nothing will remain other than the thorn lodged in the throat of this world

by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian

“Don’t be sad. No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat. No one will manage to swallow it. Don’t worry.”

– From Wadih Sanbar’s last words to his son, Palestinian historian and poet Elias Sanbar.

Haig Aivazian and Noor Abed enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, hisses the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.

In a recent correspondence spanning several months, the pair exchanged reflections, quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs and recitations. The performance acts as an active labour of selecting, remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, reassessing, and reassembling elements from the correspondence, as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists’ respective trajectories.

Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, the pair attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a resonance chamber traveled by vibration and transformed into a disparate choir.

bio

Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action.

Haig Aivazian’s practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of 3 technologies: artificial light, computation and law. Working across diverse media and modes of address, his work is animated by research and chance discoveries, where history is an omnipresent hum that conjures and bumps up against degraded futures and the persistent efforts to survive them.

In collaboration with the Festival Sâlmon.

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