funding and international touring activities, as well as the organization of large-scale showcases for dance and performing arts for international programmers and curators. 26 This discussion is closely linked to debates and practices of normalization— purposeful initiatives making use of culture, arts, and education with the aim of performing collaborativeness and equality between Israelis and Palestinians.

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during the creation phase of her piece. This approach is part of her broader research that revolves around the status of gestures in archives, as well as in individual and official forms of memory. In different projects, she explores the possibilities of relating to gestures as testimonies or evidence; using photographs, for example, she traces back gestures that have been suppressed from official records. Highlighting the connections among aesthetic representation, corporeality, and political agency, she investigates how rendering certain gestures invisible or taking them away from certain bodies (or, conversely, foregrounding them) influences how collective identity and agency are performed on a political level. In this sense, she speaks about gestures “as tools and sites of power and sovereignty” and “traces of resistance” (quoted in Azoulay, Saleh, Schneider, and Zaides 2016) and dissent. Consequently, Saleh holds that unearthing and reassessing hidden or forgotten Palestinian gestures in her combined choreographic and archival research can shed light on how politics, and the Israeli occupation in particular, function by “inviting another body into the scene” (quoted in Azoulay, Saleh, Schneider, and Zaides 2016). By reappropriating and redistributing her own and others’ collected gestures through interaction with audience members in Free Advice, Saleh emphasizes the performativity of collective gestures; namely, that gestures are always situated and authenticated by others. This dramaturgical strategy suggests that gestures are always incomplete and unfinished. As such, her research, while departing from Palestinian gestures, does not come with an inherently nationalistic approach. Rather, she has extended her long-term explorations of this matter to other communities and contexts, in which she choreographically examines the constructed nature of collective identity on a bodily level and seeks connections across different times and spaces. To give an example, she relies on interactive settings that encourage audiences to share, physically experiment, and experience certain gestures with their own bodies and in their own imaginations.27 With respect to Free Advice, Saleh holds: “In the live performance, when everyone reacts physically, I feel that I am able to convey my archive to their bodies and that they can absorb it through repeating and appropriating the gestures.”

27 See the video dance installation Cells of Illegal Education (2016) that revisits gestures of civil disobedience carried out during the First Intifada in occupied Palestine. The installation reenacts, transforms, and deforms gestures exercised by Birzeit University students between 1988 and 1992 while trying to continue their education process at a time when schools and universities were closed by Israeli military rule and students and teachers who refused to abide were labeled “Cells of Illegal Education” (see Farah Saleh, website).

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(quoted in Liosi 2016, 6) In the audience’s aesthetic experience of her artwork, this approach imbues certain gestures with a sense of imitative familiarity and recognition while others feel unfamiliar or even imposed. What becomes clear on a sensorial and corporeal level is that gestures are not simply neutral or formal, but rather are loaded with intentionality, emotion, and meaning, and are framed by stereotypes. In my interpretation, by dramaturgically working with intersecting individual and collective dimensions of gestures, Saleh thereby counters essentialist correlations between certain body or movement features and specific communities in favor of a more differentiated and complex understanding of collective identity that includes brittleness, contingency, and performativity—“bordering and un-bordering processes” (2016)—in its very definition. In line with this, philosopher and visual arts scholar Ariella Azoulay (2016) expands on the polymorphic character of gestures in her discussion of Saleh’s work: “A gesture is not immune from being reiterated by others whose intentions are opposite, antithetical, irreconcilable. […] A single gesture is always necessarily preceded and followed by other gestures. When a gesture is captured framed, frozen, showcased, it is its delineation, which renders it recognizable and more: ready to be reiterated. Gestures continue to live in one’s body or the body of another through reiteration. This afterlife in the body of another is the archival modality of gestures. Gestures procreate through being archived in another’s body, they form a cause, they state, claim, inspire, resist.” (Azoulay 2016b)

The assumption that gestures are embodied—that they travel between bodies and are eventually appropriated by other bodies—gains specific significance when placed in the Palestinian/Israeli context, where strong, binary narratives and representations of collective identity are prevalent. Instead, acknowledging with Azoulay that gestures are lived, incorporated, performed, choreographed, trained, transferred—that they migrate between bodies—suggests that no collective can claim them exclusively.28 In other words, the porosity and permeability of collective gestures destabilizes hard distinctions between different collectives, as well as between the collective and the individual. Against this backdrop, Saleh’s recurrent decision to describe certain gestures specifically as Palestinian needs clarification. In reaction to an audience member questioning the national-

28 See Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini (2015), who discuss how gestures have been used as means of domination in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and, in the process, have been strategically and ideologically appropriated and dis-appropriated.

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istic implications that this formulation might evoke, she comments in a postperformance discussion: “I think of course we can have a collective gestural identity, once we have equal rights. These gestures can be performed all around the world. I labeled them as ‘Palestinian’ because they took part in the Palestinian stories that I am interested to bring to the surface. As soon as these stories are visible and also Palestinians obtain their freedom, then we can drop that label, it’s just a matter of why I am using that label, they are not exclusive Palestinian gestures and movements.” (2016)

In this quote, Saleh’s personal political stance and its corresponding normative and ideological frameworks become obvious and are essential to any interpretation of her work. In my reading, however, her artistic research on collective gestures represents a way to artistically and politically intervene in everyday life and to challenge how political structures and information consolidate the idea of sovereignty on a corporeal level. Talking Back: Agonal Dialogues From a dramaturgical perspective, Free Advice is built as a series of dialogues; it is built as a dialogue. This is mirrored, for example, in the circular composition of the performance, which begins with a video of encounters that happened in the streets and ends with an exchange between the audience and the artist. The impulses from these interactions, in turn, are later digested and reworked by Saleh and eventually incorporated into the further development of the piece; they function, she explains, “as a continuation of the performance.” Taking on the idea of dialogue, Saleh underlines, in my view, the importance of establishing the ability for all involved to talk back during the performance: to collaborate or reject interaction, or to communicate by bodily means, movement, or language. This dramaturgical strategy of questioning authority—here, the authority of the choreographer, specifically—ultimately does not prevent normative dynamics from operating completely. For instance, different codes and power positions initially demarcate the role of the audience from the role of the artist. Yet, in the Palestinian/Israeli context, this strategy takes on a further significance. After the Second Intifada in particular, dialogue has been explicitly promoted by the international community and Palestinian authorities alike as one of the key tools for operationalizing peace negotiations among Israel, Palestine, and the international community in the fields of policy-making, diplomacy, strategic planning, and art and culture. Yet, with the increasing stagnation of the Oslo peace process, the

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potential and promise of dialogue seem to have become, from a Palestinian perspective, more a strategy of pacification than a strategy for future empowerment.29 Against this backdrop, I interpret Saleh’s creation of opportunities to talk back in Free Advice as a dramaturgical strategy that encourages audiences to react on the propositions, thoughts, and movements with which the piece confronts them and as a way to create a collective space for controversy and discussion—a space, as I frame it, for an agonal dialogue. Qualifying the encounters that happen during the performance as agonal aims to highlight contradictions, tensions, and asymmetrical positions as an integral part of collective experience that cannot be separated from parallel acts of consensus, similarity, or accord. In line with this, Saleh mentions in the interview that much of the advice she received from passersby during the research phase for the piece was contradictory and contained double standards, rather than communicating clear and wellreflected positions (see 2015a). These inconsistencies are introduced towards the end of the interactive performance through a set of voice-over commands, instructions, and orders asking the audience to enact simple movements and tasks, the contents of which the audience may reject or agree with. Significantly, these moments of individual exposure and decision making are public: they take place amidst the other audience members and the performer. In my own experience as an audience participant in Free Advice, however, it is not primarily the potential of being judged by fellow audience members or by Saleh that causes uneasiness, nor the fact that the instructions are based on necessarily generalizing preassumptions that preclude differentiation in the moment. Rather, the disquietude that one might experience comes from a tension between being addressed as an individual, ready (or not) to stand up and express their thoughts, and, at the same time, being represented as part of a political, a gendered, a national, or some other collective. Most significantly, Free Advice deprives all involved from adopting a safe position or collectively agreeing on quick solutions, while it performatively maintains an invitation to communicate and, potentially, to act.

29 The problem of dialogue is at the center of ongoing discussions on the issue of normalization that impact both artistic and academic practices in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Ghassan Hage’s response (2016) to an invitation for a keynote lecture at the Anthropological Association of Israel exemplifies the debate and its key arguments, as well as the boundaries inherent within it.

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4.3

COMING CLOSER: REAL AND IMAGINED MOVEMENTS OF RESISTANCE

The proximity between art and activism—namely, the question of how to combine the closeness of the dance studio with a direct exchange with people— runs through most of Saleh’s work and through Free Advice, in particular. Accordingly, she references Palestine and the political dimension of her work very clearly in the communication that accompanies her artwork (e.g., program leaflets, biographies, provided historical-political contexts, artist’s discussions, etc.). A key example of this is her general support of the BDS movement30 and the cultural boycott against the state of Israel: notably, the rejection of any collaboration with Israeli government-funded institutions or artists. Despite defending the categorical stance of the BDS movement, she differentiates between her individual actions and collective state politics: “I personally also know Israeli artists who are personally anti-Zionist, and they take responsibility to handle the situation, so they acknowledge that they have already many more rights than the Palestinians, and agree with the [Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural] Boycott. I feel at this moment, it’s a means to push on the ground. And I don’t represent the people, it’s my personal stake. […] It’s a very sensitive topic, because it can be used.” (2015a)

30 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a “Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity” (BDS, website). As a globally acting initiative, BDS intervenes in the spheres of art, culture, and academia. According to their own description, they are invested in creating awareness of Israeli settlement politics and the occupation of the Palestinian territories. At the core of the resistance project is the rejection of any form of collaboration with Israeli state-funded individuals or institutions, except those who adopt an outspoken anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian position. Their goal is to expose Israel’s politics of self-presentation as an open and liberal society by relying on cultural means and symbolic values. The Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel that Saleh refers to is a part of the BDSmovement. I do not aim to present the debate on the BDS-movement in its necessary complexity here but will limit myself to pointing out that the movement serves as an example in which collaboration and exchange are defined on the basis of an a priori, nonnegotiable distinction between the Palestinian and Israeli communities and their respective allies.

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With regards to the problem of collectivity, it is interesting to note that the BDS movement finds inspiration in different globally acting resistance movements such as the South African anti-Apartheid struggle, an alignment that has at the same time been critiqued by some BDS supporters who have argued that it risks obscuring the specificity of the Palestinian case and its specific claims. In a similar effort to critically evaluate the potential but also the limitations that the argument of collective identity holds in this context, journalist Nathan Thrall (2018) points to the diverse political, religious, and secular divisions and distinctions that BDS action and corresponding debate bring to the fore in both Arab as well as Jewish society. In her artistic practice, Saleh establishes a general sense of proximity between artistic and activist practices that shapes their respective capacities to directly intervene in and come closer to society. At the same time, she equally evokes the boundaries of both realms of activity: notably, the risk that her artistic work might be overshadowed by an external cause. This tension is at the core of the cultural history of civil agency in Palestine, as well as its historical and current popular disobedience and resistance movements. More concretely, Saleh suggests that the experience and concept of collectivity in Palestinian society are interdependent and condition how agency in arts is conceptualized and brought about in practice. She remembers one interlocutor during her field research for Free Advice in Ramallah who suggested that artists should be part of “the real movement, not only do things about,” recalling: “In the 60s and 70s really all the Palestinian artists from that time were part the PLO, or part of the struggle, they were in it, in the movement itself, even their artistic products were integrated in the society in the same manner. Now it’s not happening any more, and that was my question, that was my research.”

Referencing prominent Palestinian figures like poet Mahmoud Darwish, caricaturist Naji al-Ali, painter Suliman Mansour, and the Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company, she describes how artists during this period produced texts or posters for propaganda purposes, integrated political content such as the right to return, internal divisions in Palestinian society, and the war on Gaza into their work, and thus directly contributed to the political movements at stake. In this sense, art and culture provided forceful tools to shape Palestinian collective consciousness and distribute it around the world. According to her, from the 1990s onwards, with the outbreak of the First Intifada and the subsequent peace negotiations, this relationship shifts to what she describes in the interview as the tiredness of a whole generation. In short, the idea of collectivity increasingly lost

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its relevance as a framework for artistic action. As the ability to unite and weave people together became primarily rhetorical, collectivity came up for renegotiation. Significantly, she interprets this as a process of increasing individualization and personalization within Palestinian society spilling over into the artistic field. In the interview, Saleh refers to a rhetoric of a “free Palestine” that was increasingly fostered with the start of the Oslo peace process and that influenced artistic practice, as well—a feeling that “we can finally talk about our individual stuff, or maybe talk about the Palestinian society, but talk about it, not be part of it.” To talk about but not be part of it: the movement of drifting from collective to individual concerns that Saleh observes here is also evident both on the organizational level of effectively implementing collective action as well as in the affective and emotional terms of feeling disconnected from the Palestinian cause or from one’s own community. It is only with the Second Intifada that Saleh observes within Palestinian art-making a tendency towards breaking with disillusionment and deception, and returning to more social, political, and economic issues. In relation to this period, she summarizes: “But then there was the Second Intifada, which was a hit on the face to everyone, there was no peace, there was no individual, there was no collectivity, there was nothing. […] Negotiations didn’t work out, art struggle didn’t work out, so let’s try another strategy and work on individuals by strengthening them as individuals, because we cannot do a collective thing again if we don’t have strong basis with the people. That’s the shift, so I think it was a new start.”

As mentioned earlier, this shift, which, according to Saleh, was a “directed choice for many”, corresponded to changes in the practical conditions of art production, notably the gradual internationalization of the Palestinian struggle and the growth of an NGO-based funding system that started promoting arts and culture rather than political parties or action. Against this backdrop, individual artistic projects that incorporated the processing of personal concerns were encouraged, a circumstance that is, I argue, meaningful inasmuch as it identified the individual as the starting point for collective action, not the collective itself. The interview does not explicitly discuss how and to what degree the artistic practices, strategies, means, and aesthetics of dancers and choreographers changed in the process. Yet, more generally, Saleh states: “From there I feel everyone had a project, a program, a vision, but somehow the vision became less and less about really the Palestinian reality, and the Palestinian project, and it became about becoming professional in this and that.” This process of professionalization and internationalization affected the Palestinian dance scene’s

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artists, organizers, and audiences alike. Saleh explains that, in the process, audiences became more elective and elitist and that accessibility to the arts grew more and more restricted. Moreover, she detects a kind of self-indulgence that developed within the arts scene and ponders her own involvement and the role of civil responsibility in artistic practice: “For whom do we do this? For the same people with who we have the same points of view?” She continues later in the interview: “We shouldn’t be a political party, but we should be aware of who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it.”31 In reaction to this, Saleh makes a concrete proposal for how to reestablish the relationship between art and politics, insisting that dealing with the pressing challenges of the current time can only happen as a collective project which, at its outset, must be imagined on a broader scale beyond the specificity of the Palestinian context. Thus, she deems it necessary to develop a collective sense of solidarity and justice that connects different realities and political struggles and operates on a global level, stating that “it’s all the injustice in all countries that brings us together.” In conclusion, Free Advice provides an example in which the artist transfers the problem of political and social agency into the microcosm of a performance, thus interactively experimenting with the social and political force of collectivity in the aesthetic and corporeal realm. In the process, that agency is not only directed against something or someone; rather, by dramaturgically validating movement, gestures, and encounters between bodies, the aesthetic experiences that Saleh provides redirect the question of agency to one’s own involvement and participation in the performance of reality and to our complicity and participation in normalizing borders and violence. By engaging audiences actively in Free Advice, Saleh is thus invested in different outputs from the same environment and situation—making and keeping things plural and in tension.

31 It is interesting to note that in the interview sequences that discuss the changing relationship between artists and the Palestinian cause over time, Saleh flips between description and self-description, simultaneously using “them” and “us” to mark her involvement in or to critique the developments under discussion.

Chapter 5 Artistic Case Study Dictaphone Group: Nothing to Declare (2013)

People began to call us border crossers. In reality, we felt trapped in between an Occupied Palestine, the brutality in Syria, and a privatized seashore. Border crossing became our theatrical act, but sometimes our suicidal act. We learned that we cannot just appear on borders and hope for the best. The mere appearance on some borders may result in detention, disappearance, or death. […] Each border demands from us a specific performance. Passing through open stretches of no-man’s-land gave us enough time to rehearse our lines, and revisit our appearance. We will have to perform our identity, accents, papers, passports, purposes, class, gender, voices, and attitudes. Dictaphone Group, 2014.

The practice of border crossing has been a defining element in several of Dictaphone Group’s projects since live artist Tania El Khoury and architect and urban planner Abir Saksouk co-founded the collective in 2009.1 Like most of

1

El Khoury is a live artist based in Beirut; she holds a Ph.D. from Royal Holloway College, London, and a Masters in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London (Tania El Khoury, website). Saksouk graduated as an architect from the American University of Beirut and holds a Masters in Urban Development Planning from University College London. She is a cofounder of Public Works Studio (Public

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Dictaphone Group’s works, Nothing to Declare was created with the support of international art residencies and in collaboration with an informal local network of temporary collaborators in Lebanon. However, with this project, El Khoury and Saksouk open up their collaborative structure by integrating artist Petra Serhal2 in a different capacity in the process of making and performing the work: “In this project, we have kind of blurred the lines between researcher, performer, and producer. We were all doing everything together, and just at different points in the project, one was taking more the lead in one discipline more than the other, but we were doing the work collectively. It was an experiment. Because the whole idea is to have these two mediums together that normally don’t collaborate: research on space, urban research, and live arts.”3

In their projects, Dictaphone Group addresses various historical and contemporary borders that range from natural borders to national frontiers, boundaries related to social and ethnic communities, and normative orders unfolding alongside divisions of gender, class, and generation. In many of the collective’s projects, place is a starting point for understanding how a society functions on both individual and collective levels. They state: “The idea of place and how it’s written and rewritten and experienced and researched is the common theme in all the productions we do and in all our approaches.” In line with this, Nothing to Declare deals with Lebanon’s dysfunctional national railway system, both historically and currently. The piece was first created in 2013.4

Works Studio, website) in Beirut. See the following projects for Dictaphone Group’s long-term research on borders: Bil Téléferique (2010), a site-specific performance inside the Jounieh cable car; Bus Cemetery (2011), a sound installation performance inviting audiences to an unused bus from the 1990s to reflect on public transportation service in the Lebanese pre-war period; This Sea Is Mine (2012), a site-specific performance that transported the audience in local fishing boats alongside the Beirut seashore to reflect its ongoing privatization (Dictaphone Group, website). 2

Serhal is a performance artist based in Beirut. She holds a Masters in Body in Performance from TrinityLaban, London. She has collaborated with Dictaphone Group as a performer and producer; in Nothing to Declare she coauthored the writing, research, production, and performance of the piece.

3

The interview with El Khoury and Saksouk was conducted via Skype on March 21,

4

The lecture-performance Nothing to Declare was created in 2013 after an onsite

2015. In this chapter, quotations are taken from this interview, unless otherwise noted. research period in Lebanon and an artist residency at Watermill Center, N.Y., in

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Accordingly, the lecture-performance departs from three distinct journeys simultaneously taken by the artists. The trips all started at Mar Mikhael, a derelict former train station in Beirut that currently houses the headquarters of the Office des Chemins de Fer et des Transports en Commun,5 “the privatepublic rail authority that still oversees Lebanon’s ghost train network” (Baaklini 2013). From there, each of the three performers travelled alongside derelict railway tracks in the direction of the areas in which they each grew up, with the goal of coming as close as possible to the Lebanese national border. Serhal went on the eastern track which passed through Beirut’s Forn El Chebbak and Jamhour before arriving at Riyaq in the Beqaa Valley, in the direction of Damascus; Saksouk headed south, arriving at Naquora which is near the UN-guarded border between Lebanon and Palestine/Israel; and El Khoury followed the northbound track through Jounieh, Jbeil, Batroun, Tripoli, and Aabboudiye up to the border with Syria, where her family village is located. While on their separate journeys, they stayed in close contact, maintaining an ongoing exchange throughout their trips. Commenting on the biographical and personal dimension of this approach, the artists explain their intention to “return to the roots, return to the area that we know very well, but seeing it from the point of view of the railway.” Most of Dictaphone Group’s works are site specific and based on research developed in urban space, or, more specifically, on issues related to public transport, taking place in cable cars, unused buses, or fishing boats. Nothing to Declare represents an exception insofar as it is the collective’s first non-site-

collaboration with ArteEast. The project was presented as a lecture-performance at Watermill Centre; George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.; Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, Austria; Fusebox Festival, Austin, Texas; Forest Fringe, Edinburgh, U.K.; and Mucem, Marseille, France. It was also presented as a video installation (2014) during HomeWorks at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Saatchi Gallery, London; Station Beirut, Beirut; and Kennedy Museum, Athens, Ohio. Nothing to Declare was supported by a production grant from AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture). In all versions, the basic structure of the lecture-performance stayed the same but some elements were tailored, adapted, and reworked in reaction to the respective presentation environments. El Khoury (2017) summarizes the overall development of the pieces as becoming more intimate, approaching audiences in a more direct and less theatrical and choreographed way. 5

The Office des Chemins de Fer et des Transports en Commun is the government authority that operates public transportation in Lebanon and owns the country’s national railway infrastructure that remains out of service due to severe damage during the Lebanese Civil War.

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specific initiative. This decision stems from practical concerns related to security conditions that the artists encountered during the research process, as well as the general inaccessibility of Lebanon’s national borders. It was further motivated by reflections on the artists’ responsibility towards their audiences, acknowledging the actual danger of the direct experience of the border as well as ethical questions related to the status of its aesthetic representation. El Khoury (El Khoury and Nield, 2016) wonders: “To put yourself in danger? For what is it? For the film, to prove something to yourself, or to discuss it later?” While creating the piece, these questions about the purpose and objectives of Nothing to Declare translated into a process of continuous negotiation that El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal undertook both individually and as a group—a process that considered practical circumstances, artistic needs, and ethical concerns. From a different angle, the choice of format for the lecture-performance mirrors a broader tendency in contemporary Lebanese art. Although Dictaphone Group does not reference this explicitly, in particular from the 1990s onwards, a number of Lebanese artists have been exploring the potential of documentation, archival work, fiction, and imagination through lecture-performance, combining artistic and academic strategies of accessing and transferring knowledge.6 Nothing to Declare exists as different material outputs and formats. This change in media reflects the artists’ general wish to share the work with a wider audience. Consequently, and in line with the research design of this study, the empirical data is composed of a mixed-media sample. My subsequent analysis, however, refers to the version of the project that was presented at Tanzquartier Wien. This primary source is an unedited and unpublished recording of a presentation of the live work which I personally assisted with.7 Furthermore, a

6

For different forms and concepts of lecture-performances, see the work of Lebanese artists Rabih Mroué, Lina Majdalanie, Walid Raad in collaboration with Jalal Toufic, Joanna Khalidthomas and Khalid Joreigne, Mounira Al-Solh, and Akram Zaatari, among others. For a discussion of the format of the lecture-performance and its epistemological implications, see Peters 2011; Rainer 2017.

7

The video recorded version of Nothing to Declare that I am referring to in the following analysis dates from June 21, 2013. It was presented in English language at Tanzquartier Wien in the framework of the program SCORES°7: intact bodies, an artistic-theoretical project on the integrity of the body that I also curated. It is shot from a single camera angle for archival purposes and is neither edited nor published. Due to a technical problem that occurred during the recording of the lectureperformance, the first five minutes of the work are missing from the video document

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comprehensive booklet entitled Nothing to Declare: Train Narratives was edited by Dictaphone Group in Arabic and English in 2014, documenting the research process that led up to the lecture-performance and was distributed to audiences during presentations and made available online for download.8 In addition, a semistructured interview via Skype with the two founding members of the collective, El Khoury and Saksouk, reviews and articles referencing Dictaphone Group’s work, and texts and talks authored by the artists complete the corpus of empirical materials. Nothing to Declare (2013) The lecture-performance opens with a video sequence screened on the back wall of Tanzquartier Wien’s studio space. The space is arranged with the audience on platforms facing the stage, eliciting associations with both classical theater as well as academic panel discussions. Three chairs, three paper notebooks, and three white table lamps are prepared upstage on a long table. The introductory video sequence depicts El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal standing in a choreographed triangular arrangement in the middle of a busy street in Beirut, facing each other, caught in conversation, and surrounded by cars and heavy traffic, as is typical for the city’s center. A railroad bridge tagged with Armenian graffiti can be seen in the background while a female voiceover comments on the creation and research process of Nothing to Declare and the origins of the sources and materials that the audience will encounter. Notably, it states Dictaphone Group’s ambition to participate, through the lecture-performance, in a wider political and symbolic discussion on borders within Lebanon and the broader Arab region. It notes, for historical context, that the Lebanese national railway has gradually ceased to function. Towards the end of this first media sequence, the three performers physically enter the stage from behind the screen, barefoot

and will be reconstructed in the following description of the piece on the basis on my notes taken from the live experience and double-checked with the artists for accuracy. 8

The booklet combines text authored by the three members of Dictaphone Group (notably, a “declaration” as well as an account of the geneses of Nothing to Declare) with edited excerpts of oral histories collected during the research and production period. It is organized into three chapters that correspond to the individual journeys of the artists to Riyaq, Sayda, and Tripoli. As the booklet was published in 2014 only, it was not yet distributed during the lecture-performance at Tanzquartier Wien that I am referencing in my analysis.

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and wearing identical white dresses (unlike in the filmed footage, in which they carry casual, colored clothing). Fig. 6: Nothing to Declare (2013)

Copyright: Dictaphone Group

El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal sit down on the chairs and unfold three scrolls of semitransparent paper that spill over the table’s surface and onto the floor, where they unfurl toward the audience. The papers show three identical base maps of the national Lebanese railway system. Throughout the lectureperformance, the artists will refer to, manipulate, and use them repeatedly; annotating the maps, marking out different trajectories and defunct stations, and gradually filling in inked pathways. The maps help the audience to roughly visualize the artists’ trips and imaginatively follow the accounts of their journeys. Against this backdrop, the main responsive structure of the lectureperformance unfolds: taking turns throughout the piece, all three performers share with the audience personal testimonies, family memories, excerpts from historical documents, handwritten notes, and oral statements that they collected during their journeys. This triggers a process in which the text of the live performance alternates with pre-recorded audio statements and the screening of edited parts of the filmed material, putting different kinds of information into conversation. This compositional strategy of mounting and recalling vignettes and snippets of accounts from various media and voices offers a multilayered report on the Lebanese railway and its borders. It performatively constructs a nonlinear and fragmented representation of the railway’s history by relying on everyday and personal scenes and stories. During the lecture-performance, the

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dramaturgical effect of introducing multiple and simultaneous perspectives is strengthened by small actions, quotidian movements, and gestures that the artists perform on stage, changing and rearranging positions, both in terms of space as well as contents, so that the specificity of their experiences gradually becomes visible. Fig. 7: Nothing to Declare (2013)

Copyright: Dictaphone Group

The artists’ movement sequences and choreographic arrangements in Nothing to Declare are, from a technical standpoint, relatively simple. However, they produce strong aesthetic effects and a sense of theatricality through their deployment of props and costumes. The changing use of light during the lectureperformance exemplifies this dramaturgical strategy: initially, the stage setup is decidedly low-tech and the light design mainly functions to establish, in a quite conventional sense, a basic concentration and shared attention on the stage. Yet, gradual changes in the intensity, focus, and warmth of the light—operated by a technician and supported by the performers’ direct use of the table lamps on stage—create fluctuating ambiance and opening up the theater space to associations with a public forum, a tribunal, a court, a political gathering, or a casual get-together. Towards the end of Nothing to Declare, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal stand next to each other facing the projection screen and loosely imitating the triptych arrangement of their bodies on the video that began the lectureperformance. The edited scenes that are subsequently displayed during this sequence are derived from footage that the artists shot during their journeys. The

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performers’ bodies blend in and intersect with their mediatized alter egos; their wide gazes, as we learn from the voice-over, are directed towards the real and projected national borders of Lebanon that they travelled to but were ultimately unable to cross. This scene exemplifies a recurrent dramaturgical strategy in Nothing to Declare—the entanglement and intersection of theatrical, media, and public space. As the performers leave the stage, three audience members equipped with letters and instructions that they were given prior to the performance take a seat at the table. They switch on the table lamps in front of them and, one after another, start reading personal statements and memories collected from three Syrians crossing the border. This explicit incorporation of the public represents, in my reading, a gesture of handing over the history of the railway and delegating the narration of Lebanon’s border to the collective of the audience, thus questioning who holds authority over memory and experience.9

5.1

BORDERS In Lebanon, as elsewhere, misery is most visible in the peripheries, and control is most apparent on the margins. We encounter borders every day, both national and internal. They are specific sites for the exercise of violence and the manifestation of oppression. As one person put it, borders are a tremendous opportunity to make people suffer. Dictaphone Group 2014a, 4.

The title Nothing to Declare alludes to internationalized customs regimes, calling forth associations to airports and transit zones where the crossing of sovereign borders is regulated. However, the title, decontextualized and abstracted from any direct and concrete situation, opens up a more general level of reflection when placed in the Middle Eastern context. Here, Nothing to Declare might be read as a comment on the border politics and practices that have been implemented in the region during and after the Arab uprisings from 2010 onwards—orders, measures, and regulations that, in the aggregate, aim to restrict

9

This last sequence of Nothing to Declare is specific to the presentation at Tanzquartier Wien; in later versions of the lecture-performance, Dictaphone Group stopped inviting audience members on stage to read border-crossing testimonies.

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the mobility of Arab citizens on an international level as well as between ostensibly fraternal and neighboring Arab states. In their booklet, the artists state: “The Arab uprisings gave us hope as we found ourselves caught up in networks of solidarity and knowledge. But those were complicated by border regimes between Arab states that dictate which of us can travel and where we can travel to. These borders were drawn, constructed, militarized, and policed with no consideration for the majority of inhabitants of the new states.” (2014a, 4)

The contradiction is obvious: whereas the idea of border crossing was a driving force in the physical and digital mass mobilizations during the uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Tunisia, the reality looks different in their aftermath. In retrospect, mobility continues to be a privilege for most Arab citizens. Thus, the collective claim to freedom of movement that arose in the Arab region has ultimately produced its opposite: the increasingly tightened border controls, newly installed or reinforced visa politics, deportations, and denials of entry that the artists evoke in Nothing to Declare. Ostensibly in the name of security and anchored in a “current state of state-encouraged Islamophobia and the growing threat of Arab people, where passport control zones become places of statesanctioned discrimination” (Dictaphone Group 2016, 113), the material evidence of moving freely across borders—e.g., passports and permits—has gradually become the primary means of restricting and hindering movement.10 Dictaphone Group writes: “But while the passport as a document is interesting, what it reveals has nothing to do with a document in and of itself. The passport is a visual indicator of borders and limits. It is an index of who we are expected to be and what part of the relevant nation’s imaginary we are expected to perform” (2015). In my reading, this ambivalent and contradictory reality might have motivated the sense of rejection, frustration, and near cynicism that lingers in the lecture-performance’s title. The artists’ exploration of borders “within Lebanon, those between Lebanon and its neighbours, and across the Arab world” (Dictaphone Group 2013a) must be placed in this context. The Lebanese railway thereby serves as an example of contested space and as a tool to enter and focus the debate. Thus, the next

10 In a panel discussion, the artists trace the changing use of passports, “taking us from the Ottoman empire when the internal passport was used as a means of containing people who might otherwise flee military service through a period when we find oral histories describing a freedom of mobility across borders, until today, when passports rule over movement” (Dictaphone Group 2015).

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sections will discuss the experience of tangible and intangible borders that the lecture-performance evokes: body-bound and imaginary border movements; internalized processes and lines of inclusion and exclusion; and borders related to the artists’ as well as others’ collective experiences and participation in public space and life. Traveling: Border-Movements with the Body To move is to be moved. To travel is, potentially, to change. Hence, the apparent banality of transportation infrastructure masks the myriad ways our lives are shaped and entangled by our ability to move. The disappearance of a train route, then, is always about more than just logistics. It is a metaphor of a changing ‘social contract’ between citizens and the state. Jad Baaklini 2013.

Trains and railways are commonly used as metaphors for traveling, moving, and crossing borders—ideas that are at the core of Nothing to Declare. Placed in the cultural and geopolitical context of Lebanon and the broader Middle East, traveling evokes changing fabrics of territoriality, sovereignty, and transition, and the figure of the traveler has become a forceful motif in the collective Arab imaginary and cultural history across countries and traditions. Literature theorist Edward Said famously points to the epistemic potential of traveling. Without ignoring phenomena like forced migration, exile, and refuge,11 he depicts travel as a strategy for learning and challenging deep-rooted assumptions. Said frames travel as an opportunity “to understand a multiplicity of disguises, masks, and rhetorics,” stating that “travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. […] The traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions all the time” (Said 2002, 140). Both the link to collectivity as well as the investigatory moment of traveling that Said

11 “The exiled knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within safety and familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” (Said 2002, 147)

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addresses here are connected to Dictaphone Group’s use of traveling as a dramaturgical strategy during their research process.12 From a historical perspective, the Lebanese railway system is part of a largescale project of interconnecting different Arab cities throughout shifting power constellations, making it highly metaphorical, politically loaded, and closely linked to the project of pan-Arab nationalism and the idea of Arab collective identity and culture that it promoted.13 However, as the description of the lecture-performance shows, the artists’ account of the infrastructural, political, and ideological history of the railway is not a story of triumph. Rather, from today’s perspective, they point to its actual failure, or as El Khoury puts it, to what has become “a symbol of the impotence of the Lebanese state and the failed national project” (El Khoury and Nield 2016b). Dictaphone Group describes their decision to travel alongside the remnants of the railway infrastructure as a strategy to unravel the “past and present uses of these tracks and stations that dotted them. Some were abandoned. Others were turned into makeshift housing. Some were marked by their use as military bases and torture chambers” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 5). Consequently, in Nothing to Declare, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal transfer the idea of traveling onto their own bodies. They state: “Since the contested space was our starting point

12 Furthermore, the idea and practice of traveling resonates with the realities of production and creation that many performing artists are confronted with today, including the sharing of work internationally and movement between different countries and cultures. The advantages and constraints of such forms of structural flexibility and nomadism have been subjects of critical debates in performance studies; however, in the Lebanese context, it is important to note that a substantial lack of opportunities and infrastructure on a local level often precludes creating and touring work abroad. See Kunst 2015; Sennet 1998; Ertem 2016. 13 The Lebanese railway system dates from its founding in the 1890s during the colonial era to its closure in 1991. Built during both the Ottoman Empire and the French Mandate, it once comprised different passenger routes connecting Beirut to Damascus and Haifa. It was a key initiative of pan-Arab nationalism, a political idea imagining the union of all Arab states and regions in a single Arab national state. In short, pan-Arabism, beyond its different historical articulations, sought to bridge fractions and divisions between different Arab countries by highlighting their shared experience of colonial border politics that continue to affect the region to this day. Alongside transport infrastructure, arts and culture have been at the core of this project (see Hakim 2013; for different artistic projects addressing the theme of the Lebanese railway, see Roach and Nassar 2013).

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and inspiration, we decided to do what we often do: place our bodies in these contested space and record what happens.” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 6-7) In the interview, they outline the visceral qualities of moving alongside railway tracks and their environments; they explain that the embodied knowledge about borders that they accessed and accumulated during this process consequently informed their corporeal state and their energy as performers on stage. Furthermore, by entangling facts and fiction within the multimedia elements of Nothing to Declare, the artists’ actual experience of traveling in person equips their records with a sense of authenticity. During the process, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal gathered information not only about the physical space but also about the memories and stories that the space carries. This is meaningful inasmuch as it makes more evident the impact of the railway project on the formation of collective identity politics. On a national level, the railway represented a major economic and political but also symbolic project when Lebanon gained independence from the French Mandate and consequently formed a sovereign state in 1945, with Beirut at its center. According to the artists, the railway remains an important marker of border politics and intersectarian and intercommunitarian divisions, even after it has ceased to function. In fact, it is maintained and actualized by its artistic and everyday representations, such as that within Nothing to Declare. Dramaturgically speaking, an interesting tension is established here: the performers’ bodies witness and provide situated and corporeal evidence of border experiences that they, at the same time, consistently question, actualize, and potentially correct during the lecture-performance. Thus, the journeys of the artists, imbued with a quasi-utopian quality, allow Arab and international audiences to familiarize (or refamiliarize) themselves with the complex cultural formations related to the history of the trains. Internal Affairs: The Internalization of the Border I think they were more mobile in the old days, even though we are supposed to have more technology now. Tania El Khoury 2016b.

The Lebanese railway was part of the wider, border-crossing network of the Hejaz Railway that, as a key component of Ottoman infrastructural ambitions, connected Damascus to Medina and transported people without the need for visas through what is today Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The railway was

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not only at the core of the political pan-Arab project but also had a strong internal effect on Lebanese society and its national project. Yet, Dictaphone Group’s reading of the history of the Lebanese railway does not primarily foreground its capacities to make or unmake national borders by working towards binational or pan-Arab alliances. Instead, the artists emphasize connections as well as divisions within the country and across Lebanese society. El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal bring together a wide range of materials, stories, and details in Nothing to Declare, including archival documents, found footage, and pieces of fiction that illustrate how families and communities coexisted and interacted day-to-day through their relationship to the railway.14 Through this dramaturgical strategy of assembling diverse sources, they offer insights about gradual changes in the use of public space. For example, train tracks and facilities turned, over time, into overgrown green corridors inside of cities, playgrounds, agricultural plains, cemeteries for buses, detainment centers, houses, places of leisure, intelligence headquarters, or torture chambers. Other sources reflect on the effects of manifold processes of appropriation, occupation, flight, migration, and changing political powers on the ground. What can be observed from these accounts and their articulations both in the lecture-performance and the booklet is how different types of borders intersect— political, sectarian, and economic boundaries, for example, as well as natural borders and national frontiers. This leads me to suggest that the border, in this context, appears in many instances as a border zone—as a permeable space-inmotion, in which hard territorial demarcations coexist with small-scale, quotidian, and internal interactions and divisions. In line with this, the artists describe how their initial interest in national borders translated during the process “into internal borders that we had to cross internally even before arriving at the national border.” They elaborate: “Like, there are borders that are not the checkpoints, but that people, that local people know. So we were in a situation where

14 In the lecture-performance, Dictaphone Group gives the example of Saida, a city in the south of Lebanon at the border of Syria and, historically, Palestine. With this reference, the artists show how the history of the railway is bound to changing political events, e.g., the effects of World Wars I and II; the influence of different Zionist movements and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon; the Lebanese army’s claim to land, or, in other areas, Syria’s thirty-year occupation of northern Lebanon; the impact of displaced Palestinian, Roma, and Kurdish communities; and the establishment of Palestinian refugee camps; to name but a few (see Dictaphone Group 2013a). Journalist India Stoughton (2013), however, highlights the fact that sectarian divisions had little influence on the operation of the trains.

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we had to follow them, their knowledge of the area or just carry on.” During the lecture-performance, the live and prerecorded audio text depicts borders that exist within a nation, within a country, and within a community, as well as those resulting from internal power struggles among different official and unofficial armed groups in the country.15 El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal describe in the empirical data how internal borders affected their process of collecting material for Nothing to Declare. For example, they were sometimes hindered from accessing spaces and information and made to rely on local expertise and advice. They thus identify moments of self-censorship—feeling unsafe or unsure of how to judge a situation, or having to negotiate and trust in conflicting information that interlocutors provided—that impacted their actions and decisions on a more indirect level, and that shaped how they perceived and experienced certain borders. These observations highlight how experiences and representations of the border are mutually constitutive, as Dictaphone Group states: “On a more intimate level the journeys were an exploration of the relationship between ourselves and unfamiliar landscapes, and of the role of stories, our own and those of residents, in the making of representations of these places.” (2014a, 7) In the interview, El Khoury translates these dynamics in a self-reflection of Dictaphone Group’s own journeys: “In the text of the performance, we talk a little bit about how we need to perform ourselves, and our identity, differently at each border, [when crossing] different areas in Lebanon, with different sovereignties, different checkpoints, whether they are visible or not. And, obviously in a place like Lebanon, who is driving the car, and who is asking the questions plays a big role, and this is where I talked about performing our identity. It is kind of something that happens without you being very aware of it. What language you use with different people.”

This quote is revealing of the experience of the border in different respects. To begin with, it suggests that the artist’s individual experience of public space

15 “This is when we experienced the frustration of Lebanon’s internal borders. Our journeys were often interrupted by the Lebanese army, railway-station guards, and locals in various regions. The project turned into a journey that traces train routes through Lebanon to tell a story—or rather stories—of control, displacement, housing, and sometimes hope. We collected stories that seek to question the internal borders that have been imposed upon us […] In a lot of spaces we could not film because they were monitored by different armed groups. So we use the spy camera, and the footage from this is also part of the performance.” (El Khoury 2016b)

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holds a collective dimension. Moreover, the clarity of the bodily experiences of the border that they recall in their statements suggest that performance, embodiment, and the sensorial are crucial in the process. As a result, borders are kept alive and powerful by the tone, smell, and physical attitudes, gestures and movements through which mobility and immobility are simultaneously practiced, projected, aestheticized, and legitimized. El Khoury adds to this mix in the interview, where she outlines the importance of gender politics in the process: “Also gender played a big role. Because we have noticed the difference when we were alone, one woman, or three women, as opposed to having a male cameraman. And how he was perceived as a threat, a man, and a cameraman, and a camera, much more than the three of us would be perceived together. This is a way of kind of a-politicizing us young women.”16

As this quote suggests, politics and collectivity are interwoven in the experience of the border. More generally, the acknowledgement of internal, visceral sensations complicates notions of the border as a clear-cut, officially drawn, and indisputable line of demarcation. The artists’ accounts show how actual encounters with the border extend into the everyday and into individual and collective imagination, memory, and future projections. Claiming the Commons: Experiencing Public Space In Nothing to Declare, the Lebanese railway not only provides a historical framework for discussing mobility and freedom of movement. It equally serves as a lens to critically look at the current Lebanese state, which has largely failed to provide public services. In the booklet, Dictaphone Group states: “[The railway] is internally a symbol of a weak and dysfunctional Lebanese state, used to justify militarization and corruption.” (2014a, 4) Thus, the railway provides a starting point to reassess the “contract between citizens and state” (2016a) and, more generally, the present distribution of public- and private-owned goods. The debates over reclaiming the commons and the right to public space in Lebanon were ongoing during the production period of the lecture-performance, and had been catalyzed by increasing urbanization and several wide-reaching

16 At the same time, she wonders if this dynamic might have actually saved them from danger, since being younger women might have qualified them as politically harmless in the border control authorities’ perception.

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political decisions in favor of private and foreign real estate investment.17 Broadly speaking, this process curtails communal accessibility to public space and natural sites and, particularly in Beirut, entails the proliferation of walled marinas, privatized and costly beaches, gated communities, and militarized zones. Whereas an image of open borders has become central to Lebanon’s officially self-representation as a hub of commerce, finance, and investment in the region, these dynamics simultaneously reintroduce new and tightened border realties for many. In reaction to this, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal are each engaged, in different capacities, in initiatives that claim the right to the city. Likewise, in their collective work with Dictaphone Group, they reflect on how artistic practices, alongside social and political ones, can be reconceptualized in defense of common and collective rights—a concern that is shared by many artists in the region, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, as my fieldwork suggests. El Khoury explains: “In the last two years, people across the Arab world have repossessed public squares and affirmed territories by creating spaces for interaction, dialogue and intervention. […] Citizens have turned from thinking resistance to performing resistance in their everyday lives.” (El Khoury 2013, 202) This includes the use in political struggles of representational and scenic elements and staging, such as collective dances, the positioning of immobile bodies in public space, flash mobs, and street theater, to name but a few particularly choreographic examples. In the Egyptian context, El Khoury, leaning on theater vocabulary, consequently describes public space as a “scenography for revolution” (El Khoury 2013, 202) in order to point out that performance and live arts have been part of countermovements and autocratic regimes alike. She states that “activists use spectacle to assert their presence and that of their demands, the regime uses spectacle to negate those demands” (El Khoury 2013, 202). Applying these observations to Nothing to Declare, I argue that reclaiming the commons by remembering and re-appropriating the history of the Lebanese railway is not limited to freely accessing its premises and abandoned spaces, but also entails raising awareness about the unavailability and opacity of information about a project with strong collective and political significance.

17 This is also relevant to the Lebanese railway, parts of which have been sold to private investors and turned into shopping malls. Other prominent examples in Beirut during the period in which Nothing to Declare was created include the Solidere project’s privatization of public buildings and housing and attempts to privatize and develop the Dalieh waterfront.

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This link among artistic, civic, and activist strategies for action is exemplified in the dramaturgical means employed by the artists during their research phase, including direct encounters, learning through personal exchange, the diversification of voices, and the integration of marginalized positions.18 It is important to note that engagement in public space causes can reveal different communities’ competing claims of ownership that have developed over time in reaction to social, environmental, demographic, and other transformations, and that have resulted in complex, parallel borders. El Khoury explicates the problem with reference to Nothing to Declare: “It’s very interesting because it’s very much about this militant attitude, reclaiming public space, leaving it open for everyone, but with Nothing to Declare it complicated a bit this idea. It wasn’t enough to actually demand that all public spaces should go back to the collective and to the state, because in many cases the spaces were used by marginalized groups to actually live in them. […] So it complicated the idea of what public space to demand to take over, and what not.” (El Khoury and Nield 2016b)

The point that El Khoury makes here—that anti-border action might result in the reproduction of existing border regimes or the implementation of new ones—is significant for my theorization of the border. It places emphasis on the fact that parallel and potentially conflicting logics and power constellations are at stake in the formation and experience of the border. Furthermore, it accentuates the necessity to reflect on one’s own involvement in doing and undoing borders, as an artist, a researcher, and a citizen; thus, to shift the analytical focus from the event of the border to its constitutive process.

5.2

COLLECTIVITY

Dictaphone Group explains that the initial impulse that led to Nothing to Declare was born out of “a common feeling of a great need and passion to build regional networks of solidarity and knowledge” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 6); a wave of commonality that swept through the Middle Eastern region with the beginning of the Arab uprisings in 2010. These historical events pose the question of what

18 The artists recall: “We reached the so-called national borders. No matter which direction, it was indeed at the margins and the far-away unfamiliar landscapes that we encountered the most telling embodiments of extreme oppression.” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 5)

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holds collective movements and collective action together: clearly defined, common goals; affective bounds; symbolic affiliations; or more subtle gestures of solidarity? In the following, I analyze the perspective that this artistic case study reveals on the experience of collectivity. Therefore, I will take my starting point from three dramaturgical strategies that stand out in the lectureperformance: the use of oral history and collective memory; the reference to mapping as a means to represent, maintain, and challenge collective identity and self-representation; and the way communication and collaboration are instigated with audiences. Collective Inscriptions: Moving through Contested Space Condition of the Train Station Building: In Use; Abandoned; Destroyed. Use of Train Stations: Military Base during the Civil War; Military Base for the Lebanese Army; Office of the Railway and Public Transportation Authority; Residence; Restaurant; Library; Hospital. Dictaphone Group 2014a, 2-3.19

These are some of the criteria indicated on the map of the Lebanese railway system that Dictaphone Group used in preparation for and during their research travels. Saksouk explains: “It is a base map. The base map is the actual, the official map of the railway, the regional one, and we altered it by removing the borders and making it more legible, it is from the 40s, I think.” The map focuses on the conditions of the train stations and their current uses, establishing a strong link between maps and lived experience. At the same time, it reminds us that maps are artifacts that only reflect the realities they represent to a limited extent. Thus, rather than providing objective or neutral information, maps are always bound to a specific moment in time and carry specific interests, norms, and values that shape their interpretation. They are always constructed, applied, and dependent on distinct acts of performative authentication for legitimacy. Consequently, maps reveal or conceal complex relationships among power, control, and spatial practice. As the history of colonialism in the Middle East

19 These categories and descriptions are taken from a map of the Lebanese railway reproduced in the booklet accompanying Nothing To Declare. The map shows the three train tracks. The circles along the thin lines represent stops along the routes, and the thick lines demarcate the borders of Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

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illustrates, maps aesthetically provide an effective means of making certain communities and collectives visible or invisible.20 In Nothing to Declare, the artists draw on this dynamic when transferring the object of the map and the practice of mapping from urban research and architecture to the field of performing arts. This procedure, as Frederico Geller comments, has been widely used by artists in order to reclaim imaginary as well as concrete spaces: “Displaying a wide variety of approaches, the focus of these interventions is set in the spatial dimension, inviting us to compose new places, to alter the normalized ways of interacting in a territory with other bodies and objects, as well as shortening the subjective distance between apparently isolated conflicts” (2014, 175).21 In the lecture-performance, the map fulfills a basic didactic function as it provides a point of orientation and information for the audience without, however, advancing any claim of exclusiveness. Significantly, the map is multiplied in the lecture-performance; that is, it exists in different, parallel versions wherein the artists edit, rework, and annotate their respective maps during the course of Nothing to Declare, corresponding to their own experiences of moving through the designated space. I interpret this dramaturgical strategy as a way of actualizing the meaning that the maps carry, and as a proposal that maps can and must be read from different and coexisting perspectives and angles. Thus, Dictaphone Group’s handling of the map might be read as an invitation to the audience to interpret and consequently experience space differently—to invest themselves in alternative versions of how, and by whom, space and movement are regulated. This process of performatively rereading and reinhabiting maps calls into question ingrained frameworks of movement and can be understood, as artists Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat put it, as a means “to

20 The artist-activist group Atlas of Radical Cartography points to the importance of critically questioning not only the use, but also the authorship and ownership, of maps at the intersections of artistic and activist practice: “There is nothing wrong (and everything right) about using such skills for counter-purposes. The questions nevertheless arise: What would the maps have been like if we had developed them with the settlers themselves? Did the settlers have a vocabulary of their own for mapping the world around them, as many folk cultures do? And would such maps have lived on, including through memory and oral culture, in ways that our maps could not or did not?” (Bhagat and Mogel 2008, 25) 21 In the Lebanese context, a number of contemporary artistic projects critically focus on the intersections between fact and fiction and the relationship among imagination, aesthetics, and political agency linked to maps. See, for example, the artistic work of Lebanese artists Saba Innab and Marwan Merchaoui.

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unhinge our beliefs of the world, and to provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages, association and representations of places, people and power” (2008, 11). Alternative Stories: Oral History and Collective Memory After the end of the Civil War, the Lebanese railway gradually shut down its stations. The traces it left, however, go beyond its remaining infrastructure or services.22 El Khoury contends: “It’s kind of, more of a hidden history, or things that have been linked to the war years, to the Civil War. People don’t really think about it or know how it stopped, that there are still employees being paid, and there are still lands being owned by the railway authorities. […] In the Lebanese audience, there was some sort of nostalgia also about the fact that the train starts as the train that would take you from Lebanon to another country which we felt like unheard of, that Lebanon can take you to Palestine, can take you to Syria, and from Syria all the way to Istanbul and Paris, this felt like some sort of dream.”

As this quote suggests, the railway and the fascination and nostalgia that it engenders continue to perform a crucial function in Lebanese society: they offer a surface on which collective adherence to and identification with memories of the past, realities of the present, and projections into the future are negotiated.23

22 The almost ghostly existence of the Office des Chemins de Fer et des Transports en Commun illustrates the immaterial effects of the Lebanese railway project up to today. Formerly an important employer, the company continues to contract a community of railway workers that stays largely invisible. Therefore, in some ways the Office contributes to the disappearance of a transportation project that, from today’s point of view, has arguably failed. However, the syndicate for the railway workers still exists, as well as the support group, “Friends of the Tripoli Railway Station” (see Dictaphone Group 2014a, 17-18; Chamma 2013). 23 See Gabriele Rosenthal’s discussion within the Palestinian/Israeli context of how exclusion or marginalization in collective memories depends to a large extent on who is in power in a given set of relationships (2015, 40-41).

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Fig. 8: Nothing to Declare, field research, Lebanon, 2013

Copyright: Dictaphone Group

In Nothing to Declare, Dictaphone Group accesses this cross-temporal dynamic within the narrative of the railway by dramaturgically working with oral history.24 Oral history is a popular and widespread cultural practice of transmitting and passing on knowledge in Lebanon and most of the Middle East. Significantly, it is a performative practice: it is related to speaking and listing, to passing on stories and memories, and to interpreting and arranging elements of meaning. As oral history fundamentally builds on encounters between people and on placing bodies into physical space, it holds a distinct embodied dimension.25 Translated to the case study at hand, it introduces a colloquial tone in the lecture-performance and addresses the audience in a quite direct way. In line

24 The use of oral history, exemplified in collective practices such as storytelling and mourning, is a recurring dramaturgical strategy in Dictaphone Group’s work. See This Sea Is Mine (2015), as well as individually authored projects by El Khoury like Garden Speaks (2014) and Story of the Refugees (2013). 25 In relation to other works, Dictaphone Group reflects on the connection between the initial physical experience of a situation and its transfer to a performative space: “It’s about placing yourself, your body, in situations that are sometimes dangerous, sometimes bizarre. People feel with that, even if it’s a journey that happened miles away.” (quoted in Bramley 2013)

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with this, the booklet, Nothing to Declare: Train Narratives, is mostly written in the first person and is reminiscent of travel notes or diaries rather than objective accounts. Fig. 9: Nothing to Declare, field research, Lebanon, 2013

Copyright: Dictaphone Group

During their field trips, the artists augmented the factual information from official and archival sources with an extensive process of collecting stories related to the Lebanese railway from former employees or oral testimony offered by residents and track dwellers. In these accounts, the lines between fact and fiction are blurred, as Serhal explains, giving an example of how one of her research partners described his experience of borders during her trip to the Bekaa area: “Those borders are green, those borders have become imagined spaces of battles and imagined fighters, accessed from both sides without visas, areas that we know only about by the stories told by people from the border areas and securities which play the role of observers only. Those stories are heart and transferred only by word of mouth, so with no pictures. Those stories are imagined borders of a space that was supposed to be a transit and circulation space and that now turned into a non-transit space.” (Dictaphone Group 2015)

I surmise that it is precisely this potential of oral history to open up and, at the same time, maintain and generate collective imagination, that fascinates Dictaphone Group in Nothing to Declare. In practical terms, El Khoury,

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Saksouk, and Serhal recorded and partly transcribed the oral material collected on their trips, and reworked it in the lecture-performance and its complementary materials. In the process, a double movement of translation takes place; first, the research partners’ oral accounts are transferred into written documents by the artists; in the next step, the materials are converted into a performed, embodied, spoken, or recorded form to become part of the lecture-performance and its corresponding outcomes. These acts of translation develop into a playful montage in which the research partners’ names remain anonymous, both in the lecture-performance as well as in the accompanying booklet: the information provided is minimal, only indicating the place, year, and date of the interaction, as well as the former or current function or status of the person bearing witness. Dictaphone Group includes these details in the lecture-performance as well as in the other elements of Nothing to Declare, as this comment on their working process exemplifies: “The texts are written as on-site interviews so as to tell the stories of these spaces through specific points of view in which we play an editorial role. The characters may be fictional or based on real personalities, but what they say is real.” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 9) This point provokes epistemic questions about the status of the information that oral history and its artistic re-articulations provide to scientific and artistic research. Yet, as I see it, this approach mirrors the artists’ insistence that their work be placed in the field of art as opposed to the field of academia. At the same time, they describe their artistic projects and activities as research-led, despite their choice of format of the lectureperformance. Recalling the founding of the group in 2009, Saksouk states: “We set specific goals in a kind of manifest when we started our work. We decided to rely on research in order to undertake artistic, empirical projects, and share it first in Arabic with our people and then they were translated into other languages. […] We wanted to get out of Beirut because in the stray of art, it is concentrated in the capital city and they forget about the periphery.” (Dictaphone Group 2015)

The group’s self-definition situates the problem of research at the heart of the empirical material and my subsequent analysis on several levels. First, all of the members of Dictaphone Group, as mentioned earlier, draw on academic backgrounds and practices, bringing into the process different disciplinary and methodological approaches, notably from live arts, urban research, and the social sciences. Secondly, as the example of oral history illustrates, they rely on and adapt classical procedures from qualitative research in the social sciences into

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the aesthetic realm. In addition to oral history,26 this includes conducting interviews, taking field notes, engaging in participatory processes and selfobservation, and documenting their experiences and encounters by video or audio devices, depending on the security situation at the borders. Thus, in summary, the dramaturgical procedures upon which Dictaphone Group relies in Nothing to Declare open up spaces in between artistic and scientific practices; in between one’s own and others’ stories; in between different temporalities, spaces, and media orders; in between memory, reality, and fiction; and in between feeling, moving, and interacting bodies. This suggests that collectivity emerges not along clear-cut lines of distinction alone, but from interaction and relationships. Furthermore, the artists’ use of oral history shows how collective memory and imagination are simultaneously generated and maintained in the process. Therefore, rather than providing facts or conveying authentic information, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal examine how artistic practice might create the impulse to challenge and disturb what has become familiar, and provide an alternative space for narrating the history of the national Lebanese railway as an alternative history of the country and its people. Extended Bodies, Collaborating Audiences Dictaphone Group describes how differently audiences received Nothing to Declare within and outside of Lebanon: “While performing to a Lebanese audience and in Arabic, we realized that this project is no longer about Arab borders. It rather touches upon a much-needed discussion in Lebanon around the history of the trains, public space, land ownership and its uses, mobility, checkpoints, and post-war policies. We hence decided to develop it in ways that mature these existing ideas, before embarking onto any Arab journey.” (El Khoury 2016b) “For a foreign audience, the fascination with the railway wasn’t necessarily the focal

26 At this point, it is worth mentioning that oral history, from a methodological perspective, has been criticized for its lack of reliability, defined here as an analytical capacity to provide objective, verifiable, or comprehensive information. Critics have emphasized the risk of popularizing academic research or simplifying contents that accompanies the decision to combine various types of testimonies. Despite this limitation, oral history is commonly used as a hermeneutic method of researching history in social sciences in an effort, following academic standards, to outline the factors and elements that influence its collection and evaluation, and to reflect on the implication of the researcher in the process of knowledge production.

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point. It was more about learning about this unfamiliar context to this audience, and being more fascinated by the issue of the border actually.”

The Lebanese audience primarily took interest in the history of the railway, an observation that the artists interpret as a need for discussion on the current state of the Lebanese government and of Lebanese collective identity at large. They comment: “This is why we felt that we wanted to develop this project further by even more focusing on the railway, and what it did to people’s lives, and how it impacted the cities it was in.” Consequently, Dictaphone Group developed the research on Nothing to Declare in different media and formats in order to disseminate their work widely and reach out to a broader range of audiences, including visitors of the artistic and academic programs in which the lecture-performance is delivered, viewers of the video version of the work, readers of the booklet, digital users that access project materials online, and participants in workshops and discussions that the artists regularly organize around the project. In the context of amplifying their activities, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal reflect on an expanded understanding of their work and their collaborators: “We often found ourselves wondering when the performance precisely took place. Was it during the lecture-performance in which we shared our findings with an audience? Or perhaps it starts during the three journeys that we each took along the railway towards the borders? […] Or was the performance our live acts of jumping over fences and entering abandoned or restricted public spaces without permission, all the while secretly recording our journeys? What of the different communities with whom we crossed paths? Were they not our collaborators in that performance?” (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 9)

These reflections that the artists share in the booklet are significant in two ways: first, they convey an understanding of the audience that is not limited to the actual event of the lecture-performance, but extended in time and space. Secondly, they advance the notion of an involved and collaborative audience; an audience that is active on self-reflective and imaginative levels. El Khoury picks up this thread elsewhere by referencing the historical development of performance art in the 1960s and its legacies today concerning the role and the involvement of audiences in the aesthetic experience: “Performance art has suffered decades of being ridiculed by television shows, the media, and even the general public. Its sometimes ‘shocking’ aesthetics have been depoliticized and judged as ‘elitist’ and ‘alienating.’ In the minds of many people this art form became

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synonymous with self-inflicted pain, self-inflated egos, obvious symbolism, obscure aesthetics, and the indispensable flash of genitalia.” (El Khoury 2015)

In her problematization, El Khoury explicitly refers to both her own work as an individual artist as well as her collaborative project with Saksouk and Serhal. In line with this, the all-female cast of Dictaphone Group and their investment in the redistribution of voices and bodies might be read as counterstrategies to performer-centric approaches and to a lack of feminist engagement in many artistic proposals today, which she has criticized. Furthermore, El Khoury engages the connection between aesthetic experience and the experience of collectivity by distinguishing interactivity and participation from the idea of spectatorship. “Spectatorship is the opposite of participation in art, in the city and in politics. Since the eruption of the Arab uprisings, interactivity in political performance is reinventing what we perceive as relational aesthetics. It is pushing audiences and artists alike to reveal their position, bare witness and act upon it.” (El Khoury and Nield 2016)27 The differentiation suggested here concerns the degree to which activity and passivity; the impact of hierarchies, codes, and prescribed conventions; and other elements operationalizing power politics play out in the aesthetic experience. Strengthening the experiential potential of a piece of artwork, she holds that “it is the interactivity employed in Dictaphone Group’s projects that applies politics to performance” (El Khoury 2015). In my reading, the political consequently lies in the capacity of an artistic work to start a discussion and to unravel the power relations and border politics immanent to every experience of collectivity. According to El Khoury, this is linked to the precondition of not giving “spectators a false impression of freedom” by introducing rules or by “taming them” (El Khoury and Pearson 2015):

27 On the relationship between politics and performance, El Khoury points to the performativity of politics in the context of the Arab uprisings and the broader Middle East, see El Khoury 2013. In conversation with theatre scholar Sophie Nield, she elaborates: “But also regimes are using performance in public sphere as a way of creating counter-revolutionary measures, e.g. staging choreographed sexual assault on female activists […] Performance has been used to claim the public square and to claim sovereignty over the city and its politics, and Dictaphone’s work is very inspired by this. Yet each work we’ve done is also live art and stands by itself as an art piece.” (El Khoury and Nield 2016)

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“Real interactivity cannot control audience interaction. On the contrary, it embraces the unknown and the reality that each show is completely different from the last. It is a risk that is definitely worth taking. Using the audience as collaborators does not only offer excitement and unpredictability but a horizontal relationship between the artist and the audience/participant, which for a moment in time balances the power dynamics around us. During that moment, both the artist and the audience/participant reveal their politics. There is no place to hide—you are asked to take a stand, make a decision, react, relate, play, give an opinion, choose, disagree, and so on.” (El Khoury 2015)

5.3

NETWORKS OF SOLIDARITY: THRESHOLDS TO ARTISTIC ACTION

Creating alliances is a recurrent motif in Dictaphone Group’s strategies towards its audiences and research partners, and in its investment in the commons, as mentioned earlier. Placed in the cultural and geopolitical context of Lebanon, this approach might be interpreted as an attempt to reduce physical and social barriers in a highly fractured country. This opens up further questions about how the experience of collectivity and the problem of collective agency translate into the aesthetic realm. In the empirical material, the artists center the debate around two perspectives: first, they address the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, and its effects on a person’s capacity for empowerment in spite of predominant versions of collective history, identity, and imagination. Second, they reflect on commonalities and differences between art and activism from the perspective of their collaborative practice. To begin with, El Khoury, Saksouk, and Serhal offer a context for their project with Dictaphone Group by commenting on the fact that large parts of research on Lebanese culture and history are only available in English: “If we use research that is usually in the academic realm, it is used in a language that people don’t understand. […] People here who are affected by these things never have a chance to know a lot about these things or be part of the debate” (quoted in Quilty 2013). Significantly, they link the accessibility of knowledge production and of imagining things differently to the question of which voices are included or excluded in artistic, popular, or scientific accounts and sites. In a panel discussion in Beirut they explicate: “Our preferred language of publication and performance is Arabic. We believe that art practice should not intentionally alienate a vast majority of the population and speak solely to an educated elite.” (2015) In connection to this, the artists’ approach might be interpreted as an effort to democratize the sharing of local academic research on space by discuss-

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ing—in an info-activist manner—laws, illegalities, and urban planning with a general public in Nothing to Declare. Correspondingly, in Nothing to Declare, they emphasize integrating incidental encounters and marginalized positions. El Khoury contends: “This is maybe the contribution to politics, to allow some of these voices that need to be told, that they challenge some of these grand narratives whether that the regime forced on us or that tells the injustice of the Lebanese state that is not a very obvious injustice. It’s not a dictatorship, but the very subtle oppression that it uses against the refugees or people of low income in general, people of minorities, sexual or other.” (El Khoury and Nield 2016)

This question of participation in society and politics is addressed differently in the empirical material, when El Khoury and Saksouk reflect on how they began working on Nothing to Declare. They identify a concrete event from 2011 in which experiences of borders and of collectivity were highly relevant; namely, the Annual Arab Blogger’s Meeting that took place in Tunis (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 6). In short, the aim of this meeting was to bring together Arab bloggers to discuss mutual solidarity and how knowledge moves around in the Arab world (see Bramley 2013). They remember a “common feeling of great need and passion to build regional networks of solidarity and knowledge,” and “a lot of solidarity between youth and activists, artists—people across borders, across national borders” (Dictaphone Group 2015). Yet, at that point, border realities had prevented a considerable number of participants from taking part in the meeting. Also, El Khoury was unable to travel due to bureaucratic regulations and lengthy visa procedures, whereas Saksouk attended only to discover that many people were unable to travel despite campaigning for open access, physically as well as digitally speaking, in the Arab world (Dictaphone Group 2014a, 6). This illustrates, as mentioned earlier, the close and direct connection of all members of Dictaphone Group to different activist and public campaigning projects, and their familiarity with common methods and tools in these fields of action. As a result, some of the dramaturgical tools and strategies that they deploy in Nothing to Declare, as well as in other projects, can be found in different variations in grassroots campaigning, bottom-up and political activism, or info-activism: for instance, billboards and panels used in demonstrations, work with slogans, and the positioning and placing of the body onsite. In line with this, it is also interesting to observe that the artists use a collective and collectivizing “we” in large parts of the booklet and the performance text, a rhetorical gesture that suggests a shared ground, affiliation, or proximity with

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potential readers but that remains unspecified. When asked in the interview how they would describe Dictaphone Group’s work at the intersections of art, activism, and political protest, Saksouk responds: “I think we actually like the idea that different people frame it differently. And that it’s not really tagged as one thing, as a political work or as an artistic work or whatever, activist work. […] We actually like this, that we are sort of blurring the lines. Because we do have a problem that in a lot of cases in Lebanon, artists speak to artists, and activists speak to activists, and academics speak to academics.”

El Khoury adds: “Yes, I think it’s a comfortable place, […] being in between, kind of borrowing various tools from all these mediums, but also kind of speaking to each other.” This openness regarding the interpretation and framing of their activities aligns with the collective’s general attempt to merge and meet with different groups and communities through their artwork, and create movements of solidarity in the process. At the same time, Dictaphone Group does not actively work towards situating its practice in an activist realm or tradition,28 and it critically discusses the implications, responsibilities, expectations, and ultimately consequences that come with the appropriation of this label and its claim for direct action and change. El Khoury elaborates: “I think the question is more about what we call ourselves. And what kind of responsibility comes with that. We call ourselves research and art group because we are, and we can claim that comfortably, if you want. And even when we, separately, as people, when we work in activist campaigns […], we took that decision of not calling ourselves an activist group, or artist-activist group. Personally, I feel that there is a lot of pretense that comes with this framing, […] but there is also kind of responsibility that you are actually giving solutions. Especially with this whole kind of branding that’s happening mainly in the West but also in the Arab world of artists as ultimate victims, or artists as heroes, and it comes from a true place, […] because a lot of them, especially under authoritarian regimes, are being targeted personally. But we don’t live this victimization in Lebanon and we kind of

28 In the interview, Saksouk states: “This is basically the backdrop of a lot of work that we do, and I don’t think only as a collective. Also as individuals, or other projects that we are involved in, that we are driven by wanting to […], at least, influence politics or discourse in different ways and in different power struggles, whether they are about gender, or about the city, or about any form of injustice. Yes, rights. So it is a project of change for me.”

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feel that it’s a more honest place to call ourselves who we are: researchers and artists. […] But sometimes I feel if you call your art activist, it kind of puts if above critique.”

With regards to the question of art and agency, I read this statement as a critical reminder not to align politically engaged art projects and political action too easily. Rather, in conclusion, the case study on Nothing to Declare shows the potential, but also the practical and analytical difficulties, that result from positioning research or action, individually or collectively, either in the artistic or in the activist realm. Furthermore, I read the grey zones that open up in the qualitative analysis of the artistic case study as a call to expose and revise the ethical criteria and political responsibilities that come with each context: “What makes an artwork a political event? […] Is it when the artwork clearly champions a political cause or discusses current affairs? Or is it when the artist—as has been the case for many since the beginning of the Arab uprisings—is beaten up, locked in, tortured, or demonized?” (Dictaphone Group 2015) These questions are fundamental for the further discussion of the idea of agency, particularly with regards to bodies, as I will turn to later in this study.

Becoming Border, Becoming Collective

Chapter 6 Becoming Border, Becoming Collective: Comparative Cross-Case Analyses, and Theoretical Discussion of the Findings

In this chapter, I will synthesize the findings from the qualitative case study analyses of the preceding chapters and compare their commonalities and discontinuities. At the same time, I will put them in conversation with selected positions from dance and performance studies, border studies, philosophy, and the social sciences. This methodological approach aims to mobilize the results for a further theorization of the research question driving Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: how can the experiences of becoming border and becoming collective be understood from the perspective of bodies? Taking into account the results of my analysis thus far, my use of the term “becoming” references my conception of the entanglement between the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity as a process that is often provisional, never fully accomplished, and subject to manifold reformulations. Also, from the perspective of bodies, I argue that this dynamic configuration is inextricably linked to issues of politics, ethics, and power and that aesthetic experience is central to how we construct and convey our nonneutral and subjective conceptions of the world. In line with this and in accordance with the main conceptual pillars of the study, the following theoretical discussion of the findings is structured in three sections: bodies, borders, and collectivity.

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6.1

BODIES BODIES AS RESEARCH TOOLS AND PERSPECTIVES

This study places bodies at its center in an effort to analytically recognize corporeality and performativity as often neglected dimensions of thinking about borders and collectivity. Rather than considering bodies as bound and constrained entities, I situate them in their always specific environments and conditions, using the three artistic works under discussion as examples. Here, the body’s capacity for questioning its role in maintaining, challenging, rehearsing, staging, legitimizing, and aestheticizing the very context it moves in, is key. This approach explicitly counters universalistic ideas of the body that have, historically speaking, haunted the fields of dance and performing arts as well as politics. For instance, ideas of the authentic, utopian, naturalistic, or nationalistic body have been used to translate diverse political ideologies into movement cultures and bodily representations, and vice versa. Hence, I argue that bodies exist always in relation; that is to say, in the plural. This section is structured in three parts that approach the relationality of the body from interlocking perspectives. The first part engages the theoretical concepts of intercorporeality and embodiment, and social choreography to discuss how meaning and knowledge are generated in the interaction between bodies and the interplay between different orders of movement. This suggests that art, society, and politics entertain a dynamic relationship—an argument that introduces the question of the body’s agency in this context. After sketching out recent discussions in the field of art on the body’s capacity to intervene and participate inside and outside of the aesthetic realm, I will take on two significant findings from the case study analyses and suggest that “hesitating” and absence are meaningful elements in defining a body’s agency. Subsequently, I contend that foregrounding the relationality of bodies in my investigation reveals an indispensable ethical dimension to the debate on borders and collectivity. The concept of hospitality will inform overarching reflections on the coexistence of bodies in the cultural and social sphere, and these reflections will be interrogated in the context of ethical standards, norms, and values in the field of art in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. Bodies in Relation To conceive of bodies as bodies-in-relation, it is necessary to situate the idea within the specific cultural and sociopolitical contexts of Contingency, Free Advice and Nothing to Declare. Obviously, any attempt to equate the complex

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conditions that characterize Lebanon and Palestine/Israel for the sake of direct comparison would be futile. At the same time, it goes beyond the scope of this study to fully recount the nuanced and historic differences in the status of bodies in each environment. What can be said, however, is that bodies, in both cases, are embedded in society in a structural way; a general condition that writer and artist Lina Majdalanie perceives within the coexistence of three unequal poles of power that impact Lebanese society and the status of bodies therein: “[T]he official power of the State; the unofficial yet as-potent power of the Ahliyya society which is first and foremost an archaic structure still deeply rooted, sometimes tribal, but also mainly familial and religious; and finally, the civil society where individuals, including artists, position themselves critically vis-à-vis the two other poles of power, knowing that the civil society is by far the weakest and most fragile pole of the three.” (Majdalanie 2018, 61)

The artistic case studies exemplify the basic assumption that a body’s belonging—its representation as well as the way that it is experienced and perceived—is significantly determined by its basic alignment with one or several communities or collectives. This precondition does not ignore a body’s individuality and singularity. It is also not static, but evolves over time. Yet, it represents a feature that pierces through all domains of life, linking social and political life with a person’s most intimate moments.1 It finds further expression on a corporeal and embodied level, as the following quote by artist Tarek Abi Samra illustrates: “In truth, I always see myself through the eyes of others. I am always watching my own features on my imaginary screen projected behind the person speaking to me. I carefully observe all the muscles of my face so that their contractions correspond with what the person is saying or doing. […] All of this is exhausting. My body is a burden to me. Its smallest movements must conform to some law of unknown origin. I don’t dance. I hate holding someone’s hand in public. In the street, I watch my gait from above like a puppeteer. In bed, I watch myself fuck, even when I come. Alone at home, the screen is still there, affixed to one of the walls, following me from room to room.” (2015, 83)

1

In the cultural contexts of Lebanon and Palestine, this in-betweenness that bodies, according to Lina Majdalanie, demarcate is equally reflected on an architectural level. The hammam or houses’ half-open staircase construction might serve as examples that operationalize how bodies move across and inhabit the intersections between the individual, the domestic, the private, and the public.

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Consequently, the immanent relationality of the body translates into habits, laws, taboos, and projections and ultimately provokes backlashes to them, too. It provides a texture, or a kind of support structure, for bodies to exist and move within. At the same time, it creates a normative frame and represents a symbolic, sensorial, and corporeal act of intrusion that regulates the being of bodies in the world. Similarly, the empirical material offers various examples of the contradictory quality that marks the passage between the individual and the collective: of experiences in which bodies blur the lines between the individual body of a citizen, an artist, a researcher, or an audience member and the collective body of the state, of an ethnicity, or of the law. Coupling and Uncoupling: Intercorporeality and Embodiment Grounding my research on borders and collectivity in bodies-in-relation stems from the presumption that meaning emerges in between bodies. Correspondingly, I contend that bodies are not simply enacting or implementing pregiven, identity-related structures. Rather, they are active, irreducible, and coconstitutive agents in the process of making meaning.2 In what follows, I will turn to the concepts of intercorporeality and embodiment, as developed across different disciplines in the social sciences, in order to examine interaction between bodies: “My I is entangled right from the beginning in a corporeal culture that is not necessarily of my own making, even though I perpetuate it through my own way of making the body, the way(s) in which I have learned to make a body, by varying degrees of consciousness or self-awareness of what I do.” (Meyer et al. 2017, xvii)

Here, social scientist Christian Meyer et al. describe a primary entanglement as a precondition for the concept of intercorporeality and thereby connect to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophical definition of the term that holds that bodies are never alone in the first place (see Merleau-Ponty 1962; 1964; for an over-

2

From the perspective of the sociology of the body, Robert Gugutzer, Gabriele Klein, and Michael Meuser contend: “The body is significant for actions that are subjectively meaningful; yet, it is also a social fact that helps to understand social issues. The human body is a producer, an instrument and the effect of the social. It is a societal and cultural symbol as well as an agent, a medium and a tool for social action. Social structures are registered in the body; social order is generated through bodily action and interaction. Social change is motivated by physical sensations and shaped by corporeal actions.” (2016, VI; author’s translation)

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view of the development of the concept of intercorporeality, see Meyer et al. 2017). Distinguishing this idea from phenomenological perspectives on intersubjectivity, they argue that bodies always exist in dynamic constellations, interconnected by reciprocity and mutual dependence. It is important to note that this approach does not negate the influence of learned behaviors, norms, values, and aesthetics on the relationship between bodies, nor does it suggest that bodies are linked in equal and balanced terms. What I would like to point out is that the concept of intercorporeality as I use it in the following conceives of our engagement in the world as something that is constructed through the experiences and interactions of moving, feeling bodies. Thus, it cannot be fully expressed in language and it is not fully intentional, conscious, or under control. Significantly, in accordance with the empirical findings, the concept of intercorporeality accepts movements, gestures, gazes, touches, and mimetic elements in the production of meaning as well as affects and emotions (for the concept of “interaffectivity”, see Fuchs 2017). Furthermore, it conceptually accommodates animate as well as inanimate bodies alike. In the context of the study at hand, this expansive idea of the body enables an analysis of the ways in which the extensions and amplifications of bodies impact the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity in a given time and space: the influence of imagined, memorized, and projected bodies; of bodies mediated by border technology and digitalization, by discursivization, and artistic practice; and of bodies that are witnessing or documenting border events and experiences. By means of the dramaturgical strategies that they deploy, the artists, thus put the concept of intercorporeality into practice and engage the corporeal, affective, and social qualities of body-bound meaning making on several complementary levels. As a reminder, all artists work actively with participation and interaction, either via direct contact between bodies at the border during their research phases or in the experiences that they create in the aesthetic realm. Hence, movement between bodies is key to intercorporeal interaction, and the empirical data suggests that scale, intensity, rhythm, and synchronization, as well as contingency, fragmentation, non-accomplishment, and failure3 are significant elements in the process of coupling and uncoupling bodies.

3

For an analogy to this, see psychiatrist and philosopher Thomas Fuchs (2017), who in his explicatory model on intercorporeality distinguishes between what he terms “mimetic” resonance, based on similarity and coperception, and “complementary” resonance, integrating countermovements and agonistic behavior.

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The concept of intercorporeality examines embodied action and therefore connects with myriad instances in the empirical material of how borders and collectivity are internalized not only on a psychological but also on a corporeal level: how experience (e.g., learned behavior, situational reactions, and aesthetic experience) is recollected, handed down, embedded, and archived in bodies at the intersection of the individual and the collective, how it is body-bound. Correspondingly, embodiment represents a well-researched subject. While it has not yet been exhaustively explored in border studies, dance and performance studies as well as the social sciences have submitted a wide range of perspectives on the embodiment of social and political power politics across different historical and geopolitical frameworks. In his historical research on East German dance, for example, Jens R. Giersdorf demonstrates how embodiment has been used to generate a sense of identity through dance and movement-based practices that serve to stabilize a collective (see Giersdorf 2013). This function of embodiment—aligning bodies with overarching social or political projects, ideologies, and movement orders—seems especially relevant in contexts such as post-war Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, in which representation and agency are distributed in unequal terms. On that note, the comparative analyses of the empirical data give the example of dabke as a distinct traditional dance culture that has been appropriated by different nationalistic projects (see Rowe 2016). Furthermore, the data reveals a need or desire in the local Palestinian context to transmit, adapt, or reject contemporary, Western dance languages in practical as well as identity-related terms. From a different angle, recent scholarship in political sociology and theory argues that a critical analysis of embodiment is crucial for understanding conflict, violence, and war.4 In relation to this, the empirical material at hand demonstrates a calculated and professionalized use of embodiment in border politics, often through technology and digitalization, to make threats and instill fear. In the same vein, sociologist Kevin McSorley discusses how “the soldier’s skills, capacities, reflexes and habits are inculcated, developed and indeed resisted” through training and discipline, and how “competencies and sensory practices, [and] skilful coordinated choreography” are implemented in order to develop an “acute sense of communal time and secure col-

4

For indicative positions on the role and the use of embodiment in sociopolitical processes, see Foucault 1977, 1978; McSorley 2012; Bargu 2014. For research on the role of embodiment in implementing national or other political and social ideologies by dance and movement cultures, see Baxmann 2000; Burt 1998; Cvejić and Vujanović 2015; Giersdorf 2013; Kant 2016; Rousier 2003; Rowe 2011.

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lective movement” (2014, 8-9). Similarly, using the example of war, McSorley states: “It is not just the bodies of the combatants and victims that are produced by and central to war, but the bodies of veterans, witnesses, pacifists, patriots and many others. Given the global nature of contemporary economic, migratory and media flows few in today’s interconnected world remain completely isolated from war’s touch.” (2013, 2)

What is interesting to note is that both McSorley and Giersdorf describe embodiment as a process that spans different temporalities, media, and spatial orders. To stay with McSorley’s example, the preparation for war, the immediate response to open fighting, and the bodily aftereffects of military action are interconnected on a bodily level. Or, as Giersdorf (2013) spells out with the example of East German Dance, the use of dance in the implementation of nationalistic projects involves the rehearsal of an ideologically loaded movement vocabulary based on instruction manuals, its implementation in the form of mass choreographies in popular and official events, and its subsequent official documentation. Both the various extensions of embodied action as well as their performative character are similarly present in the empirical material. Here, the case studies show how bodies carry, rework, and anticipate the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity: how they rehearse, stage, aestheticize, and perform them alongside meaningful categories such as gender, nationality, or age, among others. Significantly, the data and the interviews with the Palestinian artists in particular suggest that embodiment inhabits a controversial position in establishing links between real and imagined bodies. On the one hand, it provides a tool that empowers individuals and collectives to counter indoctrination, voice resistance and utopian visions, and equip bodies with the ability to cope with experiences of inclusion and exclusion (see also Basham 2013). On the other hand, embodiment has fallen prey to diverse universalistic and essentialist ideas and purposes whereby the argument for corporeally embedded experience has been misused for legitimizing some bodies over others or for depicting some bodies as more authentic, autonomous, healthy, functional, or natural than others. The case study analyses illustrate this most distinctly with regards to border politics that implement and maintain territorial politics by forcefully streamlining collective identities and physical features, gestures, or movements. In summary, I argue that the interactive and participatory dramaturgical strategies that Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group deploy in their artwork offer connections to the theoretical concepts of intercorporeality

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and embodiment. At the intersections of individual and collective bodies, they accentuate relationality as a driving force in the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. Therefore, they counter essentialist notions of the body in favor of an individual, individuated body that is always already a collective, social body, as well. Social Choreographies When applied to the empirical material at hand, the problem of making meaning through bodies-in-interaction is closely linked to the question of agency; that is, to an individual and a collective’s capacities to intervene and participate in society and politics on bodily grounds. This observation is based on the initial understanding that the aesthetic realm is not a bound and closed-off sphere of experience, representation, and analysis, but is rather inseparable from the everyday. From this, it can be deduced that artistic, social, and political movements and movement orders are interlinked. This hypothesis is key to the concept of social choreography, as an increasing number of studies have recently explored in realms such as protest and resistance movements, public assemblies, the distribution of commons in public and urban space, and the orchestration of bodies in swarms or flash mobs.5 In what follows, I will approach the idea through two selected theoretical positions on social choreography that pay specific attention to the idea of collectivity and to crisis, respectively. Grounded in extended empirical research, sociologist and dance scholar Gabriele Klein defines social choreography as follows: “I use the term ‘social choreography’ in order to demarcate a connection between the social and the aesthetic in corporeal orders of interaction. The concept of social choreography focuses the spatiality and the temporality of the social, understood here as an emergent order of inclusion and exclusion, of marginalization and power, but also of subversion, transformation and revolution that is generated through the organization of movement.” (Klein 2014, 809; author’s translation)

Following Klein, the concept of social choreography provides an analytical tool to capture how movement orders are performatively brought about and experienced in the social, political, and aesthetic realms. Significantly for this study’s theorization of collectivity, Klein points out that social choreography has been used “to elucidate concepts such as community or collective, social organization

5

For further scholarship and case studies that engage the idea of social choreography, see Foster 2003; Hewitt 2005; Lepecki 2006; Klein 2012; Ertem 2013; Butler 2015.

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or system, the peculiarity of figurations or the ordering of interactions and their rituals” (2012, 39). Consequently, the body’s general ability to address other bodies centers movement in the process of entering into relationships. The idea of movement in conjunction with the concept of social choreography simultaneously refers to a specific form of existence and a corresponding mode of action (2004, 132). Furthermore, Klein conceives of choreography as an emergent order (2012, 43) rather than as a preestablished structure to be imitated, mimicked, or reproduced. This definition is in dialogue with my findings from the comparative analyses. Rather than working towards imitable and stable forms, the artists purposefully install a kind of openness and elements of ambivalence or contradiction in how they invite audiences to participate in and interpret the aesthetic experiences that they create. This observation can be brought into conversation with different accounts on sovereignty and territorial politics that the artist interviews offer. Notably, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group spell out how societal and political movement orders, in the experience of the border, are implemented. maintained, choreographed, and disciplined by bodily means while being jeopardized and exposed to improvisational patterns at the same time. Taking up the artists’ distinct positioning in the field of arts as opposed to the field of politics, I would like to emphasize that speaking of social choreography must not be conflated with the social impact or community-building role of artistic practice. Echoing my overall argument that border experiences constitute both immediate and structural experiences of crisis in which societal and political orders are reassessed and redistributed, Gay Morris and Jens Giersdorf intervene in the debate. Discussing the relationship between twenty-first-century warfare and choreographed movement, they contend that choreography bridges different areas of practice and knowledge production: “Important for this definition [of choreography] is the acknowledgment of training, technique, rehearsal, performance, and reception as intrinsic parts of choreography, not only to reveal labour and agency but also to examine discipline and resistance to it […]. For this reason, choreography is situated outside any specific technique and thus not necessarily tied to dance. […] Without erasing the distinctions between the written, the theorized, and the choreographed, the understanding of choreography as a knowledge system establishes both dance and choreography as thought and theory.” (Giersdorf and Morris 2016, 7)

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Although the authors argue that bodies are able to carry, activate, and circulate knowledge, they also make clear that dancing subjects have always been connected to authorities.6 According to them, this interdependency has even increased in recent times with conflicts (including those across borders) becoming more and more territorialized and interconnected on a worldwide scale (2016, 7). Therefore, I contend that any concept of social choreography must consider the initial normative dynamics and the primary inclusions and exclusions that define a body’s capacity to move across aesthetic, social, and political realms in every specific case. This is even more applicable to the study at hand, as a power-sensitive approach to choreography is crucial in order to analyze the unequal relationships and power politics that define realities in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel and inform experiences of the border and of collectivity. Here, reading the artistic case studies at hand through the aforementioned theoretical propositions on intercorporeality, embodiment, and social choreography allows us to understand the relationship among arts, society, and politics through the body’s capacity for action, as the next section will discuss. Scaling Agency: From Solidified Images to Silent Moves Contingency, Nothing to Declare, and Free Advice are all anchored in the everyday and created from a process-driven approach that knits together phases of research, production, and presentation. These preconditions might intensify the abovementioned links and blurred boundaries among the aesthetic, the social, and the political realm. In conjunction with the fact that all artwork deals with different kinds of borders and border experiences, this creates the problem of positioning oneself and one’s work both inside and outside of the artistic context. In other words, it generates questions about the means, standards, and objectives, as well as the consequences and implications, of the artists’ engagement. In line with this, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group distinctly address this matter in the empirical material and the case study analyses, providing insights into what binds and holds together bodies in action. At the same time, their individual concerns about how, where, and on which terms to position oneself and one’s work speak, on a broader scale, to recent debates in aesthetic

6

For example, dance scholar Mark Franko discusses how the dissolution of the nationstate and imperial model impacted ballet, with choreography confirming either reigns or sovereignty but also providing resistance not primarily through debate but through performance (see 2016, 333-57).

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theory that dedicate renewed attention to the body’s capacity to intervene and participate in society and politics.7 With regards to my empirical material, I would like to point to discussions about the proximity and differences that mark art, activism, and real politics. In this strand of scholarship, the relationship between artistic strategies and other forms of social or political action that are directed, planned, and characterized by a pronounced sense of efficiency have been of particular interest.8 Furthermore, a number of studies have paid specific attention to the role of the sensorial in how bodies affect and are, in turn, affected by their social and political environments.9 Moreover, and especially in the Middle Eastern context, the symbolic forces of bodies in collective claim-making have been researched as a source of intervention and mobilization, wherein giving meaning and presence to certain bodies etches them into collective memory and identity and equips them with the capacity to stand up or stand in for a broader project or idea.10 These theoretical attempts to locate agency in conjunction with the body raise more general questions about the preconditions for the collective alignment of bodies. Art theorist Bernadette Buckley, for instance, sees the “re-arrangement of collective propensities” (Buckley 2014, 23) as the basis of such a process. In other words, she argues that the existence of a common inclination or interest to be implemented grounds the very possibility for collective action. Yet, as Judith Butler adds from a performative perspective on bodies-in-relation, these common grounds must not be homogenous or consistent. Acting together reserves the option of keeping up a level of divergence and inconsistency—in her words: “To act in concert does not mean to act in con-

7

The complex alliances among arts, activism, and formal politics are reflected in terminological differentiations, such as activist art, artivism, socially-engaged art, or applied art. My discussion of the problem of agency in conjunction with bodies began with my research project “dé-position: On the body’s capacity for action” (September 2012 - June 2013) with Lejla Mehanovic and in collaboration with Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; the German Federal Cultural Foundation; and Dance Congress. Other participants included artists and theorists Antonia Baehr, Claudia Bosse, Tony Chakar, Adrian Lahoud, Janez Janša, and Jalal Toufic.

8

For indicative positions, see Duncombe 2002; Mouffe 2007; Gludovatz et al. 2010; Malzacher and steirischer herbst 2014.

9

For indicative positions, see Manning 2006; Ahmed 2010; Goldmann 2010.

10 With regards to the body’s role in martyrdom, see Tripp 2014; Buckner and Khatib 2014. With regards to the body’s role in human shielding, see Bargu 2014; Gordon and Perugini 2015.

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formity: it may be that people are moving or speaking in several directions at once, event at cross-purposes.” (2015, 157) Engaging this idea, I will later consider the possibility of building a collective project while maintaining a certain level of a-synchronicity, disidentification, and heterogeneity in action, analyzing its significance for a conceptualization of collectivity. But for now, I will focus on the representational qualities of bodies—the question of who represents whom or what and on what basis. In line with this, dance critic Elisabeth Nehring contends: “[The body] has always been a suitable field for projections. Of ideas, ideals, and ideologies. Of values and norms, of wishes and desires. An arena for fights, a fertile ground for stereotypes and clichés. […] A cliché can already be an act of violence. […] And very often it goes hand in hand with physical outrage. Isn’t the body not only observed and controlled, but already violated by the sight, by all these scoptic regimes? […] A resilient body is the one that denies logic, clarity—and thereby interpretation. […] An interpretation imposes meaning on the body. It wants the body to make sense—personally, politically, nationally—whatever. It takes the body under control again, objectifies, monopolizes, and dominates its expression.” (2017)11

In connection with this dynamic, all three case studies problematize the idea that individual bodies, by symbolic, imaginary, metaphorical, or corporeal force, align with and represent collective bodies—the body of a collective.12 This becomes concrete in the ways that the artists evoke the role and status of the body in both historical and recent upheavals, as well as in their descriptions of their own practices, situated in an internationalized art market and its overall

11 This text is excerpted from Elisabeth Nehring’s audio feature, “On the Emergence of Text between Experience and Observation—About the Questionable Role of a Critic,” presented July 1, 2017 at Violence of Inscriptions—On Resilience at HAUHebbel am Ufer theatre, Berlin. She analyzes how the three female performers— Valeska Gert, Yasmin Godder and Marina Abramovic—have been resisting collectivizing expectations on femininity, functionality, and political correctness through their artistic practices. 12 While the dramaturgical analyses suggest that the artists consciously work with this dynamic in their pieces, political theorist Lina Khatib observes in the broader Middle Eastern context that, given the actual role of bodies in peaceful, violent, explosive, and long-term political and societal processes, these dynamics did not always adequately translate in scholarly and media analyses (Khatib 2008; also see Martin 2016, 208).

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dynamics of framing bodies. On that point, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and the members of Dictaphone Group all recount, from personal experience, explicit expectations from curators, audiences, and peers to represent an ‘Arab body’ or an ‘Arab identity’ in their artwork. Here, I contend that the field of art mirrors a much broader mechanism of othering bodies—of creating and fostering prejudiced and stereotypical representations of the body to instill a widespread and mostly abstract sense of rejection or fear in political and public debate. Recent tendencies in mass media and popular discursive representations of bodies in refuge and forced migration serve as just one example of how corporeality, politics, and religion can be conflated in this process in generic, fomenting, and dangerous ways. Against this backdrop, the artists’ accounts of being trapped in collective narratives, representations, and experiences of the body and of reducing their artwork to their representational capacities are not exceptions.13 For example, when I presented the work of choreographer Danya Hammoud as a guest curator in a theatre in Berlin, an audience member commented after the show: “She is Lebanese, right? The performance was strong, but should have been more political.” (2017) The aesthetic and thematic expectations expressed here result in a rather normative corpus of body variations and corresponding realities that seem to be reserved for Arab artists: either ever-potent, resistant, militant, or terrorist bodies that maintain a high level of velocity, or nonsecular, weak, rejected, and docile bodies.14 Being addressed as and forced into representing a collective is, in my reading, an act of politicizing and institutionalizing bodies. In what follows, I will take on two analytical figures—hesitating and absence—and bring them in dialogue with the empirical findings to reflect on how agency in conjunction with body-bound artistic practices can potentially be thought of differently. Moments of Hesitation: Acting from Within In her lecture-performance I Can Find Something Shorter, If Necessary, writer and artist Lina Majdalanie points out how, under the banner of relevance and

13 Anthropologist Jessica Winegar points out that this mechanism of collectivization was reinforced with the Arab Spring and the repercussions of 9/11, which reintroduced a strong rhetoric of division, nationalized stereotypes, and judgmental approaches to different value systems within the public debate (see 2006, 660). 14 Reflecting on how artistic work from the Middle Eastern region is presented in European contexts, Ramsay Burt (2017a) describes existing stereotypes and phantasms of an Arab body in contemporary dance as a European invention.

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actuality, sociopolitical urgency risks being confused with romantic and unquestioned ideas of creativity (2009, 2018). According to her analysis of the field of contemporary performing arts, urgency, at its worst, risks becoming the ultimate legitimization for artistic work, situating it beyond critique. Referencing her own experience in the Lebanese context, she points to the reduction of complex correlations and realities in the Middle East to aestheticized and collectivized accounts of trauma and conflict as one unfortunate example of creating art as a commentary on real life. In response, Majdalanie opts for the possibility of inaction and disengagement as a commitment to reflect, to take time, to distance oneself from what seems familiar and evident, and to explore alternatives to dominant representations and experiences. Majdalanie’s reflections mirror some of the most significant findings from the comparative analyses of the data concerning the conceptual and practical localization of agency in art. The artists discussed in the case studies share similar concerns when raising questions about which audiences their artworks reach out to and which bodies we are actually seeing on stage—the ones that actually have the border problems being depicted or others acting on their behalf? To recall, Contingency, Free Advice, and Nothing to Declare were all created between 2010 and 2015, and Dictaphone Group and Saleh in particular acknowledge their respective engagements with contemporaneous activist campaigns or projects dedicated to the commons. Yet, none of the artists accepts to reduce their work to a direct comment on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath, or as having a direct impact on the latter. Rather, as the interviews verify, the artists explicitly draw attention to the limitations of their artistic practices and their outreach in the social and political sphere. They highlight the boundaries and thresholds that they face in their efforts to contribute to the broader circulation of knowledge and education, or to empower individuals and groups. When asked about the potential agency of their artwork, they all repeatedly describe their approach as “denormalizing” or “destabilizing” what seem to be unshakeable notions of borders and collectivity. In my reading, this opens up a notion of agency that is not necessarily directed toward or against a particular external cause, grounded in a specific objective or theme, or rooted in intentionality. Rather, it suggests that agency lies in the aesthetic system and the aesthetic experience itself and cannot be measured according to an artwork’s ability to instigate change or represent truth. Similarly, literature scholar and philosopher Joseph Vogl reflects on potential modes of interacting and intervening in reality via aesthetic practice in

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his essay On Hesitation (2014; author’s translation).15 Establishing an initial connection between aesthetic systems and the everyday social environments in which they operate, he develops the analytical concept of hesitation—of positing doubt rather than providing answers and affirmation to preestablished categories and knowledge—to capture this dynamic. Vogl locates the potential for action first inside the aesthetic system itself, rather than depicting it as a reaction to an outside objective, aim, or interest. He gives in his essay the example of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of it in order to draw attention to what he refers to as gaps or absences of meaning that define how we perceive an artwork: things that are not shown, not said, or not recognized as meaningful elements in a first place but that might open up alternative interpretations of an artwork and the realities that it pertains to, and thus, alter the starting points of our interpretations and judgements. In this sense, hesitating, according to Vogl, describes the capacity of an artistic work to evoke experiences of disintegration in the very act of perception: small, cautious shifts or relocations of how we give meaning to things that might, however, ultimately lead to action. Accordingly, the agency that an aesthetic system accommodates lies in its capacity to question common or established interpretations of reality, the validity of canonical knowledge, and the preconditions, norms, and values of our interpretations and actions at large. Vogl develops his analysis with reference to literature and visual arts, but I contend that “hesitating” similarly applies to the body-based artistic works in this study, in particular as he reads hesitating always in terms of movement. Importantly, while suggesting that audiences, artists, and society maintain a dynamic relationship in the aesthetic experience, his proposal is not invested in conflating the aesthetic with the political and social realms. Moreover, I understand it as an invitation to address the inconsistencies, the overflow, and the incommensurability of art in order to engage in a process of multiple readings and to imagine things differently.16 Hence, to suspend monolithic and stereo-

15 Vogl does not use the term “agency” in his text, but uses the German term Zaudern that might be translated as dithering, hesitating, or leaving in suspense. It describes moments of indecisiveness that might constitute either a conscious choice or an element of insecurity. 16 With reference to William Forsythe’s piece Three Atmospheric Studies, theater scholar Gerald Siegmund discusses the effects of art from the point of view of choreography: “Through continually shifting perspective, the events appear in varying forms (verbal, visual, bodily) precisely to prevent their becoming manifest and materialized in one single form. What is prevented, therefore, is the production of one single, valid

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typical interpretations and judgements is, as I discussed earlier, to reflect on the individual and collective assumptions and predicaments that construct our aesthetic experiences (see Amoore and Hall 2010 on artistic representations of borders). To different extents and via different dramaturgical strategies of hesitating, the case study artworks are all engaged in rewriting certainties and participating in a learning process, including the ways in which the performances address and involve their audiences. Such an approach is especially relevant when recalling that, in the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, agency is and has historically been strongly related to stark and highly politicized models of us-versus-them, resistance, or opposition. Against this backdrop, hesitation’s politics of softening, multiplying and diversifying perspectives might also be open for critique in the concrete geopolitical and cultural contexts under discussion. Thus, how can the desire for differentiation and subtlety be balanced with border realities that are to some extent nonnegotiable and only influential via a high level of mediatization? How do we acknowledge the fact that artistic experiences might not even reach or hold those bodies that are actually implicated in the issues under discussion? Towards a preliminary conclusion, I acknowledge that representation and experience are at the heart of both, arts and politics. Thus, exploring issues like borders and collectivity through aesthetic experience corresponds to an implicit or explicit act of questioning our individual and collective abilities to participate in society—it is an artistic but also a necessarily political choice. In this sense, Vogl’s insistence on the shapeshifting qualities of hesitation might be read not only as an artistic stance but equally as a political one that distrusts solidified interpretations of complex realities. In line with this, the artistic case studies and the dramaturgical strategies that the artists deploy help us understand that the relationships between bodies and agency are not linear or homogeneous, but constructed and traveling in meaning. Thus, the body’s agency cannot be sufficiently explained by predefined shared interests, norms, intentionality, or rational choice. Rather, as peace scholar Mona Lijla argues, there is an “extra cultural meaning attached to resisting bodies” (2017, 1)17 that exceeds linguistic

and solid representation of war events claiming to capture and display the truth of the events represented. […] The constant shifting of points of view primarily draws the audience’s attention to the construction of truth, which appears to be endlessly malleable depending on personal or political interests. War here becomes a metaphor for the destruction of all certainties.” (2016, 320) 17 Mona Lijla also points out that resistance studies have mainly focused on language and symbolism (2017, 2).

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registers and relates to perception, senses, affects, and emotions that indicate who belongs to a community, a territory, or a cause, and who does not. The Agency of Absent Bodies While embodiment is one element in explaining collective agency from the perspective of bodies, the case studies suggest that absence is another. Absence is a prevalent motif in the geopolitical and cultural framework of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. It is largely understood in relation to exiled, lost, missing, and dead bodies that evoke a long history of colonialism, migration, and occupation, and that continue to influence artists and intellectuals from the region. Correspondingly, in the Middle Eastern context, absence has been a starting point for a rich corpus of installations, performances, writing, films, and other art forms that discuss how to remember; how to engage in representation despite the lack of official narratives and memory, despite amnesia; and how to artistically create alternatives to existing archives and evidence.18 Testing the boundaries between fiction and truth, this strand of work in the contemporary art scenes from the region is about aesthetically debating, circulating, and renegotiating the role of history and one’s own stance in it. Or, as Abbas, in the interview, asks from a Palestinian perspective, how one handles the constant need to reappear, both corporeally as well as symbolically, in a context where one’s body is politically marginalized. At the same time, the artistic interest in the idea of absence that finds expression here reflects an imperative to hide or disappear because of existing or anticipated threats to one’s work, person, or community—an issue that has confronted artists and cultural operators, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings.19 In connection to this, the case studies offer concrete examples of how certain bodies, in the experience of the border, are kept absent—either for strategic purposes or as a result of being exposed to active acts of unseeing. It would be insufficient to explain the artists’ efforts to trace bodies, movement, and gestures that have been erased simply as effects of or reactions to normative structures. Instead, the dramaturgical analyses of the case studies

18 For indicative positions, see Walid Raad and Jalal Toufic; Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige; Kamal Aljafari; Larissa Sansour. 19 In the wake of the revolutionary movements in the Middle Eastern region from 2010 onwards, several cultural and arts educational institutions have faced intensified censorship, raids, politically pressured closings, and threats against cultural operators and audiences (for only few examples, see Townhouse Gallery in Cairo and SALT in Istanbul).

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suggest that absence is a mode of agency in its own right—a strategy to consciously and purposefully influence and take action while not being physically present. Choreographer and performance studies scholar Adham Hafez, for example, discusses the bias of absence in the context of art making across several Arab countries in his 2015 lecture AA—Artists Anonymous. In a prerecorded video, he reads aloud a series of four letters written by unnamed artists. We learn that the letters were drafted in Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis, spanning from 1938 to 2018, and addressed to an initiative titled “Artist’s Anonymous Community.” The letters are anonymous accounts based, as he notes, “on real events that took place, real events that may and will take place, real fiction” (Hafez 2015). They offer insights into artists’ realities: infra-structure, politics, hopes, and obstacles. Through the personal accounts, becoming—or rendering—oneself, one’s body, or one’s work absent inspires questions that combine current production realities in art with the sociopolitical challenges of working in conflict-driven contexts: “Can I work anonymously? Could the whole organization disappear and yet operate? What does this produce artistically, what kind of community can we mobilize at such times and within such new conditions? Who does one work for anonymously? Who is the audience of an anonymous artist, or an anonymous cultural foundation?” (Hafez 2015)20

20 In his lecture, Hafez addresses how whole communities are simultaneously hypermediatized and absent in global mainstream media coverage: “I worry if they [the Syrian refugees] are only seen in the light of the violence of the media generated images. Every Syrian man is a Muslim Radical Terrorist. Every Syrian Woman is a body amputated of its desires and covered entirely in black. The media generated images has no dancing bodies, has no singers” (2015). This statement, dated March 1995 in Damascus in the lecture, feels even more timely considering common representations of bodies at the borders, in refuge, and in mainstream media today. The collectivization of the body on which these images and narratives are based is also reflected in formulas like “waves of migration,” “refugee streams,” and rhetoric that depicts migrating bodies as “flooding” Western territories (and territorial privileges). Bodies perform refugeeness and look and move in a specific way, and are poor, traumatized, sad bodies. Hafez returns to the collectivization and invisibilization of Arab artists that he observes in an international art market: “Will I be able to be seen as an artist, only and merely an artist, the way I was seen home, or will I be geo-politicized and localized as a market builds itself around my fleeing terrified flesh, and my fragmented memory of ever having had political responsibility? Will I ever be seen as an artist—that thing that terrifies states of terror enough for them to set your museums, archives and galleries on fire?” (2015)

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In this sense, the impact of agency as a concept and as a strategy is twofold: it speaks of being silenced, of being washed out, and of not being seen. At the same time, when read as an active or conscious act of withdrawal, it represents an act of empowerment and a means to protect the physical and symbolic integrity of one’s body. The idea of absence cannot be equated with erasure or with a general incapacity for action only; it encompasses more than the activities of mourning and re-appropriating lost bodies or reacting to censorship. Rather, bodies-in-absence appear as sites of power and contestation; as challenges to established representational regimes, paradigms of presence, and notions of witnessing; and as potential catalysts for discipline, control, and violence as well as resistance, resilience, and agency. Deriving agency from absence acknowledges both moments of engagement but also moments of disengagement and non-participation as possible starting points for action. In other words, disengagement is not about the refusal or denial of something common. Nor does it come from a negative place. Rather, it questions the participation of bodies in the systems that they feed, that they belong to, and that they aestheticize and legitimize. In Response: Body Ethics Bodies-in-relation blur being and acting in order to problematize the norms, values, and ideas that bind bodies together. Drawing on the empirical material, the artists translate these concerns through their respective artistic inquiries into matters of self-determination and freedom, the right to public space and participation in society, or the accessibility of knowledge. Next to the social and political aspects that are addressed here, ethics, understood as applied and dispositional ethics (see Chapter 2.1) are negotiated in the aesthetic realm, in the aesthetic experience, and in the interaction between bodies. This observation resonates with scholarly debates that insist on the centrality of ethical understandings of lives in times of profound and interlocking social, environmental, and political transformations. Rosi Braidotti, writing on posthuman philosophy, speaks of “hybrid, multicultural, polyglot, post-identity spaces of becoming” (2006, 243) to indicate how notions of identity and tradition are affected by actual realities. Regarding the agency of bodies, she relates the problem of political agency to an inability to adequately represent the now, stating: “There is a shortage on the part of our social imaginary, a deficit of representational power, which underscores the political timidity of our times.”

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(2006, 243) What is important in the context of this study is that Braidotti opts for an ethical project that begins with the body:21 “At the core of this ethical project is a positive vision of the subject as a radically immanent, intensive body, that is, an assemblage of forces or flows, intensities, and passions that solidify in space and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as the ‘individual’ self. This intensive and dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and undergo constant though nondestructive fluxes of transformation […] It is important to see that this fundamentally positive vision of the ethical subject does not deny conflicts, tension, or even violent disagreements between different subjects.” (2006, 238)

Here, Braidotti’s conceptualization does not imagine the body as a bounded or closed entity. Instead, she projects a body in movement, capable of accommodating transformation and conflict, as I will further develop in this chapter. For now, I limit myself to suggesting that the artists discussed in the case studies place equal emphasis on the process of decision making rather than on the fulfilment of predefined form or rules. Thus, they invite their audiences to reassess their respective ethical premises through their artwork. In other words, they set up aesthetic experiences in which imaginary, symbolic, and material territories are negotiated by corporeal and sensorial means and in which competing interpretive frameworks, values, and norms are brought into conversation. Experiences of vulnerability, non-accomplishment, and failure are part of this process, and Braidotti22 suggests that taking “suffering into account is the starting point” for what she describes as the process of “becoming-ethical” (2006, 243). She contends: “Such an enterprise involves a sense of loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, and thus is not free of pain. No process of consciousness-raising ever is.” (2006, 241) Bringing philosophy and performing arts into dialogue, Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer also work towards an understanding of ethics as a responsive dynamic rather than a directive concept. It is in the interaction of bodies that they see the political relevance of artistic practice, stating: “One body

21 See Arno Böhler’s, Erin Manning’s, and Brian Massumi’s reflections on Spinoza’s question “Do we know what a body can do?” (Manning, 2014; Massumi, 2014). 22 “This is the defining moment of the process of becoming-ethical: the move across and beyond pain, loss, and negative passions. Taking suffering into account is the starting point; the real aim of the process, however, is the quest for ways of overcoming the stultifying effects of passivity, brought about by pain.” (Braidotti 2006, 243)

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is no body, because bodies only exist in relation to other bodies. They inter-act with each other, have a reciprocal effect on each other.” (2018, 190) Similarly to Braidotti, who develops her notion of ethics primarily from the body’s embeddedness in social and transformative realities, Böhler and Granzer ground their approach in the body’s initial exposure and openness to the world: to all kinds of animate and inanimate bodies, anchored in their very corporeality and physicality; to the body’s skin, breath, sensitivity, and capacity to affect and to be affected: “One goes over to the other, influences others, other influence bodies. Bodies are exposed, close to the skin, exposed to each other, are living, breathing, psychic bodies. For this reason they have an ethical dimension. An ethical-aesthetical dimension. Insofar as they are skin, they possess an ethical dimension: For from that instance they are in sensitive contact with other bodies and the problem how they want/should experience and that contact with other bodies in their body.” (Böhler and Granzer 2018, 204)

In this sense, the process of mutual validation and recognition through which ethical principles are negotiated both within and beyond the aesthetic realm is not only directed towards the outside, but also expands into multiple versions and articulations of the body itself.23 In this entanglement, according to Böhler and Granzer, we face a “limit of self-awareness: […] a body’s difference from itself is already inscribed in the body itself, not only in the conscious reflecting on it.” (2018, 192) Accepting an immanent relationality of the body that is not based on the principle of self-similarity gains particular relevance in the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, where the politics and ethics of belonging continue to be strongly influenced by external judgments, acts of institutionalization, and powerful symbolism. In what follows, I will refer to the concept of hospitality in order to discuss how the aforementioned, body-based notion of ethics translates into the conditions of welcoming and inviting strangers and foreigners into the aesthetic and social realms. On this basis, I will then turn to examples from arts funding in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel and illustrate how ethical thought crystallizes in the actual production practices of the artists under discussion. Of Hospitality The motif of the encounter and the reflection on its foundations and preconditions runs through Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects on several levels, and

23 See also Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of “being singular-plural” (2000; 2008).

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connects to concepts and practices of care, invitation, and address that I have explained earlier in methodological terms. At the intersection of aesthetics and politics, the study questions the artists’ strategies for communicating with their audiences and with society through their work. This approach centers the idea of hospitality—of who welcomes whom and on what terms—in my analyses. Beyond a general acknowledgment that hospitality is a deeply ingrained convention and lauded virtue in many Middle Eastern cultures, it offers an analytical framework that allows me to look at how bodies enter into relationships with each other and how responsibility and agency are distributed and shared in bodies’ encounters. In his notorious conceptualization of hospitality in the 1996 seminars The Foreign Question and Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality, philosopher Jacques Derrida (2000) accentuates a paradox in the idea of hospitality. As a cultural practice of welcoming and inviting the stranger and the foreigner and of opening up one’s home or culture, hospitality simultaneously comes with an element of collision when potentially conflicting protocols and desires, temporary alliances, and hidden histories need to be handled. Derrida, correspondingly, describes the encounter between the host and the guest, and between the foreigner and the friend, as a process in which rights and obligations are negotiated: “The foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc. This personage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that’s the first act of violence. That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before to be able to and so as to be able to welcome him in our country? If he was already speaking our language, with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to him? This is the paradox.” (2000, 15-16)

What becomes clear from Derrida’s reflections is, first of all, how different normative systems are interwoven in every act of hospitality: aesthetics (in this case, language, movement, and imagination); politics (law); and ethics (preconditions and premises that define the encounter with the foreigner). By pointing to the inclusions, exclusions, and nonnegotiable inequality that define hospitality in the first place, Derrida distinguishes between what he terms “conditional” and

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“unconditional” or “absolute” hospitality (2000). Whereas unconditional hospitality exists, according to him, without imperative, order, or duty and without restriction or compensation,24 conditional hospitality, by contrast, is linked to an initial gesture of taming and to manifold practices of subordination, distinction, and forced assimilation. Derrida further points out that these dynamics of distributing physical and symbolic space do not necessarily rely on given realities, but instead are strongly defined by collective projections, i.e., on how the other is constructed in imagination and memory. Thus, following Derrida, hospitality in an unconditional sense remains ultimately unaccomplished. Yet, he suggests that we invest in continued acts of imagining and desiring the encounter with others and with ourselves—an undertaking to which the artistic works under discussion might eventually contribute. Thus, it is exactly this ambivalence of openness and closure that becomes tangible in the aesthetic experiences that the artists create. In producing temporary experiences of welcoming the stranger on the artists’ terms and conditions, they lay open the ethics and politics of social interactions (codes, values, stereotypes, etc.) and put them up for discussion. In summary, the concept of hospitality places the idea of negotiation at the center of analyzing the relationship between bodies. It suggests that these relationships do not just exist, but are constructed, unstable, and unequal. The ethical demand that Derrida emphasizes in his reflections on the distribution of territories translates, in my reading, into the need to give up certainties of belonging and preexisting definitions of who is the host and who is the guest in order to engage in an encounter with the other. This concerns artists, audiences, and citizens alike, and is exemplified by the practical need to balance ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Cultural Diplomacy or Soft Humanism? This conceptual framework of conditional and unconditional hospitality aids us in looking more closely at the realities of production that confront many artists from Lebanon and Palestine and that are also referenced in the case study analyses. In particular, I am interested in the aesthetic but also ethical criteria and categories that define arts funding, and thus the encounter among the artists, audiences, and society at large, in these contexts. I have already noted

24 “Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner, but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking for them either reciprocity (entering into the pact) or even their names.” (Derrida 2000, 25)

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that external sources such as international NGOs provide the majority of resources for artists to create, produce, and distribute their work. While grants and private donations are crucial in situations where structural funding for bodybased arts is almost nonexistent, they simultaneously introduce external value systems and eligibility requirements—for example, extra-artistic demands or expectations that vary from community-building activities and cultural dialogues to therapeutic approaches to education and relief from trauma—that affect artists’ practice. Bernadette Buckley (2014, 25) underscores the sense of efficiency and measurable outcomes that often accompanies such approaches, asking “if art cannot change realities, can it at least introduce hope?” At the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics, bodies and their artistic articulations risk being reduced to their ability to compensate for political or representational deficiencies. This dynamic is exemplified by the phenomenon of funders, notably in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, introducing topical frameworks to the creative process that, for example, connect artistic work with ideas of resistance or conflict or that often come with an internationally recognizable vocabulary of body representations such as suffering, vulnerability, wounded and victim-like bodies, or weak bodies that need protection. Artists, as the case studies exemplify, are consequently and to different degrees confronted with the need to implicitly or overtly engage these framings in their artistic choices in order to receive economic and symbolic recognition for their work in the local context as well as to serve the sentiments of a global public (see Bargu 2013). In line with this, different authors have pointed out that humane or humanitarian standards are used to legitimize the relevance of a piece of artwork, and that bodies, in the process, become metaphors or catalysts for large-scale ideological projects. Christina di Marchi, for instance, comments on the potential problematic effects of these mechanisms for artistic projects related to the current refugee crisis: “The artist’s own body can be perceived as a tool for exploring reality, in a quest for universalism, where the individual embodies the humanity and the simplicity of his/her actions testifying to a more inherent pertinence and reference to the human condition per se.” (2016)25 This bias has been addressed in discussions about the benefits and limitations of conceiving art as a means of cultural diplomacy or a communal activity that

25 Also see “10 Things You Need to Consider if You are an Artist—Not of the Refugee and Asylum Seeker community—Looking to Work with our Community” issued by RISE: Refugees, Survivors, and Ex-Detainees (2015). In the Palestinian context, communal dance in particular has been explored as a peace-building and harmonypromoting activity for conflict-scarred and sociopolitically enfeebled communities.

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might build bridges, instill a sense of belonging, or foster interethnic tolerance and cross-cultural understanding. Yet, as Banu Bargu reminds us in her analysis of the connections between international law, warfare, and morality, the bodies whose rights are actually violated are most often the bodies that are denied opportunities to give direct evidence of their experiences, that are not in a position to call for justice, and that are not in a position to enter our galleries, theaters, and performance spaces. She describes this as the “aporetic quality” (Bargu 2016, 33) that accompanies any alignment of specific bodies with overarching values. This leaves us with the question of who can afford to be ethical, nonjudgmental, open, and unconditionally hospitable in light of real risks, danger, or the simple lack of alternatives? At worst, it forces artists into a nonnegotiable position of weighing principles against results. My critical take on funding politics is not meant to ignore or dismiss the positive effects that initiatives actually might have on a social or educational level. I seek, however, to accentuate the troubling conflation of aesthetics and pragmatics that, as I have observed in my practice as a curator, is often not optional for the artists and art institutions involved. Referencing the exhibition of Arab artists in the American context, anthropologist Jessica Winegar similarly argues that these mechanisms hold strongly moralizing presumptions about what is valued as good or bad art—ideas that conflict with scholarly or professional accounts.26 Thus, even though projects that engage explicit links between art, society, and politics in their framing might be well intentioned, they risk reducing artistic work to expressions of soft humanism rather than a field of reflection and action in its own right. In conclusion, the application of prevalent funding politics to artistic work from Lebanon and Palestine brings, once more, the question of responsibility to the fore. It insists that we take into account the existence and impact of privileges (ranging from freedom and wealth to the

26 In her analysis of the post-9/11 American context, Jessica Winegar (2008) shows how, paradoxically, in search of experimental and contemporary forms of artistic practice from the Arab region, specific frameworks like Islam, conflict, and the veiled body have been reproduced in a process that ultimately inflated and stabilized existing stereotypes rather than complicating them. Furthermore, she argues that many projects that engaged specifically in presenting and mediating art from the Arab context relied, more or less explicitly, on the assumption that art is universal. This precondition, according to her, takes a Western notion of humanity for granted and suggests, in a continuation of colonial politics, that non-Western art might profit from growth and proliferation when given international exposure.

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material availability of and access to resources) in discussing ethical, aesthetic, and political standards in an internationalized art market.

6.2

BORDERS ‘THE BORDER’ AS ANALYTICAL CATEGORY

Recent scholarship on the Arab uprisings and their repercussions illustrates the perennial centrality of borders in Middle Eastern history and geopolitics (see Del Sarto 2017). Yet, as the examples of Contingency, Free Advice, and Nothing to Declare make clear, the experience of the border is always specific and cannot be analyzed without taking into account the complex and transformative realities of particular situations. Thus, when considering the border as an analytical category within the framework of this study, it is impossible to “attribute to the border an essence which would be valid in all places and at all times, for all physical scales and time periods, and which would be included in the same way in all individual and collective experiences,” as philosopher Étienne Balibar reminds us (2002, 75).27 This initial bias results from working with the indissoluble tension between the local and the global, between abstraction and concreteness, and between the material and the immaterial, and has intensified as the definition of the border has broadened since the 1990s with the gradual development of the transdisciplinary field of border studies (see Wilson and Hastings 2012, 1-25). Spanning different academic and practice-based disciplines such as international relations, geography, architecture, cultural studies, and political theory, increased scholarly attention has “also obscured what a border is” (Johnson et al. 2011, 61). Moreover, there is a basic tension characterizing research on borders: on the one hand, ideas of globalization, transnationalism, network communities, fluidity, and flows continue to determine scientific discourses on a “borderless” world.28 On the other hand, politics of control, defense, and security counter this

27 Balibar (2002) points out that the mere—and often ahistorical—defining of something as a border is necessarily reductive and predetermines the way a problem or phenomenon is read and understood. 28 This development was fostered in the post-Cold War period and with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Geographer Anssi Paasi sketches out the theoretical vocabulary that has been invented in border studies from the 1990s onwards in relation to emerging globalization debates, e.g., terms like space of flows, de- and re-territorialization, mobility, and hybridity (2011,62). For indicative positions, see Beck 1986; Beck and Levy 2013; Rumford 2014.

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perspective as they have gained influence in the debate, these positions have found expression in economic protectionism and anti-migrant sentiment, most notably in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent rhetoric of ‘war on terror’.29 The specific borders of Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and the neighboring regions illustrate these increasingly contested and contentious dynamics (see Kaufman 2014a, b). In Palestine/Israel, the period after the First Intifada and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 has been marked by discourses of reconciliation and peace, accompanied by intensified instances of partition and ongoing spatial fragmentation of Palestinian territories (see Kotef 2015, 29). In the Lebanese context, the confessional political system according to which the country is governed since the end of the civil war in 1990 is highly salient to this discussion. Political sociologist Chris Rumford comments on the relationship between the apparently conflicting paradigms of movement expressed here: “Borders and mobilities are not antithetical. A globalizing world is a world of networks, flows and mobility; it is also a world of borders.” (2006, 163) Consequently, the uniqueness and particularity of every border constitutes the primary condition of the subsequent analyses. Yet, as geographer Alison Mountz accentuates, “[b]ecause borders are always in a state of becoming, their conceptualization remains provisional in nature” (2011, 65).30 Furthermore, it must be noted that academic scholarship on borders mirrors the initial epistemic unbalances that I addressed in Chapter 2.1. While the correlation between belonging and space are ubiquitous topics in both public discourse and academic research on the geopolitics of the Middle East, as Daniel Meier emphasizes, the region continues to be theorized to a large

29 In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, the territorial integrity of borders has seen new challenges: while on a practical level, border practices and regulations have been increasingly tightened, including between Arab countries, borders in the region have never been “hermetically sealed” (Del Sarto 2017, 767) in a similar way and continue to be disputed. According to Del Sarto (see 2007), this basic level of permeability and instability can be explained by a historically increasing interdependency between different communities and states in the region, resulting in a reduced capacity to exert sovereignty and rearrange borderwork between different states, groups, and agents. 30 Mountz rejects a reading of borders as arbitrary or completely open formations and identifies the methodological challenge of producing creative tools and research designs that can introduce analytical precision in understanding the formation and experience of borders. In this context, she explicitly mentions the possibility of integrating activists in border research (2011, 65).

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extent on the basis of strongly Western and relatively inflexible categories like nationality, ethnicity, or religion (2013, 353).31 He summarizes: “The Middle East is traditionally under-represented in border studies despite the salience of conflicts involving borders or along sectarian boundaries.” (2013, 353) In the context of his research on Lebanon, Meier consequently opts for examining hegemonic categories of border analysis: “The case of Lebanon conveys the importance of thinking about social and political relations in terms of space, which requires thinking simultaneously about both physical (borders) and symbolic (boundaries) divisions.” (2013, 354) In line with this, Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects is interested in how artists address the experience of the border in their conceptual approaches and the dramaturgical strategies that they develop. This approach engages with the hypothesis that “borderwork,” defined here as the exploration and implementation of border concepts and spaces, has undergone a process of gradual redistribution in recent years—a presumption with which the literature on borders generally agrees. Chris Rumford, for instance, argues that “borders, and, in particular, processes of bordering, debordering and rebordering are central to any under-standing of the social” (2006, 166). As a consequence and in reaction to the manifold social, environmental, and political transformations of our time, more and more nonstate (and even antistate) actors and groups have become involved in the material and immaterial production, representation, and maintenance of territory, territoriality, space, and sovereignty. This development and the broadening of agency that it entails can be read as exposing borderwork to communal and public engagement. Alongside direct politics on the street, the fields of art and culture have also gained renewed recognition for the theoretical analyses and practical implementation of borders (see Matar and Harb 2013), and have specifically acknowledged bodies in their sensorial, experiential,

31 Meier contends that the imbalance in academic research on borders in the Middle East mirrors the predominance of certain research axes; namely, that existing studies are focused on state-building rather than nation-building processes and thus do not take the boundaries between sects, linguistic communities, or marginalized groups sufficiently into account. He points out that the regular emphasis of certain borders (such as, in the case of Lebanon, the initial dividing line since the National Pact in 1943, or the Blue Line marking the withdrawal of the Israeli Defence Forces in the year 2000 after an eighteen-year occupation) might ignore “overlapping with other divisions such as those between Right and Left, pro- and anti-West, sectarians and secularists” (2013, 353).

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symbolic, and corporeal capacities in this context.32 More specifically, Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall emphasize the contribution that artists might make in what they term “border theatre” (2010). They contend that artists are potentially endowed with the ability to intervene in the experience of the border on an emotional level, beyond concrete acts of re-appropriating border spaces. Artists disrupt routines33 that condition how borders are perceived and experienced and they rework “the everyday ways of seeing, [to] defamiliarize the border crossing, making it strange, incongruous and extraordinary” (Amoore and Hall 2010, 300).34 In a similar vein and with concrete reference to the Palestinian/Israeli context, Johannes Becker et al. evaluate social and therapeutic uses of performance art that frame the experience of the border as positive, pointing to its supportive impact on collective imagination: “[I]n the shadow of occupation, disillusionment and hyper-nationalism, public performances of ‘alternative’ spaces and identities have challenged fixed spatial boundaries, and performance has become an important site for the expression of alternative imaginations” (2013, 259). While this aligns with my basic argument that artistic practice can inform our understanding and experience of the border in a meaningful way, it is still necessary to critically reflect on the repercussions of pairing artistic and non-artistic means and objectives in the process.

32 Chris Rumford (2006) references an incident in which Venezuelan actor Javier Tellez propelled the human body of David Smith across the US-Mexican border in Tijuana/San Diego in August 2005—an act described in the media as a “human cannonball.” With this example, Rumford accentuates the metaphorical dimension of the body that unfolded in the project, i.e., its potential to stand in for a larger collective of border crossers. Thus, this event, according to him, “is illustrative of a shift in the relationship between state and society. Borders have human and experiential dimensions, and can be appropriated by societal actors for non-state purposes; signaling an important dimension of community identity” (2006, 159). 33 As I will explain in Chapter 6.2., routine connects to the body’s appearance and performance at the border, referring to the quotidian, often unavoidable experience of the border, particularly in the context of Palestine/Israel. It can equally be associated with a highly repetitive set of representations, behavioral patterns, actions, etc. that define border experiences in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. 34 Many approaches attributing border agency to artists, activists, or other nonstate players accentuate a distinctively hybridized culture as a characteristic of border spaces (see Heyman 2012; Anzaldúa 1999).

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Trapped in Images: The Aesthetic-Political Currency of the Border But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. Gloria Anzaldúa 1987, 24-25.

My selection of the empirical sample operates on the assumption that all three artistic works address and negotiate borders and bordering experiences from a body-based and movement-centered approach.35 Here, it is important to remind the reader that I personally have established this research focus and that it might not correspond in all respects to the artists’ own intentions and claims. Therefore, the case study analyses specify the different degrees to which Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group engage in the theme as well as their reservations and attitudes towards analytically framing their work within the notion of the border. Furthermore, my preoccupation with borders in this study needs to be contextualized within a potent tradition of image-making in Middle Eastern cultures. In her study on the role of the visual in political struggles, political analyst Lina Khatib exemplifies that the coupling of arts and sociopolitical agency rests upon a long tradition that extends into the present (2013). Consequently, borders and the experience of the border have, from a historical perspective, given rise to a rich corpus of aesthetic articulations across different artistic disciplines.36 Artist Dina Matar and media scholar Zahera Harb remark

35 In summary, the types of borders that are negotiated in the case studies vary considerably in quality, use, and agency. They range from natural, geopolitical and national borders, to restrictions operationalized in law, bureaucracy, and administration, and boundaries linked to social, gendered, political, economical, sectarian and ethnic affiliations and ethical concerns. They include concrete, infrastructural, and material borders as well as less tangible boundaries related to, for instance, one’s capacity to participate as a citizen in society. 36 Next to the iconography, symbolism, and thematic history of the aesthetics and politics of border representations, Ariella Azoulay, among others, calls for increased attention to the perspective from which aesthetic experiences and artistic representations are created: who has the capacity and legitimization to represent, and whose positions are masked? (see Kratsman and Azoulay 2016). For an artistic example in the context of Palestine/Israel, see the choreographic project Archive that choreographer Arkadi Zaides (website) developed in response to the archives of the

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that, in the Middle Eastern context, these types of representations have been idealized and politicized as accepting the challenge to represent the unrepresentable (2013, 10). Simultaneously, such representations have continued to be intimately connected to hegemonic and colonial politics inasmuch as they result, to a large extent, from “methods and concepts of Western-centric mass communication theories and approaches which tend to focus on the mainstream media and other conventional forms of communication while ignoring other areas and spaces of expression” (Matar and Harb 2013, 3). Against this backdrop, revolutionary events in the Arab region from 2010 onwards have sparked an increasing number of artworks, artistic commissions, events, and curatorial projects dedicated to border-related issues as I have outlined in the introduction to this book. The interests and objectives of these (often temporary and punctual) initiatives are multiple, ranging from the desire to provide alternative information to mainstream media coverage and contribute to the educational realm, to more politicized initiatives addressing human rights activism and other activist struggles. Thus, the border has again become a popular topic and a kind of currency in the international field of contemporary arts and related discourses, catering, to some extent, to a globalized and commercialized competition for attention and agency, with the pieces of artwork at the center. Despite the humanitarian and critical attitude of many of the institutions and agents that are involved in this dynamic, it might, at the worst, lead to downplaying border realities by aestheticizing them or by repeating a wellestablished, fetishized repertory of border images and narratives—a precondition that, as the case study analyses show, all of the artists are well aware of.37 Thus, what follows does not aim to offer a catchall theory. Rather, I aim to introduce differentiations and nuances into prevailing chiastic constructions of the border as clear-cut, equally distributed, and comprehensive lines of separation with a comparative analysis of the cases. On this basis, the following text is structured around three observations that are key to my theoretical conceptualization of the border: I will begin by engaging elements from the empirical material that link the experience of the border with different concepts of move-

Camera Project by B’tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. 37 On the contrary, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group all insist that they are not invested in a factual or authentic reconstruction of any specific border experience. Rather, they explicitly acknowledge the complex processes of translation that demarcate the real experience of borders from their artistic and aesthetic representations.

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ment; subsequently, I will examine the role of corporeality and embodiment in border processes in order to argue that borders always exist in various material and immaterial extensions and amplifications, i.e., in their structural qualities. The Border In and As Movement “Once the border had been created and made real, there needed to be a way for bodies to be defined as passable or not-passable across these spaces,” contends writer Agri Ismaïl (2018, 25) in his historical review of the interconnection between borders, maps, and bodies, reminding us that borders have been gradually introduced and invented over time, rather than constituting ‘facts.’ However, when considering current mainstream discourses on phenomena like migration and forced displacement, the prevalent sense of the border is linked to its ability and efficiency to restrict, control, monitor, or allow for mobility, effacing how borders are being made and changed over time. Grounded in arguments on geopolitical, environmental, or national division and defense, the impact of the border is measured by its efficiency in influencing human and nonhuman movement. In the Middle Eastern context, imbuing borders with a demarcating and separating function is closely linked to the region’s history of colonialism, the advent of nation-states, and the redistribution and legitimation of territory and land in the process (see Grimson 2012; Balibar 2002). The artifact of the map and the practice of mapping, dedicated to the organization of physical as well as imaginary space, illustrate these inherently unequal dynamics (see Anderson 2006; Kaufman 2010; Shosan 2010; Bhagat and Mogel 2008; Mignolo 2014). Furthermore, the measurement, units, colors, graphs, lines, and legends that maps employ demonstrate aesthetically that borders are highly disputed and constructed. Maps define our perception and awareness of the world, and are meant to create paradigmatic and effective representations of the border that in general terms aspire to some kind of truth. Thus, they influence how we experience reality, how we organize movement, and how we distribute and circulate knowledge. Border scholar Henk van Houtum depicts “mapping intrinsically as a political science” (2012, 408). In dialogue with decolonial theories in geography and architecture, he contends: “The map of a border, however shaped and curved, is surreal, it is not the border. […] What a map of a border therefore actually creates is a gap, a difference. [It] excludes imagination, identifications, emotions, and beliefs outside the geopolitical realm.” (2012, 411) In the empirical material, it is most distinctly Dictaphone Group who put into practice the argument that maps are not neutral or equal tools of representation. By editing

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different versions of the base map of the Lebanese railway in Nothing to Declare, they shake its authoritarian status and make room to speculate about elements and information that are hidden or made unrecognizable or invisible in the artifact. I interpret their dramaturgical strategy of remapping as a gesture of claiming access to the actual border spaces that the railway tracks and structures demarcate, as well as to information about their history and current use. Maps, in this example, appear as both normative and stabilized orders that are, at the same time, actualized and challenged by quotidian physical as well as imaginary cross-border movements. In resonance with this more dynamic and experiential idea of the border, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group provide in the interviews a vocabulary that undermines the conjunction of movement with the border. The terms and ideas that can be extracted from their accounts cover different registers. They characterize the materiality of the border as “porous” and “permeable,” and infuse it with qualities of movement that range from “dynamic” and “fluid” to “temporary” and “changing.” Importantly, the artists’ wording suggests that the border is recollected, handed down, and situated in a moving body; that it is “bodily,” “corporeal,” and “visceral,” “experienced” or “felt,” as the data unpacks. Furthermore, the artists’ link the embodied quality of the border to affects and emotions recalled from their own lived experiences there; for instance, uneasiness, fear, anger, excitement or the importance of trust at the border. In line with this, geographer Anssi Paasi writes: “Rather than neutral lines, borders are pools of emotions, fears and memories that can be mobilized apace for both progressive and regressive purposes.” (2011, 62) These findings suggest that the border cannot be reduced to its external realities but must be approached as a dynamic configuration and a movement-related experience and activity: as a space of passage, transition, and encounter.38 This process-driven perspective resonates with theoretical positions in border studies that shift the focus from territorial approaches to spatial ones, not least because of the increasing technologization and digitalization of border logistics and movements (see Mountz 2011, 65). In contrast to explanatory models of the border that rely on binary constructions of openness and closeness, us and them, bordering and rebordering, or security lines and networks (see Rumford 2006, 57), in this strand of scholarship, borders are validated as “spaces in their own

38 In line with this, borders and boundaries have been recurrently associated with the skin of the body. However, this metaphor has also been criticized, as it might suggest that borders are natural and not, to a large extent, constructed (see Cooper and Rumford 2013, 111).

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right” that are “designed to encourage various kinds of mobility” (Rumford 2011, 67). As Louise Amoore contends: “No longer strictly a matter of disciplinary practices that stop, prohibit, enclose, delimit or proscribe, the work of the contemporary border is conducted in and through movement itself.” (2011, 64) In connection to this, the results from the comparative analyses speak to a change in vocabulary in border studies with concepts such as “borderzones,” “borderscapes,” and “borderlands” (see for an overview of the debate Wilson and Donnan 2012, 1-25). This terminology indicates a polyvalent character of the border that takes into account the different ways that it is used and experienced. Moving Frameworks and the Permeability of the Border In the case studies, the artists address how, in the experience of the border, physical movement is monitored, restricted, policed, enabled, and improvised. Correspondingly, they offer descriptions as well as corporeal, sonic, and visual evidence of the built infrastructure of the border: the checkpoint and the railway tracks or more indirect evocations like turnstiles, gates, or the sounds of digital surveillance technology. Whereas this might correspond to common experiences of the border, at the same time they emphasize the flexibility, transformability, and instability of the border’s material reality. With specific reference to the Palestinian/Israeli context, for instance, Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe the provisional quality of border infrastructure in place during their research: flying or mobile checkpoints that can easily be dismantled and be rebuilt elsewhere. This mechanism continues to be used by the Israeli army as an efficient and widespread means of operationalizing the occupation of the Palestinian territories and maintaining a dispositive that, as political theorist Hagar Kotef puts it, “retains high degrees of permanence in a system that is typified by flux and inherent arbitrariness” (2015, 34).39 Dictaphone Group, for their part, illustrate borders’ inherent malleability using the example of the pan-Arab railway project and its gradual adjustment to both external land borders and intercommunal boundaries within Lebanon. In addition, all of the artists describe

39 This web of checkpoints has gradually been developed across the West Bank since 1991 and border terminals have been installed since 2005. It is important to note when speaking about border fragmentation, that these obstacles vary in technology and materiality as well as in the ways they are operated and are for the most part located on Palestinian territory (see Kotef 2015, 27). As a result, there are currently a total of six different IDs for Palestinians globally. This exemplifies that the fragmentation is not only territorial but also related to human rights and the access to resources.

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from personal as well as others’ lived experience how legal and administrative conditions (i.e. visa issuance practices, permits, access criteria) undergo constant—and from a Palestinian perspective, arbitrary and hardly foreseeable— change. Consequently, these analytical findings suggest that the experience of the border constitutes the result of fluctuating and variable conditions. This holds a certain paradox, as border politics are often presented as relying on stable, comprehensive, transparent, and liable legal or civic foundations of rights and obligations, such as citizenship status, age, and nationality—to name but a few criteria. In addition to findings that depict the border as a source of insecurity and arbitrariness, the case studies also offer a parallel and more positive interpretation of the idea of movement in conjunction with the border. In their accounts, all of the artists directly and indirectly reference historical or contemporary Arab cross-border movements: civic or activist initiatives that use public, imaginary, or digital space to instigate collective action, self-organization, and solidarity across different Arab countries and beyond (see also Insin and Nielsen 2008). El Khoury of Dictophone Group, for example, mention how a concrete case of deporting an individual at a specific border might trigger solidarity movements that spill over and expand in digital space, the public sphere, and—in the form of aesthetic experience—theatrical space (see El Khoury 2013). In line with this, Chris Rumford writes: “Borderwork can also be associated with a range of claims-making activity, not only claims to national belonging or citizenship, but also demands for trans-national mobility, assertions for human rights, and demonstrations for political actorhood, all of which can comprise acts of citizenship.” (2011, 68) The border, accordingly, is not just a matter of physical presence; much more, it is characterized by a range of intersecting and transtemporal movements and it engages different media. Of Kinetic Structures and Imaginary Lines: The Border Movements of Society The analyses of the empirical material suggest that the experience of the border and the experience of movement are not isolated, but are to a certain degree coconstitutive and interdependent. This correlation has been at the center of recent border scholarship, as well, accentuating the interaction between different bodies and different movement orders. In connection to this study’s research focus on collectivity, I will explore this scholarship through Thomas Nail’s and, more intensively, Hagar Kotef’s studies on the relationship between borders, movement, and society.

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In his 2016 book Theory of the Border, philosopher Thomas Nail grounds his analysis in the function that borders perform in society and therefore engages with challenges wrought by globalization. More than being interested in how borders grant or restrict bodies’ mobility, Nail assumes that their essential task lies in ordering societies by controlling movement. Thus, he conceptualizes the border “as a form of social division, […] and the social division of bodies” to argue that the history of the border must be read as the history of social movements themselves, “a history of vectors, trajectories, (re)directions, captures and divisions” (2016, 2). In other words, he suggests that societies should be studied through their politics of movement. Similar to the artistic case studies at hand, Nail situates his theorization of borders in the everyday, and thus undermines the worldliness of borders. Based on historical research on the US-Mexican border (2016, 165-220) and, correspondingly, a largely Western framework of references, he argues that by definition borders pertain to movement and are thus not reducible to space—that “borders are kinetic structures” (2016, 14) that define, enter, and inhabit every aspect of daily life. Hence, the construction and experience of the border can, according to him, not be sufficiently explained as the mere results of overarching sovereign orders or preestablished entities of division, such as law, the state, or geopolitics. Significantly for this study, Nail does not describe the intertwined and intrasocietal movements that borders generate and maintain as necessarily linear, consistent, or coherent. Rather, he identifies scale, intensity, flow, and the re-direction and recirculation of movement (see 2016, 24-35) as significant parameters in the ordering of border movements, and thus of society itself. By describing borders as nonlinear movements and, importantly, assigning them an always “in-between” state (2016, 2), Nail acknowledges their ability to host and react to tension and struggle. With this proposal, he is reacting to the conceptual problem that stems from combining contradictory yet coexisting elements in the definition of the border: everyday border experiences of pertinence and unavoidability as well as experiences of adaptability and flow. Thus, Nail captures the contradictions and ambivalences that the case study analyses evoke in the experience of the border, as well. In summary, it is in the combination of the border’s general capacity for order and the contingent quality of its movement that Nail sees its transformative potential for society and grounds his theoretical claim to reread the history of society as a history of the border. Political theorist Hagar Kotef is equally interested in the relationship between movement, borders, and society (2015). Yet, her investigation takes as its starting point the status of movement in contemporary politics, notably in the links between control over the formation of distinct subject positions and the

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control of movement, and how this mechanism has been used to implement border politics. She argues that the liberal subject has historically been theorized as a moving subject, and thus she stresses the significance of practices of selfregulation to which the liberal subject has been exposed since the seventeenth century: an aspect that my case study analyses confirm with examples of selfpolicing, self-disciplining, and self-censoring at the border that the artists both offer personally and deploy as dramaturgical strategies in their work. Thus, Kotef contends that the ideas of freedom and of physical movement are immanently linked, albeit in an unequal and unbalanced manner.40 She states: “The free movement of some limits, hides, even denies the existence of others. Moreover, the movement of some is further maximized by this effacement of others and their need to move.” (2015, 54) Significantly, however, as Kotef emphasizes: “Regimes of movement are thus never simply a way to control, to regulate, or to incite movement. Regimes of movement are integral to the formation of different modes of being” (2015, 15), i.e., they are integral to violence and oppression as much as freedom and self-determination. The conceptualization and practical implementation of mobility and immobility constitutes, according to Kotef, a basic principle of subject formation that applies to every political system and, in a particularly elaborate and intense manner, to situations of crisis and conflict. Her study is based on fieldwork and her own activist practice at Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank (2015, 58-59), where she observes technologies and routines that Israelis use to contain the moving bodies of Palestinians. There is a clear connection to my empirical findings in her suggestion that borders are not only a matter of physical space; rather, as she shows, they are equally constructed, experienced, and maintained in vision and imagination. Kotef anchors her argument by discussing a specific movement order that revolves around what she calls “the imaginary line that

40 Kotef references a long history of alignment between borders and sovereignty: “Regimes of movement are thus simply a way to control, to regulate, or to incite movement. Regimes of movement are integral to the formation of different modes of being.” (2015, 15) In the context of Palestine/Israel, she shows how the recognition of different movement qualities illustrates the degree to which movement is conceived of either as a human right or as a privilege (2015, 23), and also reflected in uneven hierarchies and levels of accessibility: “Israeli movement is fast. It has priority. It is this movement that has to be protected. It is direct, straight, and perhaps even rational (target-oriented). […] Palestinian movement is not. It is slow and meandering. It is also controlled, both symbolically and concretely.” (2015, 53) Thus, from an Israeli perspective, movement is made visible or invisible.

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must not be crossed” (2015, 34).41 She thereby refers to what she considers a key technology of regulating Palestinian movement: a common practice in Israeli border control that consists of giving instructions and orders to Palestinian border crossers that do not relate to the material reality of the border in an understandable way. In other words, the imaginary line incorporates “sets of contradictory orders, obscure and constantly changing regulations and instructions” (2015, 29) that ask border crossers to move and position themselves towards unmarked, invisible, and imagined spatial lines. Thus, in the experience of the border, Palestinians are exposed to a situation in which their (affective and physical) movements are disciplined on the basis of highly arbitrary, invisible, and incomprehensive spatial politics. This point resonates with my empirical material, as absence and collective imagination return as purposeful strategies to instigate and hinder action. Consequently, Kotef concludes that it is not borders, bodies, and populations that are governed, but movement itself. In the process, the body of the individual Palestinian is constructed, addressed, and held accountable as a collective body or, as Kotef puts it, it is “through movement that a plurality becomes a body” (2015, 15). Furthermore, she spells out the repercussions of the “imaginary line” on a broader political level above and beyond the mere prevention of Palestinian border crossing, arguing that this practice systematically refuses to fully recognize Palestinians as political subjects. Instead, the experience of the imaginary line portrays them as undisciplined and unstable subjects, incapable of ruling themselves and thus in need of external control. Kotef concludes that Israel uses the repetitive and embodied experience of failed movement as a means to permanently justify the officially temporary occupation of the Palestinian territories. Regarding my results from the empirical evaluation and the artists’ descriptions of personal experiences at the border, Kotef’s approach offers a theoretical framework that situates the experience of the border at the

41 “I propose that the imaginary line is, in fact, an intrinsic failure, that is built into the spatial configuration of the checkpoints in their functions as disciplinary-like apparatuses. This failure produces Palestinians passing through the checkpoint as undisciplinable, and hence as subjects whose occupation is justifiable, if not necessary. […] This should be understood within the larger framework of a constant search for legitimacy by a regime insisting upon its moral superiority.” (Kotef 2015, 34-35) She goes on to say that “a failure embedded into the regulation of space facilitates unlawful movement, hence configuring the Palestinians as always-already transgressors of the law, undisciplinable subjects who must therefore be tightly controlled” (Kotef 2015, 53).

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intersections of identity and spatial politics. Notably, this analytically recognizes the interplay between collectivity, embodiment, and the control of movement. Both Nail and Kotef emphasize the connections between physical and political or hegemonic movement orders and furthermore stress the structural qualities of the border. From their respective interests—the border’s capacity to order society and the interwoven relationship between controlling border movement and subject formation—they suggest to conceive of the border as movement that works to insert and legitimize coercive control over bodies and society at large. This suggests that the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity are linked in a process in which different epistemic, spatial, and temporal orders are entangled. Furthermore, it leads me to propose the following operational definition of the border: I rely on a process-based approach that assumes that borders cannot be exhaustively explained with clear-cut or linear distinctions, but constitute a transformative dimension of culture, society, politics, and other domains of life. This notion of the border acknowledges its potential to surprise and to integrate the unanticipated, unforeseeable, and unexpected in its very definition. It categorically conceives of the border not as an unquestionable, stable, or fixed line, but as the sum of an always specific and dynamic set of conditions (e.g., institutional networks, topological formations, discourses, symbols, and practices) through which power works in unequal ways. Bordering Bodies Not only are borders, through their infrastructure, conceptual and operating frameworks, and representations, linked to different kinds of movement, but bodies are, as well. In the experience of the border, bodies appear in myriad relationships to society, politics, and ethics, as Chapter 6.1. first discussed. Bound to multiple acts of performativity, bodies sustain and reproduce borders but simultaneously jeopardize and challenge them, as anthropologist Mary Douglas describes when reflecting on the body as a model for society at large: “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals […] unless we are not prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and danger credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.” (1966, 115)

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Taking on the material and symbolic relationships between bodies and their environments that Douglas points to, I will follow leads from the empirical material that refer to the role and status of bodies in the experience of the border. As I noted in the introduction to this study, border crossing is a remarkable physical act that the artists evoke and aesthetically rework in their projects: to stand in a line, to wait, to discipline one’s movements and breath, to remove shoes and carried objects, to be body-searched, to place one’s finger on the biometric reader, and so on (see also Hameed 2018; Ismaïl 2018; Pelmus 2018). Thus, according to different protocols, bodies are shaped by the learned, lived, and embodied experience of the border. I have already commented on the corresponding body- and movementcentered vocabulary extracted from the case study analyses. These descriptions are flanked by statements in which Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group refer to the emotional and affective dimension of bordering: how empathy and fear come into play, how they remember the visceral and somatic sensation of being paralyzed, how they sense their own vulnerability and shame, how they feel their powerlessness but also resistance and talking back, and how tension is established on a bodily level. Their accounts, moreover, suggest that there is ambivalence in how the experience of the border continues to live within their bodies and the bodies of others—a tension that unfolds between control and eruption, and between discipline and disconnection. Louise Amoore, in a similar vein, translates this initial configuration into the realm of politics, stating: “The border has historically figured not only as a site of security but also as a domain of dissent and a place of encounter where the visceral difficulties of political life are exposed and challenged.” (2011, 64) Bodies, here, appear as active agents of political meaning making. Thus, rather than constituting bound and autonomous entities, bodies show their own potential to instill politics of fear and authority as well as hope and resistance in a situation where opportunities for dissent have become constrained. As I will discuss in what follows, the artists’ dramaturgical strategies reveal how these processes of subjugation and empowerment are constructed, experienced, and aestheticized. Appearing at the Border: Theatricality and Performance All three cases evoke different kinds of bordering bodies: bodies of citizens, artists, and researchers, bodies of professional border agents and passersby, peripheral and anonymous bodies, bodies of participants, and observers in the research process, as well. In the experience of the border, as I argue in Chapter 6.1. with the concepts of intercorporeality, embodiment, and social choreography, the individual and the collective are entangled and meaning is created in

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the interaction between bodies. This condition is repeatedly described in the data as an imposed and inescapable dynamic, and—according to Abbas and AbouRahme—as a “deadly effect”. In connection to this, Saleh mentions how expectations of the “Palestinian-ness” of her choreographic work might have equally empowering and suffocating effects on her practice. She also comments, in line with Dictaphone Group, on the impact of gender-related politics and judgments on their experiences at the border. The material further highlights the biases inherent in being systematically addressed at the border as a collective body, through the lenses of nationality, citizenship, age, and secular or religious affiliation. Significantly, Dictaphone Group identifies the effects of this structural coupling between collective identities and bodily features as a mechanism that aims to politicize or depoliticize bodies by not allowing them to be singled out and appear in their individuality. Theater scholar Sophie Nield reflects on these observations, as well. By introducing theatricality and performance as analytical categories for theoretically understanding the experience of the border, she explores the artfully engineered construction and experience of political realities and of borders in particular (2006, 61-72). In her research on the figure of the refugee in the context of European border politics, she examines how borders are rehearsed, staged, and aestheticized by bodily and movement-bound means. She argues that land and territory are to some degree always produced and invented, and thus an integral part of our cultural imaginary. In an analogy to the experience of theater (in a broad understanding of the term), Nield (2011, 2006) contends that each border demands a specific performance and that bodies, consequently, appear in an almost theatrical act at the border.42 In addition to the knowledge on representation, performance, and presence that theater practice and theory provide, she identifies rituals as key to the production of specific spaces in which control— whether through cohesion or indeterminacy and disruption—is exerted in the

42 Nield (2011) acknowledges that her idea of appearance references Hannah Arendt’s work on the aesthetics and politics of appearance and judgement, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, as well as, from a sociological perspective, Ervin Goffman’s ideas on audience. Furthermore, she connects to theories on liminality as developed in anthropology and performance studies (see Arendt 1958; Goffman 1959; Turner 1969; Butler 1993). In line with this, different mobility and border studies scholars have applied the concepts of liminality and appearance in their analyses of experiences of waiting, lingering, or dwelling at borders or experiences of overflow and excess (see Bissell 2007; Khosravi 2014; Anderson, 2004; 2015).

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experience of the border.43 This position aligns with the positions of border studies scholars such as Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall, who describe the rites performed at the border as “both rites of passage and potentially also disruptive and transformative tears in the fabric of daily life” (2010, 301), and continue to explain: “Ritual is a distinct mode of routinized, sequential action, through which certain modes of credibility and authenticity are authorized by their very repetition.” (2010, 302) This process-driven and transformative approach must be understood as distinct from a still predominant focus in border studies on the significance of language and language-based meaning making in the formation of identity politics. What I would like to accentuate is Nield’s argument that bodies never appear in an identical manner at the border, but are always constructed differently as social selves. In the process, the body’s performance at the border is interdependent with the ever-specific performance of the border on a body. In this process, hegemonic and counterhegemonic politics are at play and inequality is expressed. As Nield points out and the accounts of the Palestinian artists confirm, appearing at the border as a subject does not function for those who do not have full citizenship.44 Hence, Abbas, Abou-Rahme, and Saleh note that in the experience of the border some bodies are marked as legitimate or illegitimate and thus performatively constructed and authenticated as either conforming and regular or submissive, obedient, and docile bodies.45 In addition, the case study analyses suggest that knowledge which regulates and governs an individual’s

43 Along similar lines, geographer Corey Johnson et al. explain, “borders are enacted, materialized, and performed in a variety of ways,” as “discursive or emotional acts of power, […] as technical landscapes of control and surveillance” (2011, 62; also see Coplan 2012). 44 With his concept of “naked life,” Giorgio Agamben (1998) observes how, in the process of border crossing, the body’s status is reduced from that of a political being to that of a biological body. It is therefore not only excluded from representation but from the very right to citizenship. 45 Caught in a loop of orders, protocols, and rituals that reflect a politics of discrimination, the border repeatedly poses the questions: who are you and where are you from? These questions do not require an answer, but are designed to keep to maintain the foreigner’s otherness and to ensure its failure (see Khosravi 2010). In addition, Mary Douglas (1966) argues that making distinctions between purity and impurity could be used as a mechanism for sustaining established social structures.

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involvement in the experience of the border is culturally constructed and actively reworked by aesthetic experience.46 Nield is careful in her analysis not to equate the stage with the realities of the border, and outlines the ethical and methodological limits of her interdisciplinary approach. The fact that theater is itself a coded, normative, and aestheticized system therefore can never fully and sufficiently grasp the actual experience of the border and thus risks downplaying it. Yet, she links the individual and the collective by describing the appearance of bodies at the border as theatrical—a point that is in direct dialogue with the findings from the case analyses at hand. Notably, the artists mention how choreographic strategies, different modes of somatic attention, specific movements and gestures, gaze, mimicry, and the manipulation of physical features become meaningful in the experience of the border. Thus, bordering, as an activity, signifies learning how to border: how to perform, how to behave, how to move, and how to appear at the borders. As I show with my analyses of their respective dramaturgical strategies, the artists purposefully reflect, access, and work with these connections between aesthetics, performance, and rituals in their works. Being Looked At: The Border Gaze As mentioned earlier, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group describe gestures and mimicry—next to artifacts such as passports and permits, language, and technological devices—as significant elements of being accepted and legitimized at the border. In connection to this, anthropologist Shahram Khosravi reminds us that borders are “zones of cultural production, spaces of meaning-making and meaning-breaking” (2010, 62) and thus that a body’s appearance at the border is never deliberate. The comparative analyses of the case studies confirm and exemplify these processes of combining individual aesthetic and particularly corporeal features together with collective identity politics. Khosravi furthermore accentuates the impact of what he refers to as “the border gaze” (2010, 78) as a crucial element of assessing and being assessed at the border. In his study on refugees and illegal migrants, he comments: “The stereotype of ‘the refugee’ and what he or she ‘looks like’ is formed by visual representations […]. A ‘real’ refugee is thus supposed to be a ‘profound’, ‘poor’, ‘traumatized’, ‘serious’ and of course ‘sad’ person. […] Refugees have to

46 See Chapter 6.3. for further specification of the range of elements and events that have become meaningful for collective experience and consciousness of borders in the Palestinian/Israeli and Lebanese contexts.

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perform ‘refugeeness.’” (2010, 73)47 The comparative analyses as well as experiences from my own fieldwork reinforce the importance of self-perception and self-presentation that Khosravi investigates: efforts to not appear suspicious or afraid; to not show one’s nervousness; and to not look other border crossers and agents in the eye while, at the same time, meticulously observing everyone’s behavior. Accordingly, Khosravi argues that this mechanism of “being looked at” (2017) operating in the experience of the border not only collectivizes bodies but also objectifies them. Significantly, he points out that imagination, fiction, and projection together with previous experiences of border crossing become blurred in this process. Similar to Kotef’s imaginary lines, Khosravi speaks of invisible lines and contends that the border crosser “is only visible in the phantasm of others” (2010, 72). In a lecture titled “Prosopagnosia”—a reference to face blindness, or, the inability to recognize faces—describes an everyday situation of having crossed a border that he was not supposed to cross:48 “Yesterday I did a mistake and opened a door I should not have opened. I entered a place I was not supposed to enter. A young man, responsible for the order, upset of my mistake, addressed me in the same way and same tone border guards have been addressing me all my adult life, a tone of child-making. He asked the same question several times: ‘Who are you?’ Just like the question ‘Where are you from?’ this question did not require an

47 In this context, documentary filmmaker Khaled Jarrar’s research comes to mind. In his ongoing film project Displaced from Heaven that he started in 2016, Jarrar follows an elderly Palestinian woman and her family from Damascus to Europe. Commenting on the research process of this project, he critically addresses his position as a professional witness and the ethical implications of joining the collective of refugees on their forced journey. Furthermore, he describes in informal conversation that he entered a gradual process of mimicking and adapting certain corporeal features, such as facial expressions, bodily postures, and gestures, tuning in to the body of the temporary collective of illegal border-crossers (2016). From a different angle, in her recent research Nield investigates the figure of the refugee in current forced migratory movements: how bodies are collectively depicted by visual and discursive means as ill bodies or bodies carrying diseases and epidemics in order to implement restrictive border politics (2018). 48 The text is a transcription of a lecture that Khosravi delivered in the framework of the project Violence of Inscriptions: On Experience and Representation, on March 5th, 2017 at HAU-Hebbel am Ufer Berlin. Here, he refers to a situation where he accidentally entered the stage via a backstage door during a live performance and was stopped and addressed by a member of the theater.

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answer. It is not a question. It is rather a statement. By asking this question the foreigner is not kept out but kept in his place in terms of the social hierarchy. ‘Who are you’ and ‘Where are you from’—short questions foreigners are asked so their otherness is completed; questions to measure their degree of foreignness. […] This question that is addressed to a foreigner should, in fact, be asked by the foreigner: ‘Where am I from? From which part of your fantasy and imagination do I come from?’ By asking this question the foreigner discloses how the other is never the other but an extension of us. The answer to the question ‘Who are you, where are you from?’ is ‘I am not from anywhere but you. Look at me, see my face. I am you. Don’t you remember me?’” (2017)

It is important to note that despite the inescapable loop of normative inscriptions that his situation illustrates, Khosravi contends that “the body can betray you” (2010, 63); a phenomenon that I consider meaningful in the experience of the border, as it maintains that bodies are not authentic or unshakeable evidence. In other words, he refers to the fact that bodies are never fully controllable and maintain corporeal, somatic, or visceral experiences of betrayal in which mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as well as sameness and otherness, are exposed. In connection to this, the empirical material suggests that a body’s assessment at the border is not only a result of external frameworks and conditions, but to some extent also dependent on the respective communities that a border crosser belongs to (or is supposed to belong to).49 This brings the performativity of the border to the fore of the debate—namely, the idea that for a body to successfully cross the border, its appearance and performance need to be authenticated, whether by law and authorities or by fellow border crossers. Applied to the geopolitical and cultural context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, the impact of binary and largely exclusive constructions of ever-othered bodies is undeniable. Yet, this perspective suggests that these constructions, with

49 For instance, political scientist Mark B. Salter differentiates between “formal,” “practical,” and “popular” performances at the border in his study on how the claim for sovereignty is implemented at the border (1995). Mahmoud Keshavarz’s research on the passport as a socio-technical artifact can serve as an example here. He shows how the passport renders an abstract notion of the border affective by enacting and performing “the relation between a body, nationality and the state in the context of mobility and immobility” in a dialogue of different social and material practices (2016). From the perspective of design studies and philosophy, he also discusses how passports regulate bodies by dividing them into lines, translating them into codified information, reading and writing them into space and time, and above all, by taking bodies as evidence of nationality and, at the same time, reducing them to the latter.

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different degrees of choice, can be paralleled, countered, and complicated by performative means, with the body at the core. Border Structures In his analysis of post-9/11 border politics, Mark B. Salter, scholar of international relations, contends that the border no longer exists as a state of exception but, through increased institutionalization by the state and other actors, has become permanent.50 This remark intersects with two distinct findings from the case analyses: first, it foregrounds the structural qualities of the border and its consequent experience, and secondly, it suggests that this experience cannot be sufficiently examined when limiting our inquiries to the event of the border or its materiality. In line with this, the preceding paragraphs have shown that different spatial and temporal orders collapse in the experience of the border, and that bodies are at the core of these processes. The most direct hints that the empirical material offers in support of such a structural and dynamic understanding of the border is the fact that all artistic works begin with quotidian and mundane borders and with the everyday or the peripheral: with the daily return to the Qalandia checkpoint, the observation of a homeless person in public space, or with the gradually changing use of Lebanese railway infrastructure. This gains specific importance, as mentioned earlier, within a geopolitical context that is largely defined by strong and hypermediatized border imagery and material evidence such as walls, fences, road obstructions, and militarized zones of interdiction. Or, with regards to common representations of bodies at the border,51 these depictions include harmed, wounded, or bleeding bodies or bodies in masses that to some extent render the individual border-crosser invisible and thus deprive them from their rights as individuals.

50 The state of exception is a “zone of indistinction, between inside and outside” where there is no difference between law and force, wherein individuals are subject to the law but not subjects in the law” (Agamben quoted in Salter 1995, 81). 51 The most salient borders for this study are the Israeli separation wall that was approved in 2000 and built from 2002 onwards (in contrast to the 1967 demarcations recognized by the international community) and the so-called “Green Line” that divided Beirut into East Beirut (consisting of mostly Christian neighborhoods) and West Beirut (consisting of traditional Sunni neighborhoods as well as Ras Beirut and Hamra) during the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990.

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These often sensationalized representations have been critically revised by scholars such as architect Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture Research Cluster or the DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency), to name but two initiatives that have shown a specific engagement in the Middle Eastern context. From a complementary angle, border studies have brought forth approaches that are invested in the relational, rhizomatic, and polyarchic qualities of the border, i.e., its parallel and structural capacity to connect and to separate (see Paasi 2011, 62). As mentioned earlier, the border in these contexts has theoretically been associated with notions of permeability, passage, and malleability and has been analyzed via ideas of flows and fluids, networks and scape, as well as the concept of movement.52 In line with this, Étienne Balibar, writing on political borders in the European context, considers the following features to be constitutive of the definition of the border: its polysemic quality and the fact that the border is always overdetermined and heterogeneous (see Balibar 2002, 81). Borders, thus, are not self-similar, stable, or rational devices, but immanently carry inequality; that is, they are subjected to different kinds of hierarchies and authorities. According to Balibar, the fact that borders have become more and more invisible and ubiquitous is a key factor for implementing and maintaining power. He states: “No political border is ever the mere boundary between two states, but is always over-determined and, in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated, and relativized by other geopolitical divisions” (2002, 81). The empirical data provides evidence for Balibar’s hypothesis about the amplifications of the border on a logistic level and the extensions of the border into the mind, body, and discourse. Border Logistics In the interviews that I conducted with the artists as well as in my own field research, the extension of the border becomes apparent on bureaucratic, organizational, and administrative levels. In concrete terms, the experience of the border starts long before any material or geopolitical border is reached in a literal, physical sense. In the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, depending

52 Stefano Boeri pictures a more dynamic notion of the border within which power is distributed by multiple agents and elements: “It shows us an area almost completely covered with fences, fences that are falling over each other apparently haphazardly: war zones, barriers, by-pass roads that join them up, military zones for the Israeli army, Palestinian villages and cities, refugee camps, areas that have no jurisdiction, etc. The networks of infrastructure are all juxtaposed on top of each other like a giant web.” (2006, 29)

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on the crosser’s respective passport or document and subsequent constraints and privileges, border crossing is entangled in a complex process of administrative protocols and regulations. Thus, preparations prior to the actual crossing of the border might require formal and informal network activities that serve the purpose of informing and facilitating the bordering. Fieldwork suggests that affective politics are important here; i.e., that kinship, trust, and friendship, but also doubt and suspicion, constitute decisive factors that enable or hinder the experience of the border. Moreover, the border becomes extended temporally when taking into account the necessary paperwork like visas, permits, and invitation letters or common practices of preborder interviews. The continuous development and increasing implementation of technological devices accelerate this process, extending border-crossing bodies and their data into the digital and media realm (see Halkort 2013). The rigidity and nonnegotiability of the border that citizenship or nationality imply are thus countered by realities in which bureaucratic and legal frameworks for border crossing show a certain degree of fluidity and ambivalence. In connection to this, Balibar insists that “borders do not have the same meaning for everyone,” even if they are “officially ‘the same’” or “designed to perform precisely the same task” (2002, 81). This inequality and parallel overdetermination of the border can be illustrated with the case of the Allenby Checkpoint/King Hussein Bridge. Due to an existing ban that prohibits West Bank Palestinians from traveling from the Israeli Ben-Gurion airport, the Allenby Checkpoint/King Hussein Bridge is the only possible way for them to reach Amman, Jordan from Jericho or Area A of the Palestinian occupied territories. In analytical terms, it serves as a well-researched example of how conflicting power politics and competing frameworks act out in the experience of the border. As I experienced in my own field research, Israel performs full-scale security measures and border control at the Allenby Checkpoint/King Hussein Bridge, thereby suggesting that it holds the status of a national sovereign border. At the same time, however, applicable international law and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan do not recognize the same crossing as a territorial border. According to political theorist Paola Rivetti, the nonidentical use of this specific border on the ground illustrates its asymmetrical extension into legal and political space. From an autoethnographic perspective, she describes how legality and illegality are produced in a “system that routinizes subordination and stigmatisation” (Rivetti 2016)53 with obvious consequences

53 From her position as a researcher who crossed the border in order to take part in an academic conference in Palestine, Paola Rivetti (2016) also exemplifies the intersection of ethical and political concerns that determine this experience.

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for Palestinians, in particular. Similarly, in the interviews the artists provide evidence of rules for permits and visas that might change arbitrarily or without notice, and checkpoints that might be transferred from one location to another without prior warning. In addition to the direct and immediate consequences for mobility that result from the ambiguity of the border and its logistics, it is time, preparation, and psychological stress and uncertainty that affect the personal lives of Palestinians on myriad levels. Much research has been dedicated to the traumatic effects of border experiences, particularly in contexts marked by conflict and crisis.54 Border Extensions into Mind and Body I have already mentioned how border practices and behavior are rehearsed, performed, and aestheticized and how formerly learned or lived experience, mythmaking, fiction, and memory are activated anew with every act of bordering. In the case studies, the before and after of the border experience are equally part of the artists’ accounts: they all mention in the interviews the “residual effects” of the border, as Abbas and Abou-Rahme term it. Significantly, they not only locate these effects on a psychological level, but also on an imaginary and embodied one, and they subsequently use this knowledge in their artwork.55 In

54 Tom Tlalim discusses what he conceptualizes as “the sound system of the state”— how power, state ideology, and national identity are implemented and diffused through sound in responsive patterns. Based on empirical research in Palestine/Israel, he argues that everyday examples of sound control shape the formation of political subjectivity on an affective and embodied level. Consequently, he contends that national border politics and ideologies are created, extended, and imparted into everyday life via “how we speak, how we dress, how we look etc.” (2017b). I would like to put the notion of structural borders into conversation with the principle of impulse and response that Tlalim transfers from acoustic studies to his research on listening. He shows that borders, beyond their initial purpose and articulation, translate into a continuous, dynamic, and more diffuse field of impulses and responses, of explosions, echoes, and repercussions in time and space. Listening and sound-producing bodies— “resonating bodies,” as he puts it—are thus recipients and amplifiers of hegemonic border politics. 55 The framing of different realities within augmented and virtual spaces is used by the gaming industry, for example, in video games like Papers, Please (see www. papersplea.se) and implemented in the context of training measures that different governmental organizations and NGOs in human rights activism develop in order to train immigrants and refugees for the borders.

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line with this, sound artist and researcher Tom Tlalim speaks of a “system in response” (2016) to describe the different acts of translation that are at work when embodying borders through sound: translations between acoustic, linguistic, and, I would like to add, visceral and somatic, registers. Based on empirical and artistic research in the context of Palestine/Israel, Tlalim shows how power and ideology work through sound and how violence is distributed aurally in everyday sonic practices and technologies located beyond an individual’s choice.56 With recourse to sound studies and practice, Tlalim captures the experience of the border as a system of impulses and responses that produce echoes and repercussions beyond the actual information (such as regulations or orders) that is communicated. This leads me to suggest that it is crucial to take this specific temporality of the border into account for its theoretical conceptualization. Beyond its effects in real-time, the experience of the border pierces through and binds together past, present, and future. In connection to this, there is an element of promise at the intersection of temporal and imaginary orders: the promise of a collective pan-Arab project that Dictaphone Group discusses in Nothing to Declare with the example of the Lebanese railway, or a more implied collective promise of returning to the homeland and the end of the occupation that defines the two Palestinian examples. Similarly, Abbas and Abou-Rahme explicitly discuss how the experience of the border prolongs and affects their long-term vision as artists and as civilians, contemplating, for instance, how the direct or indirect impact of the border might translate into acts of self-censorship (see also Sienkiewicz 2013; Saghieh, Saghieh, and Geagea 2015). In conclusion, borders and their concrete and small-scale corporeal and sensorial experience can limit or expand our epistemological visions and projects.57

56 Tlalim (2016) points to the borders that exist within sound, as well: frequencies and rhythms that frame and trigger listening and introduce a different pitch on everyday lives, communities, and bodies. The fact that these mechanisms have been applied in surveillance and border technology provides another example of the border’s place in quotidian routines. 57 Anthony Cooper and Chris Rumford (2013) argue that border monuments fulfil a welcoming function while, at the same time, potentially reflecting nationalistic projects, symbolism, or iconography. Although there is a general risk of instrumentalizing art for broader purposes, I believe that the artwork I am discussing here does not function this way, as it is not beholden to comparable politics and frameworks of production and commissioning (also see Smith, Swanson, and Gökariksel 2016).

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The empirical data further elaborates on the amplifications of the border experience in the discursive realm—what Abbas refers to in the interview as “discursive violence.” Limiting an individual in predefined and often stereotypical and reductive ways expands the inclusions and exclusions within categories such as nationhood, gender, and age beyond the border into everyday life. Bejcer et al. highlight this mechanism with the example of academic scholarship on Palestine, Israel, and the state: “Both scholarship and hegemonic narratives in Palestine and Israel that discuss these issues often tend to employ relatively fixed, inflexible categories to articulate local spaces and identities” (2015, 261). Language can extend borders into the aesthetic realm, as Contingency’s parallel use of English, Hebrew, and Arabic and Dictaphone Group’s reflections on their choice of language in Nothing to Declare demonstrate.58 Finally, linguistic and discursive border systems are reflected in the way art-related and body-bound terminology such as “contemporary,” “traditional,” “modern,” “art,” and “activism” carry normative historical, aesthetic, or symbolic boundaries between different cultures and traditions. Thus, these observations on the double-edged structural qualities of the border reinforce the artists’ dramaturgical strategies acknowledging that bodies and their psychological, discursive, and imaginative extensions are simultaneously conditioned by border politics and capable of thwarting them. The comparative analysis of the artistic case studies reflected on the border as a structural, experiential, and performative process. I now suggest defining the border not first in terms of its materiality, but as a state and movement that is accessed, actualized, and affirmed through bodies. Consequently, the experience of the border extends far beyond specific contexts and politics on the ground into the global realm. Daniel Meier similarly argues that the border politics resulting from the Arab uprisings and the war and humanitarian crisis in Syria affected not only Arab countries, but reinforced in the public discussion artificial communitarian dichotomies such as Muslim versus non-Muslim and Islamic versus

58 This is illustrated by terminology like “the Middle East,” “the Arab region/world,” “the Levant,” and “the MENA region,” or designations like “Israel,” “Palestine,” “the Occupied Territories,” or “the occupied Palestinian territories,” as well as all nuances and accentuations expressed by spelling and notation. Decisions about the historical constellations and periods to which these terms refer to, or the discourses in which they are formed and deployed are significant for interpretations of ideology, vagueness, and positioning, even if the terminology is rarely clearly and consistently used. Terminology expresses political positioning: for example, “security wall” or “antiterrorist barrier” versus “segregation/apartheid wall,” or simply “the wall.”

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Islamist (2013, 353). Both Lebanon and Palestine/Israel’s contested borders have gone viral in a comparable way. Rooted in the Lebanese Civil War and its repercussions and intensified by the failure of the Oslo peace process, the construction, maintenance, and experience of the border have become increasingly international, engaging and disengaging both state and nonstate actors with conflicting interests.59 Political theorists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, in their 2013 book, speak of the “border as method” in order to analyze its dominant place within current global processes (see also 2012, 59). Focusing on the interaction among the neoliberal economy, population flows, and governance, the authors attribute a certain quality of world making to the border, and discuss how restricting or facilitating movement is an effective way to set up flexible frames of governance. Moreover, they argue that systematically managing border experiences represents an efficient means of stabilizing certain political ideas and orders over others. Thus, to some degree, bodies in general, as well as the bodies addressed and created by the artists analyzed here, contribute—intentionally or unintentionally—to this process of moving across physical, imaginary, and political territories.

59 According to Bejcer et al.: “During the past few years, prospects for successful peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis […] have been met with much scepticism. The Israeli occupation has become ever more firmly entrenched in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and Gaza remains under siege. In Israel, nationalistic and ethnocentric discourse have dominated the public sphere, while Palestinians in the Occupied Territories struggle with Israeli oppression, spatial fragmentation, factionalized leadership and the frustration of hopes generated by the “Arab Spring”.” (2015, 260)

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6.3

COLLECTIVITY BODIES, IN THE PLURAL

The assumption that corporeality and embodiment are key to the formation and experience of collectivity is not new to the scholarly debate, and attempts to render bodies and specific collectives identical have driven and defined both theoretical debates and aesthetic undertakings alike (see Bielefeld 2017, 2003). From the perspective of body-based artistic practice, the case study analyses have provided evidence for ideological, utopian projects that have been created to align individual moving bodies with an allegedly lost or yet-to-be achieved collective.60 Furthermore, it has become clear that individual bodies, in the experience of the border, are constructed, addressed, and represented in collective ways. To mark this intersection, Paasi Anssi suggests transferring such acts of collective formation and counterformation from the realm of territorial politics to the realm of identity politics: “Bordering reflects politics in many ways. It is not only the politics of delimitation /classification, but also the politics of representation and identity that comes into play. Bordering separates and brings together. Borders allow certain expressions of identity and memory to exist while blocking others. Respectively borders are open to contestation on the level of the state and in everyday life.” (2011, 62)

The concept of identity has widely and exhaustively determined theoretical inquiries about collective and communitarian structures in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, as well. By engaging it here, I do not aim to revisit this complex debate as a whole, but will limit my reflections to articulations of collective identity that find expression in the empirical data, wherein struggles over stark and largely exclusive ideas of community and corresponding representations are jeopardized by corporeal, symbolic, and affective means and small-scale, everyday experiences of living together in contested space. In line with this, social scientists Adi Mana et al. accentuate that border politics and identity politics are immanently entangled, contending: “Collective belonging and the creation of

60 From a historical perspective, philosophers Stefanie Wenner and Silvia Sasse point out the role of the body in mass theory (with reference to authors such as Elias Canetti, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin), the theory of the state (Platon and Thomas Hobbes), and the theory of bodies without organs (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). (Sasse and Wenner 2002, 11)

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boundaries between groups is an on-going process and a fundamental fact of social life.” (2015, 273) This tension represents a driving impulse for the research design of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects that places artwork at its center. However, I am also aware that the study looks at three individual artists or artist collectives. I do not seek to generalize or homogenize the artists’ individual works by seeing them as direct and exclusive representations of a certain collective—a tendency that I have criticized elsewhere. Rather, I focus on the strategies that the artists employ in reaction to collective identities and claims of grouping that they encounter in their practice. In connection to this, I argue that the experience of collectivity is bound to an active and situated act of imagination, representation, and aestheticization exemplified in the artwork under review (see Anderson 1993; see also Weber 1978). Commenting on the relationship between the artistic and the political, Ulrich Bielefeld contends, from a sociological perspective, that “[t]he artisticformative project has not only been indicative for the transformation of a political concept but rather provided a framework to actively work on it. Political and social representations of the body have undergone a process of change.” (2017, 81; author’s translation) This suggests that the case studies at hand not only illustrate or mirror collective experience and politics, but also rework and actively co-constitute them, particularly through distinctly body-bound and movement-based dramaturgical strategies. As I described in Chapter 6.1., individual and collective bodies are entangled in myriad ways in this process. In order to maintain awareness of this basic dynamic, I will from now on speak of bodies, in the plural, with the exception of analytical reflections that intentionally engage conceptual generalizations of ‘the body’. The following investigation is structured in three main sections that build on each other. First, I will sketch out predominant markers of collective identity in the Lebanese and Palestinian/Israeli context:61 well-introduced tropes, narratives, discourses, images, and historical as well as contemporary events that are referenced in the cases. Subsequently, embedded in an argument on cultural relativism and universalism, I will offer examples from the data that illustrate how collective self-description and self-identification are brought about in the field of arts. Building on this, I will take as its starting point the idea of belong-

61 Speaking of markers of identity echoes terminology by performance theorist Peggy Phelan. Writing in 1993, she used the idea of being “marked” or “unmarked” in her analysis of how reality, power, and identity are performatively constructed in and through contemporary cultures (see Phelan 1993).

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ing, which continues to be a defining category for discussions on collectivity in the Middle Eastern context. Grounded in the artists’ dramaturgical strategies, I will focus on how the experience of collectivity is constructed, and how, in the process, bodies are choreographically organized, trained, rehearsed, and staged. This leads me to the summary argument that collectivity, by definition, can only be thought of as relational collectivity with bodies at the core. Moreover, I argue that, in the process of becoming collective, the initial exposure of bodies to each other opens up a political and ethical dimension of collectivity that is negotiated in the aesthetic realm. Positioning Oneself, Collectively: Markers of Collectivity in Lebanon and Palestine In the experience of the border, bodies become meaningful through other bodies. The comparative analyses of the data offer, with different levels of intensity and degrees of explicitness, a set of elements and conditions for explaining how bodies engage with each other: strategies of self-description, material evidence, formative events, and symbolic representations (see Rosenthal 2015; Kanafani et al. 2010) that lead me to suggest that the coupling of bodies is structural and interdependent. Shifting Grounds: Collectivity and Spatial Politics I have already demonstrated that the distribution and regulation of territorial and imaginary space at the borders greatly depends on the degree to which a body’s affiliation and assimilation to a certain collective or community are (or are not) accepted and performatively authenticated. This process entails a spectrum of normative criteria that are more or less stable and openly disclosed. It works on the precondition that some movements, gestures, or images, for instance, are connected to specific events or contextualized in specific discourses and thus stabilized over time in collective memory and identity in both aesthetic and sociopolitical terms. In the case study analyses, these collective processes of meaning making are situated on three distinct levels: in the aesthetic experience of the artistic works, in the experience of public space in Lebanon and Palestine, and in the broader geopolitical and spatial history of the Middle Eastern region. First, the experience of collectivity can be observed through the corporeal, sensorial, and affective proximity and distance between bodies. For instance, Saleh and the female members of Dictaphone Group explore the potential sociopolitical repercussions of physically standing in public, urban space in their respective research processes as well as in their actual lecture-performances.

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Abbas and Abou-Rahme, in their account of the Qalandia checkpoint, refer to the body as a site of power and contestation, brought about and manipulated by architectural, infrastructural, and symbolic orders. The dramaturgical analyses show how these lived experiences translate into diverse strategies of participation and interaction with the audience; in each piece or corresponding research process, the collective and purposeful moving and positioning of bodies in space provides an efficient means of addressing the norms and values of being together. Significantly, all artists evoke gender as a defining factor, even though reducing collective experience to male versus female dichotomies would obviously be oversimplified and therefore overlook differences related to generational divides or economic conditions, among others.62 Secondly, the empirical data suggests that the experience of collectivity is defined by how space (invoked in a general, abstract sense) and place (understood as space equipped with specificity and awareness) are used differently by bodies. In the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, intercommunal dynamics (see Sallouh 2005; Beydoun 1992, 2009; Meier 2013) are thus significant elements in defining the spatial experience of collectivity. Dictaphone Group, for example, point to the correlation between the changing intersectarian use of transportation infrastructure and the ways in which the railway project is collectively remembered and evaluated. Saleh, in turn, names the structurally established interconnection between the Palestinian educational system and different sects and value systems as a decisive factor in accessing educational spaces as a female contemporary dancer. It is important to mention, however, that in contrast to possible preassumptions, the data does not suggest that the impact of sects or religious and confessional groups is the predominant factor for understanding collectivity.63 This observation resonates with the warning that sociologist Ahmad Beydoun issues in his acclaimed research on the Lebanese Islamo-Christian society and its system of political confessionalism: namely, to not reduce our analyses of collectivity to simplistic and streamlined explana-

62 In the Palestinian context, Nicholas Rowe (2016) points out a contradiction: while gender politics might restrict women’s movements and physical expression in public space, the corporeal presence of female fighters in the political liberation struggle has historically been, at the same time, widely accepted. 63 This corresponds to Gabriele Rosenthal’s work with a research group that conducted qualitative interviews in Palestine, the West Bank, and Israel, in which various research partners considered religious divisions important, but not a key element (see 2015, 47).

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tions.64 Accepting the structural link between communitarian structures and Lebanese society and politics, Beydoun argues that intracommunal fragmentation and other lines of demarcation between, for example, the city of Beirut and the sea or desert, or between public and domestic space, need to be taken into consideration, as well. In the case of Palestine/Israel and from a Palestinian perspective, I will limit myself to recall the intracommunitarian fragmentation that stems from territorial politics of occupation and displacement, as well as different statuses of citizenship and noncitizenship that the empirical data evokes.65 This reveals a third layer that situates the entangled experience of collectivity and space against the backdrop of a complex history of colonialism, territorial expansion, and displacement that continues to define realities in Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and the broader Middle East. 66 In line with this, the data offers experiences of diaspora, exile, return, and guilt, as well as concurrent claims for land and privileges. Moreover, the artists’ interviews in particular as well as other corroborating materials list a number of concrete events as formative influences on the experience of collectivity and that continue to be memorized, remembered, and narrated today. In the Lebanese context, this notably includes references to the Grand Liban and the Lebanese civil wars. In the Palestinian

64 Analyzing six major communities and various others in the Lebanese context, Beydoun identifies the following factors as meaningful elements when it comes to grounding the experience of collectivity: the geopolitical situation, morphological characteristics of the region, a strongly ideologized history, a nostalgic recapitulation of the pre-War past, the idea of the nation, the paralysis of the state, and xenophobia. He contends: “When putting aside the different religious traditions, the differences were not enough to establish distinct ethno-cultural individuality.” (1992, 111-12) 65 In Chapter 6.2., I discussed extensions of the border. In a similar way, these intracommunitarian divides are not only negotiated on local grounds, but also amplified in the international realm. The international arts market and academia serve as examples, alongside a highly developed system of state and nonstate actors, that intervene in stabilizing or redirecting certain identity-related categories over others. 66 The mainstreaming of specific collectives and specific movements in space translates into rhetoric that is used in border politics, as well. For instance, current as well as historical migratory movements from the Middle East to Europe are commonly described as “waves” of migration or bodies “flooding” a country, suggesting that these movements and the violence related to this might be natural. Conflating this phrasing with stark and largely abstract binary constructions that differentiate, for example, people from “over here” and “over there” establishes a connection between spatial politics and the collective, implementing stigmas and xenophobic ideas.

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case, the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the First and Second Intifadas figure as the most influential and lasting markers of collective identity.67 The Arab-Israeli conflict underlies all of the empirical accounts.68 Throughout the data, despite the highly loaded and contentious history of pan-Arab relations, a general sense of alliance and standing together as Arab people against Israel and its politics of occupation and territorial expansion finds expression in this motif. As a result of these findings, I contend that the artists are actively involved in the construction and experience of collectivity by reworking these markers of identity through aesthetic, imaginative, and representational means. Yet, cultural anthropologists Ella Shoat and Naeim Giladi comment on the importance of differentiating between actual historical events and their purposeful functionalization and aestheticization: “There is the physical aspect of bodies dislocated, people losing their homes. There is also the aspect of how the story of dislocation is used to justify the on-going dislocation, in this case of Palestinians.” (Giladi and Shoat 2010, 16) Culture as Continuity Scripts The point is to understand that at the heart of all politics is the struggle for imagination. Bernadette Buckley 2014, 28.

67 The State of the Greater Lebanon was the predecessor of modern Lebanon, declared in 1920 by the League of Nations under the French Mandate, which was ratified in 1923. The country was declared independent in 1943. The Lebanese Civil War lasted from 1975 to 1990 and officially ended with the Taif Agreement in 1989. 68 Further markers that the empirical data recurrently evoke with respect to collective identity are the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the involvement of the PLO in the Lebanese Civil War from 1972 to 1983. Regarding the history of border politics in the region, I will limit myself to pointing out that nearly one million Palestinians were expelled into bordering Arab countries as a consequence of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the foundation of the state of Israel. Twelve refugee camps for Palestinians have been established in Lebanon since then. This serves as just one example of the complex, entangled geopolitical and cultural dynamics that define the contested history of the region (see also Azoulay 2015, 214). Significantly, these dynamics are not only territorial, but also highly symbolic and imaginative, as the artists emphasize in their work.

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When looking closely, the fields of art and culture in Lebanon and Palestine represent different ways in which artistic representation and aesthetic experience are deployed to construct bodies as singular or collective bodies. This notably concerns strategies and procedures that work towards the universalization, compartmentalization, and relativization of certain ideas or elements under the guise of culture. On that note, artist and writer Lina Majdalanie addresses the ways in which static concepts of culture are continually evoked in order to install and maintain fierce and fanatical collective stereotypes. In her research-led project titled “Relatively Universal” (2017),69 Majdalanie sketches out two main intersecting mechanisms used in the process. On the one hand, she identifies tendencies summarized under the umbrella term “cultural relativism”: positions that, schematically speaking, emphasize the pluralism of all cultures and argue that it is thus difficult to compare and critically evaluate them. Defending the idea that specific characteristics, corporeal features, faculties, ideas, or skills are reserved for certain collectives or bodies, this approach, at worst, might support essentialist, naturalistic, or nationalistic notions of collective identity (see also Arendt 1943; Emcke 2016). On the other end of the scale, Majdalanie poses the universalistic view that all of the aforementioned elements are, in principle, available and accessible to everyone—a perspective that might end up ignoring the specificity and situatedness of any given feature, and ultimately situate cultural conflicts beyond judgement or critique. Both dynamics work to positively or negatively construct collectivity, whether for the sake of maintaining the otherness of the other, or of relativizing differences in favor of a nonsituated argument of sameness. According to Majdalanie, they also actively affect the realm of the arts, keeping bodies in a predefined place. Correspondingly, she boils it down to the formula: “We love you, as you are, and we hate you as you are—but stay as you are.” (quoted in Noeth 2017b) Cultural anthropologist Nadia Latif takes on this paradox of generalizing and simultaneously overidentifying, and speaks about a tension that unfolds “between the essentialized, rooted-in-place identities of the immobile past and the cosmopolitan, de-territorialized identities of the hyper-mobile present”

69 The three-day salon that Lina Majdalanie organized at HAU-Hebbel am Ufer and in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin from January 19 to 22, 2017, was part of the curatorial project Utopian Realities: 100 Years Now with Alexandra Kollontai. The series of public debates was structured upon Majdalanie’s lived experience as an international artist, leftist, and citizen active during and after the Lebanese Civil War.

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(2010, 26). What is important to point out is the potential risk of cultural problems being conflated with and presented as political and social problems—a process that aesthetic experience contributes to overtly or covertly in affirmative or critical ways. On that note, recent public debates about how to handle the Muslim veil in European societies are just one example illustrating how collective identity is constructed through cultural difference. Moreover, it demonstrates how different arguments are conflated in the process, such as questions of body politics, secular values, religious freedom, female equality, multiculturalism, and a general fear of terrorism. Frictions Within: Strategies of Collective Self-Insurance Significantly, Beydoun reminds us that these collectivizing dynamics can also be observed on an intracommunitarian scale, insofar as they operate equally within a specific community or within the artistic field, and so on.70 The case study analyses offer several examples of this kind of likening of collective identity to cultural or epistemic features. With regards to dance education in Palestine, Saleh reflects on the impact of presumptions that categorically limit certain qualities and values such as experimentation, criticality, or freedom of expression to Western entitlement, criteria, and evaluation. On a more general level, different instances of self-presentation, self-censorship, and self-Orientalization come to the fore in the artists’ accounts in the form of noticeable or more subtle instances in which artists and cultural operators act in anticipation of the regulating force of real or imagined communities and peer groups71 that they belong or

70 In relation to the artistic field, differences that demarcate collectivity include distinctions between artists working inside Lebanon and Palestine as well as those working in exile. Relatedly, as Beydoun explains, intracommunitarian distinctions result from an ambivalence concerning the successful construction of a career as a Lebanese artist. He states: “To acquire an intellectual or artistic identity, a Lebanese will generally move out of the national orbit.” (1992, 101) 71 An example is the joint project The Novel of Nonel and Vovel by Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour and Israeli artist Oreet Ashery (2009). Even though the project aimed at critically discussing the very limits, inequalities, and unavoidable biases but also the openings of working together in this constellation and voicing an open statement in support of Palestinian independence, both artists faced distinct critiques and accusations of contributing to the normalization of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, with the possibility of being excluded from art shows, funding, etc. Here, the feeling of crossing a collective, imaginary line of identification seems to have clashed with the artists’ critical attempts.

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wish to belong to. Specifically, there is evidence of situations in which the artists are prompted to consider external norms, taboos, and expectations in their artistic decision making. Thus, in their creative processes, they are led to reflect on what the collective might consider acceptable and what—in the Lebanese and Palestinian contexts—can only be spoken about collectively.72 This need to position oneself collectively is intensified by accelerated neoliberal developments that affect the international arts market as well as local art scenes in Ramallah and Beirut alike. Art historian Hanan Toukan offers an example from the Lebanese contemporary postwar visual arts scene. She describes how arts-related discourse, economies, and cultural politics have in recent years created an opposition between high-end models of artistic and cultural production and less marketable, institutionally unsupported creative forms. Toukan points out that this scenario has produced friction inside the artistic community itself by conflating artistic practice, power politics, and arguments related to the representation of collective identity. As a result, some ideas (and ideals) such as criticality, subversion, or dissidence have been increasingly associated with only one part of the artistic community, a development that Toukan describes as a cultural means of constructing otherness. She contends: “To dichotomise the two art worlds by romanticising one at the expense of the other” is a way “to essentialize the notion of ‘the other’ art.” (2013) The inclusions and exclusions that result from these kinds of collective selfdefinitions are mirrored, moreover, in an idea of the political Left that continues, to some extent, to shape the experience of collectivity in the field of contemporary arts at large. None of the artists discussed in the case studies engages explicitly in the conceptual and political history of the political Left. Yet, their respective positioning towards socially and politically aware forms of artistic engagement express their general commitment to liberal politics in defense of human rights and in opposition to regulative or normative structures. On that note, Middle East scholar Sune Haugbolle reminds us of the pertinacity and political ambitions that have historically linked the field of contemporary arts and the political Left in terms of borderwork. He writes:

72 Audiences are equally part of this dynamic, as evidenced by the fact that all three artworks are partly produced and toured outside the artists’ homelands and draw on profound experiences of navigating local and international arts markets.

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“Leftists have thought to formulate alternatives to establish notions of internal and external boundaries in Lebanon, and the possibility of altering these boundaries. Moreover, artists and intellectuals who are loosely or closely affiliated with leftist groups have written about life in Lebanon as ‘borderland.’” (2013, 453)

It is interesting to acknowledge the actual collective impact of the idea of the Left in the artistic realm while its very definition often remains rather vague and imprecise, almost as a self-directed promise or an unquestioned reassurance of a collective’s political awareness. In line with this, Majdalanie similarly argues that a too generic alignment with the Left might ultimately inhibit an artistic collective’s self-criticism and its capacity to reassess its own conditions.73 Furthermore, she emphasizes the necessity that artists and citizens alike commit to repoliticizing their analyses rather than consigning them to culture in order to prevent the idea of the Left becoming an empty concept, devoid of any actual sociopolitical agency (2017). Fallen Under Spell: The Bias of Collective Address In Chapter 6.1., I started to discuss how bodies have, historically speaking, offered a surface for projecting and imagining collectivity both in the arts and in society.74 Against this backdrop, I would like to present evidence from the

73 As an example, Majdalanie (2017) refers to her position as a leftist in the intellectual and artistic circles of Beirut in the 1990s. In this context, control over discourse represented, according to her, a vital source of power at a moment when addressing intra-Arab nationalisms and racisms seemed largely impossible. 74 For an overview of the role of dance in the Palestinian liberation struggle, see Rowe (2016). In summary, artists from different disciplinary backgrounds have been supporting and subverting projects of nation building and nationalism, struggles for liberation, and independence as well as diverse movements of resistance and propaganda that define the political history of both Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. The stone throwing associated with the Palestinian resistance movements or the communitydefined graffiti and portraits of martyrs that cover public and media space in Lebanon are but two prominent examples. In the process, existing or imagined lines of confrontation and demarcation are negotiated on artistic grounds. In the literature, the Oslo Accords are often evoked as a turning point in the relationship between resistance movements and cultural production, shifting from a collective to a more individual approach. For example, in his reflections on how the PLO used arts for propaganda purposes in an attempt to shape and distribute Palestinian consciousness, Yazid Anani suggests differentiating among the following articulations of art: “Art as political

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comparative analyses that references less tangible dynamics confronting the artists: specifically, the need to defend their artistic choices against expectations of collective aesthetics expressed in formulas such as “Arab art” or “the Arab body”.75 On a movement-practical level, for instance, these external framings might include expectations of the use of traditional or popular forms of dance like dabke, belly dancing, or Sufi or zar rituals in contemporary artistic practice. Along similar lines, Abbas and Abou-Rahme discuss prescriptions that they see on a thematic level; for instance, the assumption that art from the Middle East should take a political stance and thus engage in gender-equality activism and other political struggles or, notably, border politics. The motivations for collectively controlling and monitoring individual artistic choices range from good intentions of recognizing and giving visibility to ethnic and cultural difference to the pragmatic fulfilment of funding obligations that display the international scope and agency of an arts institution. What is significant is that such collective mainstreaming corresponds to an act of geopoliticizing and localizing aesthetics that does not necessarily correspond to the artists’ intentions. However, in an international arts market, the aesthetic and ideological conformity expressed by attributing a heightened degree of collective legitimacy and appropriateness to some gestures or movements and not to others is not without irony.76 This

tourism, art as imagination of the future state, deconstructionist artists, art that looks at politics through a poetic lens, art as militant activism, art of critical sensations.” (quoted in Toukan 2014, 220-21) 75 The persistence of canonical representations of bodies is often grounded in references to figurative and pictorial traditions in Arab art, particularly from a Western perspective (for an overview see Institut du Monde Arabe 2012). Concerning the representation of bodies, there is a canon of recurring images and tropes: over-saturated and necessarily reductive depictions of weak and suffering bodies, of veiled female and oppressed bodies and of desired and phantasmagorical bodies. Discussing the status of the female Muslim body in social media, Liane Al-Ghussein states: “From my vantage point, it seems we are divided between two extremes: either dissecting women’s faces or cutting them out of public view altogether, in one hand the plastic surgeon’s scalpel and in the other the censor’s black marker.” (2015, 56) 76 With regards to Palestinian and Lebanese artists, national or geopolitical identifications are among the most frequent labels to be applied by arts institutions and funding bodies, often as indicators of a certain collective identity in combination with genderrelated (e.g., queer, female) or market-related (e.g., experimental, innovative) attributes. This is exemplified in the use of national indicators in communication materials. In my curatorial practice, artists’ reactions to these cultural identity politics

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approach restrains the freedom of artistic expression at the outset and counters parallel claims for the uniqueness and singularity of artistic work, on which art institutions, curators, and funding bodies might otherwise base their engagement. At this point, it is important to acknowledge that the collective affiliation of bodily and corporeal features with a broader cause or community is not always an external act of intrusion, but can be a deliberate and conscious choice, as well, as the example of Saleh suggests. Embedded in long-term research that also feeds the creation of Free Advice, she repeatedly refers to her repertory of gestures as “Palestinian” gestures, among other collective affiliations. Significantly, her approach does not, as I see it, exhaust itself in a performative articulation of identarian claims. On the contrary, she uses choreographic means to deconstruct any stable concept of collective identity and put it up for negotiation in the aesthetic experiences that she creates. Abbas and Abou-Rahme as well as Dictaphone Group equally acknowledge the respective cultural and sociopolitical contexts with which they interact. While they express the desire to be part of something common and shared, they nevertheless insist in their pieces and preparatory research processes on the importance of the personal and the local. As a preliminary summary, these findings suggest that firm and strongly exclusive demarcations exist in the Lebanese and Palestinian/Israeli cultural and geopolitical contexts alongside contingent, fragmentary, and contradictory factors that influence the experience of collectivity. With regards to the theorization of collectivity, this indicates that conflicting orders and practices of meaning making do not actually prevent the development of a collective; rather, they are part of its very definition from the outset. Thus, the experience of collectivity corresponds to a state of nonaccomplishment that must not be conflated with the idea of failure: it exists always in movement, in its own reformulations, and in contingency. Understood in these terms, I argue that collectivity as a political concept has a certain ability to react to the complex realities of belonging in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. Towards Relational Collectivity What is home? A physical structure? A geographic location? A set of familiar routines and habits?

ranged from welcoming the opportunity to affirm one’s belonging to distinctly rejecting such labeling as stigmatizing and discriminatory and as an act of intrusion.

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A network of relationships? Is the meaning of home only after it has been lost and left behind? Nadia Latif 2010, 26.

Belonging is a concept that continues to forcefully permeate common debates and existing scholarship on collectivity in the Middle Eastern context. Furthermore, as Lähdesmäki et al. point out, it represents a key concept used across different academic disciplines to “emphasize the fluid, unfixed and processual nature of diverse social and spatial attachments” (2016, 2).77 As this quote suggests, belonging evokes notions of home and homeland. Moreover, as the previous paragraph explores, it holds a spatial and territorial dimension; it derives from rights and duties, and mirrors the impact of shared features (such as language or culture) on a collective’s sense of being together. Building on this, the empirical material validates additional layers and elements of belonging: affects and emotional attachments, shared ideas and visions, recognizable body and movement characteristics as well as ethical and political values that bind bodies together (see also Yuval-Davis 2017, 104). These observations emphasize the importance of immaterial features like ideas and imagination in the experience of belonging. Importantly, with the case studies in mind, they uphold the possibility of nonbelonging. Moreover, as sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis accentuates, different elements that are meaningful for understanding how belonging works “cannot be analysed as items that are added up but, rather, as constituting each other” (2006, 200). According to her, these elements are complementary and interact with each other along multiple axes of power and difference:

77 Reviewing recent qualitative scholarship on the concept of belonging, Lahdesmäki et al. (2016) identify four crosscutting approaches to belonging: the spatiality of belonging, intersectional and multiple belonging, the materiality of belonging, and, significantly, nonbelonging. These approaches have most notably been used in relation to studies on migration and minorities, and explain the pertinence of the concept of belonging as a new approach to studying identity (Lähdesmaki et al. 2016, 2). Cultural studies scholar Elsbeth Probyn, for instance, suggests that belonging “captures more accurately the desire for some sort of attachment, be it to other people, places, or modes of being, and the ways in which individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is fuelled by yearning rather than the positing of identity as a stable state” (1996, 644).

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“While belonging is about feeling safe, feeling entitled to particular rights and roles, it is composed of emotional, cognitive, and normative dimensions. The politics of belonging are the political project, which constructs these feelings of belonging around particular collectivities and around particular signifiers of belonging. Within this project, political actors construct the boundaries, reproduce them, and maintain them, and of course contest them.” (2017, 104)

On this basis, I argue that both belonging and the politics of belonging are present in the aesthetic experiences of collectivity that the artistic case studies evoke. Notably, my dramaturgical analyses of the pieces consider how collective norms and values are created and unsettled in aesthetic experience and thereby allow, more generally speaking, an examination of a body’s participation and involvement in a given social and political context. Collateral Moves: Collectivity as an Organizational Principle In the interview passages that focus on the creation and production processes of Free Advice, Contingency, and Nothing to Declare, the artists evoke collectivity as a collaborative and organizational principle. They describe as the basis of their artistic activities their teaming up with a mostly temporary and decentralized network of professionals, presenters, and funding bodies but also people that they encounter in the everyday and at the borders. Furthermore, they all mention a high level of self-organization and, to some extent, recourse to Arab language and cultural traditions as binding elements in their collaborations. At the same time, all of the cases explicate the artists’ multiform engagement in different activist and solidarity movements:78 Dictaphone Group, for instance, comment on their commitment to civic initiatives fighting for the retention or recuperation of urban space, and Abbas and Abou-Rahme mention their ongoing interest in using their art to contribute to the accessibility and circulation of

78 Reflecting on the notion of collectivity in their artistic collaborations, Dictaphone Group and Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe the significance of negotiating changing environments and constellations in their artistic decisions, as well as the impact of emotional, biographical, or content-based frictions that occur in their working processes. In the specific context of this study, the question of collaboration extends, as Chapter 2 argues, to the collaboration between the artists and myself as a researcher. The problem of representation is at the core of this process: who speaks and dances for whom? Who defines the fault lines of authenticity, legitimacy, and collective identity?

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knowledge. In a pronounced way, Saleh expresses her general support for the BDS movement.79 What unites the artists’ different forms of collective engagement is a general commitment to human rights: the right to move freely, the right to the integrity of the body, the right to the commons, the right to participation in society, the right to reappropriate history, the right to speak back, and so on, in combination with a more or less pronounced or diffuse sense of union or fellowship. In line with this, philosopher Gesa Ziemer (2017), in her discussion of the concept of complicity, accentuates the importance of nonmaterial elements for the formation and experience of collectivity. Concretely, she names conspiracy, emotional involvement, and a certain amount of insecurity, seduction, commitment, and responsibility as constitutive factors that, in terms of operational connectedness and connectivity, differentiate complicity from mere collaboration. Relying on fieldwork and my comparative analyses of the data, I would like to add trust and kinship to this list. Yet, as the comparative analyses reveal, not all collective engagements result from deliberate and free choice or artistic necessity. Rather, some mirror the gradual influence of specific practical and local circumstances and ideological frameworks that confront artists and arts institutions from Lebanon and Palestine alike. Artist Shuruq Harb gives an example of the dilemmas that might emerge in the Palestinian context from conflicting wishes and needs for collaboration. In her review of the 2016 edition of the biennial arts event Qalandiya International (Harb 2017), she discusses how, beyond artistic reasons, collaboration among Palestinian institutions might be forged by practical production necessities, by a political need to stand together and an intersecting external rhetoric of unity, or by what she describes as a certain sense of nostalgia. The potential risk that she sees in these “dilemmas of collectivity in absence of connectivity” is “the danger of creating a comforting illusion of collectivity that only glosses over the political and geographic fragmentation that it is critiquing” (Harb 2017). According to Harb, losing sight of artistic connections in working together in order to receive funding or represent a political agenda runs the risk of missing out on the “real

79 Nicholas Rowe suggests defining normalization activities as “activities that had been used by the Israeli government to present a veneer of normalcy regarding PalestineIsraeli relations in front of the international community, whitewashing on-going injustices associated with colonization and military of Palestine by Israel” (2016, 28). Significantly, he notes that both sides have been “educated differently” in the conflict (2016, 29), a framing condition that applies to my position as a German researcher, as well.

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challenges of ‘sharing’ and independent collective agency outside of formal governmental and institutional structures […]; an active place of solidarity where things are exchanged” (2017). What I would like to emphasize here is how artistic concerns, political action, and issues of collective responsibility are co-constitutive and interdependent in the creative collaborations of the artists. Dance scholar Ramsay Burt has addressed these dynamics in his 2017 study Ungoverning Dance, which considers the connections between artistic practices and the commons. Writing on contemporary European theater dance, he defines “the commons” as a notion that unites groups, and he consequently examines the intersection of markets; ideological, economic, and psychological forces; recognizable and normative aesthetics; and the place of criticality in the field of dance (2017b, 19). Arguing for the utmost independence of dance creation, Burt carves out an ambivalence that applies, to some extent, to the empirical material at hand. He reminds us that artistic practices that are grounded in collective and unifying models of action and strive for commonality and a more equal distribution of rights entangle bordering processes like normative and regulatory imagery, movement vocabulary, and terminology that need to be taken into account in our analyses, as well. Out of Tune: Movements of Synchronization and Desynchronization Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects operates on the hypothesis that movement is one of the key factors in understanding the intersecting experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. In line with this, sociologist Urs Stäheli contends: “When reflecting on the formation of a feeling of ‘we-ness’, movement needs to be acknowledged as a factor in its own right, whether the joint movement of a collective towards an objective, whether the experience of one’s own movement.” (2012, 115; author’s translation) Similarly, Hagar Kotef suggests that in the experience of collectivity, the directed movement of a collective and the perception and awareness of one’s own movement are inseparably linked and extracted from any specific subject position. Using the example of a close reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Kotef examines how individual bodies, when united by shared intentions, will, or goals, are bound to each other in one movement—as a single body (2016). She argues that the collective movement that emerges when the boundaries delineating an individual’s autonomy and corporeality collapse cannot be sufficiently explained by unison or synchronization. Rather, she imagines that in the experience of collectivity, the individual body finds itself in a state of crisis. Kotef goes on to implicitly engage with philosopher Erin Manning, who emphasizes the affective politics that come

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into play in this process. Manning states: “At its most political, to reach toward is to create a concept for unthinking the individual as a discrete entity. Sensing bodies in movement are not individual bodies: their individuations are always collective.” (2007, xviii) Bringing these different theoretical voices into dialogue, the process of collective meaning making and of becoming collective seems to unfold in a state of disquietude (see also Stäheli 2012, 102):80 a state of constant reformulation, restlessness, and excitement that unfurls in between meticulously composed and, at the same time, improvisational and responsive modes of moving together. My data exemplifies the contingent, out of sync, and simultaneously stabilizing qualities of collective movement—of the collective’s movement—on different levels. The interviews with the artists, for example, provide diverse accounts of the ways in which the demand for physical discipline and a highly reactive physical behavior are combined in the experience of the border. This is flanked by more general references by Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group to the use of movement-based strategies and notably dance in the context of recent protests across the Middle East in thoroughly orchestrated yet spontaneous and eruptive ways. Rehearsing to Do Things, Separately Following the artists’ accounts, the success of collective action depends on the capacity of bodies to be at the same time eminently organized and synchronized and still able to quickly accommodate changing conditions and environments (see also Beausoleil 2014). In line with this, artists and curators Elena Basteri, Emanuele Guidi, and Elisa Ricci suggest thinking of collective movement as

80 This idea of altering the scale, intensity, and quality of one’s relationship within a collective resonates with Urs Stäheli’s sociological reflection on the possibilities and strategies of disconnection (Ent-Netzung, author’s translation). Reminding us that participation, in the first place, represents a normative concept, he examines different forms of disconnection (Stäheli 2013, 5) as a specific mode of being together that not only influences the efficiency of a collective, but also operates as a normative and regulating force. Elsewhere, Stäheli imagines a form of acting together without engaging in common action or a common goal (2012). A collective in the becoming is, according to him, defined by what he terms “social unrest” and “restlessness” (2012, 102-104, author’s translation) that puts the collective in movement: a nonlinear, circular, peripheral, and responsive quality of being together which is characterized by a certain utopian potential, an indirectness, or something unexpected.

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rehearsed movement, noting:81 “The verb to rehearse is mostly associated with theatre, dance, performance. We related it to the notion of collectivity so as to stress the choreographic, performative and aesthetic aspect connected to it” (2011, preface). In my reading, the process-driven perspective within the idea of rehearsal not only alludes to the observation that the experience of collectivity is skill based and involves the purposeful training of bodies to help them gain velocity and durability. It also indicates that collectivity is never fully accomplished; it is always projected and yet to come. Applied to the case studies at hand, the dramaturgical analyses exemplify that body-based artistic work provides crucial practical and theoretical knowledge for orchestrating bodies in the experience of collectivity: the handling of timing and rhythm or the composed positioning of bodies in space might serve as examples (see Muller and Noeth 2017). Kai van Eikels agrees with this observation in general terms; yet, he warns us not to reduce the role of art to its capacity of implementing, passing on, or mimicking collectivity in a one-to-one exchange. Instead, from a philosophical perspective, he sees the significance of art not in implementing and legitimizing collectivity, but in the critical and analytical value that it might bring to examining normative orders and borders that operate in any collective experience: “Art is not there to tell us what to rehearse in terms of collectivity, and probably not even to tell us how to rehearse collectivity. It can however help us to detect and cultivate techniques of rehearsing within the everyday practice that is social life.” (2012, 7) Even more, van Eikels points out that uncritically implicating arts in the experience of collectivity might simply produce new or harden existing inclusions and exclusions in both the aesthetic and political realms under the guise of pleasure and communality. He explains: “The violence that collective activities of singing or dancing can impose upon individuals when they manifest themselves as organisations of pleasure with a distinct line between those who are included and those who are excluded.” (2012, 11) Consequently, he encourages audiences in aesthetic and, I would add, public and social space to “do things together, separately” (van Eikels 2012, 7) in an attempt to attune one’s actions to the actions of others (or to the actions of the collective) without losing one’s individuality. Significantly, this shift towards exploring the aesthetic experience of theater as a laboratory for the experience of collectivity is artistic and political at the same time: struggling corporeally and by sensorial means over the

81 Rehearsing Collectivity. Choreography beyond Dance was held from April 27 to May 6, 2011 at Tanzfabrik/Uferstudios in Berlin, and followed by a publication of the same name (see Basteri, Guidi, and Ricci 2012).

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experience of collectivity is interlinked with struggling over power and sovereignty. Van Eikels explains: “This shift is not only from collective to collectivity, i.e. from a form of represented entity to organisational effects, but also from participation as the expression of being part to participation as parts of me, things I do or parts of things I do, synchronizing with things or parts of things others do.” (van Eikels 2012, 11) In summary, rather than predetermined arrangements, membership, or objectives, this position places movement at the core of a contingent and shape-shifting process in which the experience of collectivity can never fully stabilize.82 Collectivity in Crisis Violence traumatizes, silences, robs a person of a sense of familiarity and belonging. Nazan Üstündag 2010, 98.

The comparative analyses of the artistic case studies allow every experience of the border to be qualified, schematically speaking, as a situation of crisis, understood not as an event but as a dynamic in which existing orders are disrupted and destabilized in order to simultaneously reemerge and reorganize. The empirical material, accordingly, gives examples of everyday, subliminal, latent, and structural borders, with reference to eruptive, militarized, and civilian outbreaks of violence. In connection to the experience of the border, the case studies illustrate that bodies which are acting collectively are characterized by their adaptability to given frameworks and circumstances as well as a parallel openness to accept ambivalence and contradiction. Conflict scholarship, in an effort to understand a collective’s ability to react and adapt to long-term or abrupt changes, has observed that the individual and the collective cannot be clearly separated in this process. For example, social scientists Büscher et al. speak of a “collective intelligence in crisis” to analytically capture a collective’s response to disruptions. They explain: “Complex social practices of interpretation, coordination, information, verification and aggregation are necessary, and they are a key element of

82 Scholars have discussed how gestures that are ostensibly exclusive to a specific collective (such as the stone throwing commonly associated with the Palestinian liberation struggle) might be corporeally, symbolically, or politically appropriated over time by other, potentially conflicting collectives (e.g., by Israelis) (see Perugini and Gordon 2015; Azoulay 2016).

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more complex self-organised forms of collective intelligence.” (Büscher, Liegl and Thomas 2014, 246)83 In their personal accounts, the artists describe the augmented situational awareness (in corporeal, somatic, visceral, and affective terms) and specific skills that define the experience of collectivity in crisis: a high level of responsiveness and agility, for instance, and a certain ingenuity in finding practical solutions to being and moving together through symbolic and physical threats or attacks. At the same time, they make it impressively apparent that collective identity politics are hardened in the process. In a theoretical attempt to combine these contradictory yet complementary observations, Rebecca Solnit accentuates the performative dimension of this process from a cultural studies perspective. Embedded in historical and empirical research on communities in catastrophic situations (primarily environmental calamities),84 she draws on the concept of emergence to comprehend these processes of collective formations and counterformations. Similar to the asynchronicity and contingency that I identified earlier as integral parts of the experience of collectivity, Solnit argues that it is exactly those moments of separation and rupture that unite collectiveness with agency.85 Even more, she suggests that crises create “a sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life” (2010, 305). Herein lies, according to her, a collective’s potential to topple old orders and generate change and creativity.

83 From a different angle, in their study on choreography and war, Giersdorf and Morris consider the relationship between the entanglement of conflicting dynamics and the observation that the distinction between times of war and peace become less pronounced over time. They show how the relationship between the dancing body and the sovereign or authority that it mirrors, caters to, or criticizes, has changed. Twentyfirst-century wars, according to them, are increasingly marked by asymmetry and interconnectedness, which thus expands border dynamics, as well. Furthermore, the growing influence of media and technology helps select, local conflicts develop a global presence and a corresponding audience. Moreover, they suggest that the entanglement of territorial, physical, and digital as well as symbolic space constitutes a characteristic element of collective formations in crisis (see Giersdorf and Morris 2016, 1-24). 84 Solnit’s focus on environmental calamities introduces certain limits to adapting her findings to a discussion on borders. 85 “The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of, the opposite of merge, which comes from merger, to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged. An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion” (Solnit 2010, 10).

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The data offer examples of momentary formations and experiences of collectivity that align with Solnit’s observation to a certain extent: for example, the blogger network that Dictaphone Group mention in their booklet as a primary impulse for their artistic engagement with borders, or the joining together of Palestinians when confronted at Israeli checkpoints that Abbas and Abou-Rahme describe. Following Solnit’s reading, these appear as moments of openness and possibility where the collective, when confronted with destructive forces, expresses “desires for inclusion, purpose and power” (2010, 305-6). These instances of corporeal and affective excess create the capacity to activate experiences that she sees as otherwise neglected in civil society and public life. 86 This potential for the unexpected and the untested that finds expression in the collective experience of crisis at the border and that the artists’ agency in using imagination and experimentation to defend alternative experiences and representations in their artwork—that is, of the border—is referenced in the case studies, as well. It resonates in the artists’ corresponding efforts to defend alternative experiences and representations in their artwork. However, the transformative qualities of collectivity that emerge in crisis must be contextualized within the border realities of Palestine/Israel and Lebanon; namely, the unavoidable inequality and, ultimately, violence that accompany every experience of the border to one degree or another. From a different angle, Solnit emphasizes that in crisis, “strangers become friends and collaborators” and explains: “Disaster requires the ability to embrace contradiction in both the minds undergoing it and those trying to understand it from afar” (Solnit 2010, 14). What emerges here is a collective’s search for logic, certainty, and continuity in a moment where routines and order, as much as intuitions and impulses, might no longer be reliable. This corresponds to passages in the artists’ accounts in which collectivity is not accomplished, in which it fails or falls apart, in which it does not fulfil its potential for counter-formation, and in which connections between bodies stay loose and temporary. I have already discussed Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s term “self-policing” and what Dictaphone Group capture as experiences of suspicion, doubt, and vulnerability that manifest on corporeal as well as psychological and affective levels at the border. On the basis of the theoretical positions that I evoked, I suggest that

86 In the context of her analytical framework, Solnit contends that the experience of crisis might reveal specific forms of collective enjoyment, generosity, and desires for collectivity (2010, 5). This potential has been the subject of a body of scholarship that is interested in the relationship between crisis and conflict from the perspective of altruism and solidarity (see also Leykin et al. 2016).

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ambivalence, contradictions, and the possibility of polysemic meaning need to be taken into account in any corresponding theorization of collectivity. In the experience of crisis and, more specifically, in the experience of the border, the collective exists in the absence of the communal or of something shared. Dis-Identification as a Condition for Maintaining a Collective The empirical data reveal concrete moments and strategies of a collective’s selfassessment as concrete examples of the nonconsensual and irrational elements that my evaluation has already carved out as constitutive elements for understanding collectivity: docile bodies policing each other; members of a collective turning against themselves at the checkpoint; and suspicious gazes reconfirming one’s belonging to the neighborhood when put under curfew. Here, the artists describe situations and processes in which proximity and distance, and affiliation and friction, are measured out anew inside the collective via corporeal, affective, sensorial, and discursive means. In other words, they reflect on how the belonging is subject to inner dynamics in which one’s identification and dis-identification are negotiated with a given collective rather than with regards to external frameworks of criteria. Philosopher Frédéric Pouillaude turns to similar instances that emphasize how collectivity is constructed ever anew in his close reading of an international set of choreographic works.87 In summary, he observes a shift in the field of contemporary European dance in the 1990s in which the idea of the community as such comes under scrutiny in the artistic projects under review: “[a] community [that] was never addressed as a given fact; rather, the community was always something to be sought for, to be researched, to be intentionally researched, to be intentionally constructed. (2017) In more recent works of contemporary dance, however, Pouillaude sees that community is already accepted “as an unavoidable fact” (2017). Rather than de- or reconstructing any real or imagined community on stage, he contends that the artists now focus on how to implement artistic and political agency inside of a community and from their positions as members of it. Pouillaude elaborates: “A body is always an individual. But this individual body shares many of his gestures, habits, beliefs, fears, attractions and repulsions with many other bodies. The body is polit-

87 In concrete, Frédéric Pouillaude (2017) refers to the following pieces: Mathilde Monnier, Les Lieux de Là (1999); Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2014); Eszter Salamon, Monument 0: Haunted by war (2014); Dorothée Munyaneza, Unwanted (2017); and Sandra Iché, Variations orientalistes (2014).

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ical in this set of shared determinations. To acknowledge this set of political determinations is already a way to enlarge our freedom, to create a distance to it, to be able to imagine other determinations, and finally […] to limit and counteract the potential violence of this set of political determinations.” (2017)88

Further into his argument, Pouillaude emphasizes concepts and practices of “dis-identification” (2017) as significant elements in the artistic articulations of collectivity under review. These artistic possibilities and strategies, in my rephrasing, are developed by the artists in order to distance themselves from a national, ethnic, or gendered community to which they belong. From a critical perspective, questioning what brings and holds a collective together, they put their affiliations to the test on a choreographic, performative, and bodily level and thus reassess their own positions. What is important to note in Pouillaude’s proposal is that he describes these moments of dis-identification not as a collective’s failure or dissolution. On the contrary, he argues that they constitute a primary condition for a collective to maintain itself, to stay in movement, and to keep up its capacity for action. Thus, dis-identification is a matter of scale, intensity, flexibility, and circulation that are at work within any given collective. It entails the reflection on the degree of otherness that defines the relationships between bodies in relation, as I will discuss in the last part of this section. To Consent Not To Be A Single Being I have already argued that the body- and movement-centered perspective that the case studies introduce into my analyses suggest that relationality is a key element in theoretically understanding collectivity. In the experience of the border, bodies variously relate with other bodies in order to become what literature scholar Saskia Sasse and philosopher Stefanie Wenner term a “collective body”: “The specificity of the collective body […] is particularly constituted by the correlation of order and transgression, of regularity and the violation of rules, of the visibility and the invisibility of what holds it together. As it seems, the collective body doubles what the question of the body itself leaves open: the intertwining of collective imaginative and

88 In a similar vein, Irit Rogoff comments: “Something else that interests me is the notion of trans-identification: the possibility of identifying with something that is not your identity or your experience or your knowledge of the world or your positionality, and taking it into another context.” (quoted in Nasser 2012, 103)

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symbolic figuration and bodily participation in the conflict of demarcation, connection, regulation and exotopy.” (2002, 11; author’s translation)

The collective body that is evoked here doesn’t represent an essentialist or bound concept. Rather, it is defined by intertwining movements and by its simultaneous participation in and transgression of different orders and articulations of itself. According to Sasse and Wenner, this concerns the internal connections and interactions among different parts of bodies as well as the external relationships among bodies on a broader societal and political scale. Significantly, the authors claim that the categories, orders, and dynamics that bind bodies together are not necessarily visible. The comparative analyses of the case studies exemplify this point by imbuing immaterial elements and processes in the experience of collectivity with analytical value: friendship and solidarity, privileges, law or ethical standards, the impact of memory, imagination, and projection, affects and embodiment, for example. Collectivity as Relation These process-driven findings foreground the question of alterity in the theoretical discussion and suggest that the experience of collectivity, placed alongside the experience of the border, jeopardizes initial ideas of the categorical otherness of bodies. Linking the geopolitical, imaginative, and symbolic dimensions that every experience of the border opens up, Daniel Meier reminds us that “[b]orders/boundaries are arbitrary constructions but also evocative mental ones in the building of ‘otherness’” (2013, 352). On that note, the empirical data suggests to conceive of otherness not as an external instance or clear-cut position but rather as an element that constitutes an integral part of the experience of the border and the experience of collectivity. Nira Yuval-Davis, in her discussion of the concept of belonging, similarly states that “Not all Others can be reduced to ‘the Other’” (2010, 277) and argues that the other is always displaced, complicated, and multiplied in becoming collective. Philosopher Édouard Glissant centers the problem of how to think about ‘the other’ in his seminal book Poetics of Relation (1997). He develops “Relation” as an overarching term in order to conceptualize how bodies, elements, and entities are interconnected, writing: “Relation is not to be confused with the cultures we are discussing nor with the economy of their internal relationship nor even the intangible results of intricate involvement of all internal relationships with all possible external relationships. Nor is it to be confused with some marvellous accident that might suddenly occur apart from any relationship, the

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known unknown, in which chance could be the magnet. Relation is all these things at once.” (1007, 170-71)

Glissant conceives of “Relation” as an immanent category, i.e., as a category that cannot be further deduced and that is not inferential,89 and describes it as a process that is not limited to the representation of actual space-time links between two bodies. Crucially, he acknowledges the impact of immaterial, irrational, and coincidental elements on the formation and experience of collectivity. This is significant, as it complicates existing exclusive distinctions between and within different communities that continue to define the experience and representation of collectivity in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. On a broader scale, Glissant’s position also corresponds to the power-sensitive and decolonial approaches referenced in Chapter 2.1. He argues that the basic interconnectedness of all elements defining the experience of collectivity challenges any given authority and centrality in order to critique predominant ontological traditions in Western history of thought and their alleged certainty.90 Placed in the context of this study, he rejects reducing the idea of collectivity to the mere idea of difference, to foundational myths, or to claims on land and territory based on authenticity, unquestioned legitimacy, or affiliation.91 According to him, narrowing the discussion to the acceptance of an external other would correspond with colonial ideas of harmony, false synthesis, and ultimately erasure: a perspective that would ignore all the atrocities committed in the name of an absolute difference. Consequently, a collective is more than links derived from shared geopolitical or cultural frameworks (see also Cailler 2011, 143). Rather, and in line with the results of the case study analyses, Glissant accepts that conflict and contradiction are part of every experience of collectivity, understood as an ever-specific process of dynamic reconfiguration. In this sense, collectivity has no universal

89 Glissant states: “When we speak of a poetics of Relation, we no longer need to add: relation between what and what? This is why the French word Relation, which functions somewhat like an intransitive verb, could not correspond, for example, to the English term relationship.” (1997, 27) 90 Glissant refers to this strand of thought as “oneness,” reminding us that it is language that many colonial regimes imposed on colonized people in the first place. 91 He introduces and advocates for the term “totality” as an alternative position. Aware of potential misunderstandings, he clarifies: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to totalitarism” (1997, 119), and explains: “Totality is not which has often been called the universal. It is the finite and realized quantity of the infinite detail of the real.” (Glissant quoted in Cailler 2011, 136)

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significance but can only provide coherence in the moment in which it is generated, lived, and experienced. It is necessary to acknowledge that Glissant is a Martinique-born writer conducting empirical research on social and material realities in atavistic societies—namely, the Caribbean. But despite any limits to the translatability of his thinking to the context of this study, the fact that he places art and culture at the core of his reflections strongly corresponds to the research design of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects. He attributes transformative qualities to all artistic practices92 and argues that aesthetic experience does not represent an end in itself, but holds the potential to create a space of freedom and participation in society. This hypothesis allows me to bring his principle of Relation into dialogue with the case studies and their cultural and geopolitical environments. What is important to note is that Glissant sees this prospective agency and dialogue of arts grounded in the multiplicity, the plurality, and the chaos that every culture carries within itself. Literature scholar Bernadette Cailler comments on this approach: “Henceforth, the writer” [or, for the purposes of this study, the artist] “is immersed in multilinguism, which does not mean that he necessarily speaks or writes in different languages, but that the language and culture of the other languages and cultures, are always there in their multiple resonances, indispensable, and infusing his own cultural expression, in one way or another.” (Cailler 2011, 145)93

Glissant, consequently, does not argue for the dissolution of individual subject positions in favor of an original, universal, or natural unit that would hold a collective together. Rather, he situates agency in critically acknowledging one’s involvement and participation in the collective—that is, in relation. This aligns with the artists’ strategic attempts to destabilize monolithic narratives and representations, and open up the collective’s ability to reemerge and reformulate itself.

92 Glissant’s concept of language goes beyond the general capacity to express oneself with words, broadening to include different, ever-specific forms and modes of expression. He insists that language in this broad sense cannot be reduced to its systemic, ordering, or meaning making capacities but equally holds ambivalences, questions, and oppositions. In his terminology, he calls this understanding of language “poétique.” (see 1997, 23-36) 93 Also see Glissant’s concepts of creolization and metissage (1997, 90).

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Political Implications of a Relational Approach to Collectivity Glissant explicitly reflects on the political dimension of his thinking beyond a positivistic rhetoric of multiplicity. He notably suggests that every animate or inanimate body holds what he terms “the right to opacity” (1997, 111, 189): the right, in my rephrasing, to disappear from its oppressor (in figurative, literal, symbolic, or epistemic senses) and deliberately maintain an element of indefiniteness as an active strategy of resistance. According to him, every writer—and by extension, every artist and creator—should inhabit this symbolic and political space and work on imagining all possible particularities within the diversity of social forms and human practices. The right to opacity, however, carries an initial ambiguity when translated to the Lebanese and Palestinian/Israeli contexts. Read as a plea to oppose consolidation and the idealism of happy coexistence, it is strong in its call for differentiation. However, at the same time it begs the question of how to engage in this challenge in light of border realities in which the right to opacity is categorically unavailable or differently available to certain bodies. In the same vein, Anjali Prabhu points out a conceptual weakness in Glissant’s claim for the right to opacity, insofar as it does not sufficiently consider the influence of norms and hierarchies that shape every encounter with the other. Correspondingly, Prabhu writes that opacity “is the authorial refusal to be recuperated by the system of Europeanization, recolonization, canonization, or perhaps even capitalization. But opacity as a concept only functions in this relationship with a/the dominant other(s)” (2005, 79). Ultimately, placing the right to opacity outside of existing power dynamics might consequently result in a far too idealistic gesture that risks further contributing to the ongoing marginalization of or overidentification with a categorical other—a tension that is not fully reconcilable in the Palestinian/Israeli and Lebanese contexts. Despite these shortcomings, I would like to take the political component of Glissant’s definition of Relation and apply it to my analyses of the experience of collectivity. When put in dialogue with the findings from the data, the political does not primarily arise from a collective’s link to specific topics and contexts such as borders, crisis, or trauma, or from its comprehensive link to real politics. Instead, with reference to Glissant, the political dimension is motivated by the fact that in the experience of collectivity, the possibilities and limits of participating in society are negotiated. In a similar vein, thinking of the border as a “site of encounter” (Johnson et al. 2011, 62; see also Rovisco 2010) and acknowledging its identity-making qualities, art curator and critic Chantal Pontbriand contends that the border as a descriptive and an analytical framework has taken on a new “political sense”: “When speaking of political sense, the

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sense of common life in society needs to be taken into account, of being-incommunity, of what it means to live together with, to namely live in proximity of the other, to live side by side in a same territory or in different territories” (2006, 6). This resonates with the artists’ dramaturgical strategies as well as with general border mechanisms dedicated to redistributing bodies in the aesthetic or quotidian experience of collectivity. Dwelling Bodies, Moving towards an Other: Notes on Ethics and Collectivity To listen. To interrupt your Self and go towards the Other. To open your Self to all the possibilities that arise in you by the words of the Other, the logic of the Other, the breath of the Other. To accept and to surrender to that which enters you, so that it settles in you and remains in you. This is what we have lost…for our words now fall to the ground, in front of us, before they reach their target—and if they succeed, they arrive at a barren, destroyed land, like our language. We can design the most beautiful and modern tribunes, but the moment someone stands before them to orate in speeches, all conditions of listening are negated. Tony Chakar, 2013.

The border is a site of encounter. With every act of entering into Glissant’s notion of Relation, the responsibility for the other—for other bodies—appears anew. Arguably, every experience of the border and every experience of collectivity produce and reproduce inclusions and exclusions and maintain a certain level of vulnerability and violence to which bodies are exposed. Yet, the accentuation of the relational deconstructs the idea of an individual, bound, and autonomous body and opens a space for existing frameworks and premises of being together to performatively manoeuver. This comes with a condition that Glissant points out in an interview with scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara: the necessity “to consent not to be a single being” (Glissant and Diawara 2011, 4-19). As I read it, this is to accept that we can never fully accomplish belonging and that we become tangible through encountering the other beyond and despite all differences. It is to reflect, as I suggested earlier, on what Étienne Balibar

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describes as “the border in us” (see 2002) and to acknowledge along with Jacques Derrida that hospitality exists only as “conditional hospitality” (see 2000).94 Or, as Glissant contends: “It is no longer necessary that I understand the other, that is, to reduce him to the model of my own transparency, in order to live with this other or to build something with him.” (1997, 71) In their pieces, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group actively work on various strategies and concepts of Relation, critically engaging the possibility and the boundaries of revisiting one’s own actions and decisions, without giving up one’s own subject position. In the aesthetic experiences that they create, the ethical exists in between bodies. Rather than regulating or standardizing the interaction between bodies, it drives every experience of collectivity in the first place. Significantly, ethics—as I propose in Chapter 2— are not provided or prescribed in advance; rather, they are always situated and applied. They are not primarily cognitive or rational but evoke latent, implicit, practicebased, and embodied dimensions.95 This approach suggests taking the physical, symbolic, and social encounters created in the aesthetic experience of the artwork as opportunities to generate spaces for transversal readings of what it takes to belong and of what it takes to cross a border. Or, as Glissant puts it when reflecting on borders from the perspective of bodies in movement: “I find it quite pleasant to pass from one atmosphere to another through crossing a border. We need to put an end to the idea of a border that defends and prevents. Borders must be permeable; they must not be weapons against migration or immigration processes.” (quoted in Diawara 2009)

94 Derrida writes: “[T]his is an experience […] with all thoughts that are sources, for I will never stop beginning anew to think with them on the basis of the new beginning they give me, and I will begin again and again to rediscover them on just about any subject. [This is] not a constraint but a very gentle force that obligates, and obligates us, not to bend or curve otherwise the space of thought in its respect for the other, but to yield to this other.” (1999, 9) 95 The empirical material gives examples for such performative moments of reassessing and reevaluating one’s position in an encounter with other bodies: Saleh’s work with instructions and orders in which she asks the audience to position themselves, and Abbas and Abou-Rahme and Dictaphone Group’s work with blurring and assigning voices and opinions and destabilizing existing ideas of how we imagine collectivity.

Chapter 7 Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: Closing Remarks and Perspectives for Further Research

The Recollection of a Poem To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window,
to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the
room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a trifle, to stop, to
 pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, to stare at the wall. […] To rise early, to hurry down to the driveway, to look for the paper, take it out from its yellow bag, to read on the front-page WAR,
to notice that WAR takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that’s it, to know that they dared, that they jumped
the line, to read that Baghdad is being bombed, to envision a rain
of fire, to hear the noise, to be heart-broken, to stare at the
trees, to go up slowly while reading, to come back to the front-page, read WAR again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to
feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through
the windows, to suffer from the day’s beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it’s useless to think, to
pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed
to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, to take notice of people’s indifference towards
 each other. […] (Etel Adnan, 2014b: 275)

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Etel Adnan’s poem “To Be in a Time of War” (2014b)—and particularly the above excerpt—has stayed with me over the period of this study. Written in 2003 at a time when the author was in Beirut where she was raised in a SyrianGreek family, it responds to the US invasion of Iraq.1 Now, in this last chapter of Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects, I recall the experience of reading her text aloud after encountering it in a Beirut bookshop many years ago, and the experience of voicelessly reciting it many times afterwards. It has always been a visceral experience to me: the pressing and driving movement of Adnan’s unfinished sentences and the impact of her rhythmical patterns and grammatical fragmentations transposing and performing the announced outbreak of war on the body of the reader, on my own body. Verbs that divide the inevitability and the eruptive force of the conflict into the small, mundane activities of our personal and intimate lives. No longer “I” nor “we” but piercing through memories and imaginations, the immediacy of the moment and projections into a time yet to come and the enumeration of activities dissolves categorical distinctions between here and there and between them and us into radical and corporeal affirmations of the now. Large-scale threads turn into bodily tension and more subtle yet no less violent acts of inclusion and exclusion. Artistic and dramaturgical decisions of a writer become political decisions, as well. “To Be in a Time of War” evokes one of the key concerns of this study. Similar to Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Farah Saleh, and Dictaphone Group, the poem presents the question of how arts, society, and politics communicate with each other; of how the agency of aesthetic experience can be described and defended in light of large- and small-scale intrusions and attacks on our individual and collective bodies. In the artistic works that provide the starting point for my inquiry—Contingency, Free Advice, and Nothing to Declare—the artists investigate how the intertwined experience of the border and the experience of collectivity can be understood from a body-based and movement-centered perspective. In this final chapter, I will take on these questions once again and summarize my main findings in three interlocking comments on the residual effects of the border and the resilience of bodies. On that basis, I argue that agency, if we consider it from the perspective of interacting, moving, and thinking bodies, must be conceived of as an embodied concept and practice that unfolds at the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and

1

The poem is part of the collection To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Adnan 2014b). Adnan was born in 1925. After studying in France, she became a resident in the United States (website).

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ethics. I will conclude by disclosing my analytical results and sketching out directions and perspectives for further research.

7.1

CLOSING REMARKS

Residual Effects Bodies are the objects and perspective of my research into Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects: bodies that are characterized by their plurality, that are one and many at a time, and that exist in myriad articulations of themselves. One main finding of the study concerns the scale on which the entangled experience of the border and the experience of collectivity operate, and their intensity. Alongside distinct events, stark or exclusive communitarian distinctions, and hardened border politics that come into effect in the cultural and geopolitical context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, the perspective of bodies proposes a shift in thinking. It offers analytical recognition to indirect, contingent, and largely unspectacular elements; it thus focuses on the structural and long-term qualities at work in becoming-border and in becoming-collective. What comes to the fore in the case study analyses of the bodies of the artists, the bodies of audiences and collaborators, and my own body as a researcher are the residual effects of this process: lingering and enduring repercussions of border events that cannot directly be traced back to clear sources or comprehensive logics; embodied, sensorial, and internalized experiences that amplify and extend our individual and collective politics of belonging into the realms of imagination, fiction, and memory; and acts of intrusion and neglect recorded in our facial expressions and bodily postures that are actualized anew in every encounter with the border. This body-bound perspective works towards a cultural-theoretical repositioning of bodies in examining the experience of the border and encourages a process-driven concept of the border, rather than highlighting its externality or materiality. Furthermore, it suggests that both borders and collectivity cannot be thought of without movement: movement experienced on one’s own and others’ bodies; movement stored in maps, in border technology, or in our gestures, gazes, and somatic fabric; movement that unfolds alongside competing official and alternative rules and values through which physical, geopolitical, digital, and aesthetic space are immanently inter-connected; and movement that regulates the dynamics of living together. My dramaturgical analyses of the artistic case studies suggest that aesthetic experience can function as a lens through which these residual effects can be

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lived, observed, and described. They exemplify how choreographic elements, rituals, interactions, and patterns of improvisation and disciplining movement can be used to actively comprehend and rehearse the encounter with the border. Moreover, such an approach creates the possibility of radically imagining bodies as borders in their own right: as primary sites of power and contestation that not only describe how symbolic and physical territories and sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy are distributed and organized, but that actively intervene in developing, maintaining, and challenging both borders and collectivity. Towards an Embodied Notion of Agency By employing discussions of the relationship between knowledge and power, the accessibility of urban and educational space, and intercommunitarian strategies of self-control and self-policing, the artists reframe the overarching question of the agency of the body in their lecture-performances and live sound installation. Inspired by this, I have explained on a broader scale how bodies figure in social movements and revolutionary actions in the Middle Eastern context, from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Based on the assumption that bodies always exist in relation and in exposure to each other, I have argued that our individual and collective capacity to participate and interfere in society and politics is bound to bodies and to movement, and that agency, consequently, must be theorized as an embodied concept. Moreover, I contend that the artistic choices of Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group are, to some degree, also political and ethical choices. Here, the different physical, symbolic, and imaginative movements that the artists deploy in their aesthetic experiences are always directed towards specific bodies. Thus, rather than advancing general claims or propositions, they highlight the constructedness and performativity of borders and of collectivity and invite a situated reassessment of the terms and premises of our existence and engagement in society. What is significant is that the notion of agency that the empirical data puts forward is not primarily located in the artists’ affiliation to a broader political cause or agenda or in thematic terms, i.e., their commitment to obvious topics in the context. Instead, my analyses suggest relocating the notion of agency within the aesthetic system and within the aesthetic experience itself: in an artwork’s capacity to destabilize, soften, or counter existing, hardened narratives and representations of borders and collectivity through sensorial, experiential, and distinctly corporeal means. This position also challenges perspectives from dance and performance studies as well as curatorial practice that ground the agency of the body primarily in its relationship to resistance,

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activism, or formal politics. In the context of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, this does not restrict agency to binary models of action and reaction, or reduce agency to the region’s history of conflict and colonialism. Instead, it equips bodies with an immanent quality that responds to changing environments and that cannot be exhaustively described by intentionality, rationality, or directed action—a quality that I approach through the idea of resilience. Resilient Bodies The concept of resilience has been explored and revisited in recent years across different academic disciplines such as environmental studies, risk management, pedagogy and strategic planning, among others. Understood in the context of social processes of formation and counterformation, resilience speaks to a wide range of contemporary challenges: to governmental and community politics, to handling environmental calamities, and to developing strategies for managing demographic change, to name but a few examples (for an overview, see Leykin at al. 2016; Kent, Davis and Reid, 2014). Against this backdrop, artists Sage Brice and Seila Fernandez Arconada summarize: “Models of resilience vary between resilience as the capacity of a system to return to a former state, and as the capacity to produce new adaptations, treating stability as a conservative or progressive concept, respectively.” (2018, 225) With regards to the field of arts, the concept of resilience tends to revolve around the effectiveness of artistic practices and aesthetic experience in fostering social change, community-building activities, or dialogue (see Evans and Reid 2014; van der Vaart 2018). These conceptualizations of resilience often reflect more or less explicit and distinct agendas that preemptively condition the implementation of artistic practice in a given social and political context. My approach to these conceptualizations is critical; clearly, I do not seek to combine the idea of resilience with positivistic arguments that support a desire to increase the flexibility, elasticity, and self-reliance of bodies, make them ‘perform better’, and govern them in more efficient ways. Furthermore, I am concerned by the way that studies accentuating the purposefulness and promise of arts establish an analytical—and almost immutable—connection between the idea of resilience and communities or bodies that are described as vulnerable, ill, or weak (e.g., communities that have faced discrimination and marginalization). Such notions of resilience also fail to understand that some experiences of the border cannot be healed or be forgotten. By contrast, my findings from the empirical material mark a position in which resilience is not primarily explained in relation and in reaction to external

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norms, values, or objectives. Rather, they highlight how the intercorporeal and sensorial encounters between non-self-similar bodies that the artists instigate might trigger a collective, experience-based, and embodied process of learning. Thus, in the process of meaning making that the aesthetic experiences provide, individuals and groups develop knowledge by dealing with different kinds of artistic, social, and political challenges—responding to and coping with changing conditions and environments. Moreover, the dramaturgical analyses of the case studies reveal that this performative process of learning is never fully calculable, stable, or accomplished. Here, the data depicts how the unexpected, how moments of failure and breakdown, and how ambivalences and contradictions represent integral and constitutive elements that define both an individual’s and a collective’s ability to sustain themselves and bounce back from experiences of the border. Overall, understood as a specific, body-based kind of agency, this approach to resilience seems more capable of theoretically capturing the nonlinear and constantly reformulating experiences of borders and collectivity that the case studies expose in the contexts of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. The study at hand might encourage further research into the role of bodies in this context, and revisit the contributions that artistic practice and aesthetic experience can make to the scholarly debate on resilience in and beyond the field of art.

7.2

PERSPECTIVES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Body-based Knowledge and Border Studies Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects demonstrates that combining different fields of knowledge—notably, border studies and performance and dance studies—is fruitful for the investigation of sociopolitical processes of becoming border and becoming collective. Although my case studies were limited in scale, they serve as a starting point for ensuing research. Specifically, I see potential in taking the dramaturgical strategies and conceptual frameworks uncovered in the empirical material at hand and elaborating them more broadly, both in terms of the scale of case studies as well as the analytical categories, in order to understand how body- and movement-centered knowledge can inform border research. In addition to existing positions in border studies that focus the directed movements of individuals and groups at and across borders, the study at hand encourages further, systemic exploration into the role of embodiment and intercorporeality, into the body’s performance and appearance at the border, and into the impact of

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choreographic, interactive, and improvisational patterns in the process. Building on that, the significance that my body-based inquiry has attributed to imagination, fiction, and aesthetics in the formation, maintenance, and legitimization of the border opens up perspectives that have not yet been sufficiently explored in existing border scholarship. With regards to the specific contexts of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel, this approach might compliment allied studies that focus on concepts such as nationality, citizenship, communitarian affiliation, or law. From a corresponding angle, my analyses suggest that the artistic works’ articulations of the border and of collectivity are not only a matter of politics; that is, how power is distributed, installed, and represented. But rather, taking bodies in relation as a starting point, an applied, situated, and dispositional idea of ethics becomes tangible in the aesthetic experiences of the border. Here, the corporeal and the sensorial that the artworks put forward might encourage scholars to revisit ethical thought from a body- and experience-based perspective in their studies on borders: to shift their analyses from the implementation and evaluation of ethical standards and codes that regulate collective interaction at the border—normative lists of rules and obligations—in favor of more selfreflexive approaches that integrate one’s own involvement and participation in the process. Artistic Practice as a Tool to Raise Awareness of the Systemic Non-Representations of Bodies The case study analyses have shown that borders are not only spatial categories but also relational and, above all, bodily categories. Hence, my findings propose that the effects and consequences of borders and collective identity politics are, to a certain extent, not traceable immediately, but only much later in their residual effects. In connection to this, the artists’ accounts and dramaturgical strategies in their artwork suggest that in the experience of the border, individual bodies are always already social and collective bodies. In other words, bodies, in their appearance and performance at the border, are always addressed and represented from the perspective of one or several coexisting and potentially conflicting collectives. This dynamic, as I have argued, supplies certain bodies with rights and privileges while keeping other bodies in place, denying them specificity and the option to be acknowledged in their specific needs and claims. Acknowledging that representation, imagination, and experience are at the heart of politics and art alike, this bodily mechanism is not only a matter of aesthetics or of aesthetic visibility. Much more, it addresses a political problem insofar as the systematic and strategic nonrepresentation of bodies has direct

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consequences. Not being visible or present at the border, or being experienced in its related discourses, images and mediatization, is grounds for depriving certain bodies of official representation and memory and decreasing their political agency and claim making (see Nixon 2011). It withdraws human, political and ethical recognition from them, unfolding its analytical scope against the backdrop of an increasingly digital and technological remeasuring of bodies and of identities at the border. Against this backdrop, the artistic case studies might be read as attempts to contact and counter these dynamics of systemic nonrepresentation. In this sense, they provide significant leads that allow for further reflection on how art might raise aesthetic, and ultimately political, awareness of similar processes of systemic nonrepresentation from the perspective of bodies. Social Wounds and the Integrity of the Body The concerns raised here about the potentially suffocating effects of the involuntary and uncontrollable collectivization of bodies underscore my final, cautious suggestion for continuations of the research conducted in Resilient Bodies, Residual Effects. To begin with, the artistic works under discussion offer diverse evidence of experiences and representations of wounded bodies. Next to accounts of physical violence directed against individuals or collectives at the borders, the works also address situations and mechanisms that confront the integrity of the body in a more implicit and symbolic sense: they witness of visceral, somatic, corporeal experiences of vulnerability, insecurity, and danger—of what medical anthropologist Omar Dewachi terms “social wounds” (2015). What Dewachi points to are experiences of borders, displacement, and refuge that not only speak of individual biographies but that are also simultaneously and irreconcilably linked to the history of a larger group, whether ethnical, gendered, or national communities. According to him, social wounds provide the “interstitial tissue of the social; they are what brings people together and what sets them apart” (Dewachi 2015, 77). Borders and their accompanying experiences, narratives, and representations, in my reading, represent such social wounds in the cultural and geopolitical contexts of Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. The analytical figure of the social wound suggests that experiences of literal and symbolic attacks are never merely individual. In fact, this speculation asks how to protect and care for individual yet ever-collective bodies in the experience of the border: what does it mean for bodies to be unharmed and intact under these conditions? My aim here is not to engage in a general discussion on the universal and idealistic claim of the integrity of the body as formulated in texts

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such as the Declaration for Human Rights (see Azoulay 2014). I am rather interested in the relevance of the idea of bodily integrity to recent theoretical debates that have influenced the field of border studies in recent years, as well. In particular, I am referring to discussions that place the problem of the integrity of the body in line with its bare possibility for survival. In this context, political theorist Achille Mbembe (see 2003; 2017 a, b) argues that the nonprotection of bodies has become a significant strategy to control mobility and territoriality on a global scale. In short, rather than disciplining bodies or exploiting their labor, he observes that bodies are regulated by systemically withdrawing care from them. Here, the suffering and integrity of certain bodies is not interpreted as sufficiently urgent to prompt decisive action. Thus, the act of abandoning bodies in both a physical and a symbolic, legal sense corresponds to the act of relinquishing or renouncing our political and humanitarian responsibility. Significantly, Mbembe contents that in this process, bodies are always addressed from a collective perspective. In other words, arguments on the nonbelonging and the lack of collective affiliation of some bodies are used to legitimize inaction. Mbembe summarizes: “People are expelled in a state of vulnerability that is legally produced. […] Borders are being mapped and re-mapped and disposable people are produced.” (2017a) Ultimately, he interprets these developments as a movement towards a world in which borders multiply and are mobile, and thus he invites, in my reading, a critical reassessment of the status and the agency of bodies. On Behalf of an Answer Adnan’s poem at the beginning of this chapter and the artistic case studies in this volume question how to respond artistically and discursively to our times: times marked by various processes of translation and transformation to which the body is key; times in which legacies and epistemologies are interwoven and coexisting, in which various absent and present bodies are hand in glove; times that challenge our means and forms of representation as they confront us with the need to corporeally, sensorially, and theoretically respond to experiences that we cannot—or no longer—share; times in which we live and witness conflicts and crises that are not bound to delineable geopolitical spaces, but mediated, projected, and expanded, even as they already affect our imaginations, visions, movements, words, and actions, our privileges, and our physical and symbolic territories. On a microlevel, in the aesthetic experiences that they create, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Saleh, and Dictaphone Group address the challenges of today from the perspective of borders and of collectivity. They offer body-based and

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movement-centered experiences and representations of care and protection, of communality and togetherness, but also of vulnerability and disorientation, and of disquietude and exclusion. Arguably, their artistic articulations and aesthetic practices cannot directly impact the large-scale challenges of border and identity politics at stake in their respective geopolitical contexts. And, as I have argued, it is not through direct intervention and action that artistic practice can ultimately realize its agency and that the integrity of the body can be preserved. Rather, operationalizing an embodied concept of agency and drawing on specific, local, and situated bodily knowledge as mediated by visceral, corporeal, and sensorial experiences makes possible a dialogue between the aesthetic and the sociopolitical. Thus, in the experience of art, the question of what it takes to belong and what it takes to cross a border is negotiated in relation to other bodies; that is to say, in movement. In this sense, at the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics, artistic practices and aesthetic experience can provide tools to work against indifference and carelessness, and help connect the overarching, complex challenges of our times to our own lives, making them tangible again.

Chapter 8 Primary Sources and References

8.1

CASE STUDIES AND PRIMARY SOURCES

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme Artwork and Documentation Abbas, Basel, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. 2010a. Contingency. Sound Installation. 08:00 mins., 4 channels, minimum 3 LED-tickers, aluminium sheets, dimensions variable. Produced by Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Debuted at Beirut Art Centre as parts of Homeworks V, April 21-May 1, 2010. Abbas, Basel, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. 2010b. Contingency. Video. 09:15 mins., produced by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Website Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. http://www.baselandruanne.com. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Gallery Carroll/Fletcher (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. https://www.carrollfletcher.com/artists/63-baselabbas-and-ruanne-abou-rahme/overview/ Further Documents Authored by the Artists Abbas, Basel, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. 2014a. “The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits.” In A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said, edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Adania Shibli. http://journeysofideasacross.hkw.de/resisting-colonialism-old-and-new/basel -abbas-and-ruanne-abou-rahme.html.

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——. 2014b. “May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth.” In You Are Here: Art after the Internet, edited by Omar Kholeif, 224-28. Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse. ——. 2013a. “The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits.” Lectureperformance presented at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. June 20, 2013. ——. 2013b. “The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits Pt. 2.” Ibraaz, June 27, 2013. https://www.ibraaz.org/projects/52. ——. 2012. Radio Interview. World Link, Deutsche Welle, October 27, 2012. Farah Saleh Artwork and Documentation Saleh, Farah. 2015a. Free Advice. Interactive Performance. Presented at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. May 23, 2015. Dance and Choreography: Farah Saleh. Video Artists: Zina Zarour, Sari Hammouri. Cameraman in Vienna: Anselm Tröster. Supported by KulturKontakt Austria Residency Program and Sareyyet Ramallah. Residencies in Budapest and Providence. ——. 2015b. Free Advice. Video (unedited and unpublished). Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. May 23, 2015. Camera: Anselm Tröster. Website Farah Saleh (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. www.farahsaleh.com. Further Documents Authored by the Artist Saleh, Farah. 2016. “Free Advice.” Discussion with audience. Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, January 16, 2016. Audio recording (unpublished). ——. 2015c. “Free Advice.” Discussion with audience. Granoff Centre, Brown University, Providence, RI. September 23, 2015. Audio recording (unpublished). ——. 2014. “Kunstproduktion als Form des täglichen Protests.” Theater der Zeit 10: 1-4. Dictaphone Group Artwork and Documentation Dictaphone Group. 2013a. Nothing to Declare. Lecture-performance presented at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. June 21, 2013. Researched, written, and performed by: Tania El Khoury, Petra Serhal, Abir Saksouk. Video editing: Ali Beidoun. Camera: Karam Ghoussein, Dahna Abourahme. Music compo-

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sition: Ahmad Khouja, Khairy Eibesh. Mapping: Nadine Bekdache. Developed in part at the Watermill Center (a laboratory for performance) in collaboration ArteEast, New York. Production with the support of AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture). Dictaphone Group. 2013b. Nothing to Declare. Video (unedited and unpublished). Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna. June 21, 2013. Camera: Anselm Tröster. Language: English. Dictaphone Group. 2014a. Nothing to Declare: Train Narratives. Booklet. Booklet research and writing: Abir Saksouk in collaboration with Tania El Khoury and Petra Serhal. Booklet text editing: Ziad Abu-Rish. Booklet design: Public Work. Funded by British Council. Available for download at: http://www.dictaphonegroup.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Onlinelow-NTD-English.pdf (English version). http://www.dictaphonegroup.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/OnlineLow-NTD-arabic-layout.pdf (Arabic version). Website Dictaphone Group (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. www.dictaphonegroup. com. Tania El Khoury (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. www.taniaelkhoury.com. Abir Saksouk, Public Works Studio (website). Accessed April 1, 2018. www.publicworksstudio.com. Further Documents Authored by the Artists Dictaphone Group. 2016. “Borders, Borders, Borders.” SCORES°5 – intact bodies/under protest, edited by Tanzquartier Wien: 110-13. ——. 2014b. “Nothing To Declare: Die Eisenbahn im Libanon.” Theater der Zeit 4: unpaged. Dictaphone Group. 2015. “Declaring Borders.” Panel presented at HomeWorks cultural forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. November 17, 2015. http://ash kalalwan.org/events/declaring-borders/. El Khoury, Tania. 2016a. “Performing the ‘Arab.’” Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research 2, no. 2: 164-67. ——. 2016b. “Tania El Khoury in Conversation with Sophie Nield.” Conversation (unpublished) presented at the “Art at the Borders: Spatial Politics and Post-Colonial Strategies in the Middle East.” Symposium, Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. March 27, 2016. ——. 2015. “I Once Fell In Love with an Audience Member: Practice, Performance, Politics.” Ibraaz, May 2015. www.ibraaz.org/essays/127.

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——. 2013. “The Contested Scenography of the Revolution.” Performance Research 18, no. 3: 202-205. El Khoury, Tania, and Deborah Pearson. 2015. “Two Live Artists in the Theatre.” Performance Research 20, no. 4: 122-26. Saksouk, Abir. 2015. “Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut’s Dalieh.” Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1: 296-318.

8.2

REFERENCES

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