VANTAGE POINTS: ESSAYS,

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES,
FIELD NOTES, AND A MANUAL

THE AFFECTIVE COMMUNITY OF ART

On Transformative Territories by Rodolfo Andaur
Mariagrazia Muscatello

A distinctive trait of the Chilean art scene, its insular condition came about as
a consequence of the 1973 coup d’état, which interrupted foreign relations
for a long time. The situation is only now being reversed, with local artistic
production still being restricted to a homegrown market and audiences.
Within this national circuit of the arts, almost entirely centered in the city
of Santiago, artistic work is mostly limited to the activity of graduates and
faculty from metropolitan universities, such as the Universidad de Chile and
the Universidad Católica. The trend is now being reversed thanks to recent
social events, primarily the 2019 uprisings or the increased market value of
lithium, which put Chile back at the center of the global geopolitical agenda.
In addition, a shift in media attention toward the art of indigenous peoples,
which peaked in 2022, with examples such as the Venice Biennale, has al-
lowed artists like Cecilia Vicuña, active since the seventies, to enter the so-
called star system of art.
In addition to the nascent internationalization of Chile’s artists, there
is an ongoing process of decentralization within the Chilean state and its
territory undertaken by the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage. The
country’s regions harbor increasingly important centers of artistic produc-
tion. Curator Rodolfo Andaur, originally from Iquique, a city located in the
extreme north of Chile, bordering Bolivia, has been one of the first curators
to create a professional network outside Santiago de Chile. His ongoing
project Gestionar desde la Geografía Nuevos Desplazamientos, initiated in
2015, focuses on bringing together curators, artists, and managers from
different parts of Chile and the world to get to know Iquique’s local artists
and their region.
TURBA Volume 2, Issue 2, Fall 2023: 85–123
© The Author/s ISSN 2693-0129 (Print), ISSN 2693-0137 (Online)
doi: 10.3167/turba.2023.020205
86 / TURBA

Reading Territorios Transformativos, the book about Andaur’s remarkably

broad curatorial work, mostly focused on northern Chile, I cannot help but re-
member with a certain nostalgia my own trip to Iquique in July 2017. Thanks
to Andaur’s invitation, I had the opportunity to learn directly about the com-
plex northern territory of the Tarapacá region.
Far from the European model of the grand tour based on discovery and
individual formation, the trip as a tool for building affective relationships had
a first antecedent in the initiative of the Popular Unity government known
as Operacion Verdad in 1971. At that particular time, different personalities
and intellectuals were invited to travel around the country, not only with an
ideological aim but also to help Chileans establish affinities and friendships
and to consolidate a vast network of international solidarity.
In a different historical and temporal context, the days I spent in the north
to exchange ideas and meals publicly and to mingle in parties with a group
of both local and international artists and curators, were the occasion for the
prompting of a shared knowledge. This was knowledge of a particular kind,
without specific purpose, which is what substantially defines the practice of
a community as the endeavors of a group of people who, while being sum-
moned to a place, can at the same time transcend a territory. The affective
aspect of these sort of exchanges is rooted in a territoriality that is not only
geographic but also human, and is constituted by affinities. The centrality of
this situated experience, which exceeds representation or discourse, is the
aspect of the way knowing and living we identify with the affective turn. In
their book, Irene Depetris-Chauvin and Natalia Taccetta, the affective is de-
fined in terms of both the nature and properties of the social world and how
these arise from group interaction as an embodied or corporeal experience:
“Instead of privileging the way in which discourse constructs the subject and
society, the affective turn attends to those somatic, sensitive and material
aspects that configure and deconfigure social ontology” (Depetris-Chauvin
and Taccetta 2019).
In national representations, the collective experience of a territory pre-
vails over the ready-made images of a landscape. In the book’s introduction,
Andaur describes transformative territories as “those moments when the pro-
cesses of territorial introspection validate the renewal of artistic production
models, in order to review and revisit the very plots that intercept econo-
mies, societies and cultures, and which vibrate through the countless regions”
(2023, 15).
Thus, Transformative Territories are experiential places that go beyond the
notion of landscape and highlight regionalist spirit in opposition to the polit-
ical centralism of the state.
In W.J.T. Mitchell’s definition, in Landscape and Power (1994), landscape
is a territory subject to a preset political and cultural order that fixes the
gaze of the observer and seeks to forge national identities. Chilean iden-
tity has strong links to the landscape. It appears in the national anthem, on
banknotes, and its image is exported as a commodity for tourism. Nicanor
 THE AFFECTIVE COMMUNITY OF ART / 87

Parra evinces in a single phrase the meaning of the Chilean landscape as a Figure 1: Left to
right: Juana Guerrero,
trope of national aspirations: “We believe we are a country and the truth is
photograph of Necia
that we are barely a landscape” (Parra 2011, 1016).
(2017) Courtesy of
But it is also a territory in transformation, as well as an itinerary of hidden the artist; Vania Caro
migrations across borders and cultures, the place where the festival La Tirana Melo, project Casa
is held on July 16 every year. This is a territory that both shapes and exceeds Ruqueros: Made in
individualities, impacting on the poetics and aesthetics of artistic produc- (2013), Courtesy of
tions. It is also an example of how an affective, inverted relationship with the artist.
the territory operates in many of the local artistic productions present in the
book about Andaur’s curatorial work.
The video performance Necia in 2017, by the artist Juana Guerrero from
Iquique, shows torture in a natural setting in the territory of Pisagua. In the
text presenting this work, Andaur explains that Guerrero speaks to: “the com-
plexity of Pisagua, a coastal cove that has a gloomy, desolate aesthetic, [that]
was the favorite space for the police and intelligence agencies of the dicta-
torship to practice torture. . . .Playa Blanca became a landmark for memory,
which does not house archives, but shelters, from the landscape assigned by
nature, the suffering of thousands of people who fought tenaciously against
the impunity of Pinochetism” (Andaur 2023, 252).
There is then an affection for the territory that follows from the ideologi-
cal construct of repression and the experience of living in a carceral state. On
the one hand, the territory of Pisagua itself functions as a place of torture
due to its geography, its isolation, and the impossibility of escape, which is
due to the impenetrable natural barriers of the desert and the ocean. On the
other hand, the artist, in her attempt to remove the water from the sea with
her body, performs a desperately impossible, utopian gesture. Upon being
repeated, the gesture becomes evidence of the frustration as well as of the
failure of state interventions in the territory, thus marking the impossibility
of controlling historical processes but also the hopeless retrieving of the dis-
appeared whose bodies were thrown into the sea.
Faced with the impossibility for the individual to alter the political and
aesthetic order of nature, the artist Vania Caro Melo transforms the unin-
habited territory of the periphery of Iquique into a public space in her self-
construction project Proyecto Casa: Ruqueros Made In in 2014. The work
88 / TURBA

consists of a house built out of waste materials: American clothes that come
from the desert and industrial residues. Caro Melo denounces the problem
of homelessness in Alto Hospicio, a place occupied by precarious shanty
dwellings. In this performative gesture of self-management rooted in the
collective experience of everyday life, the absence of the state yields another
way of living together and building communities through art. In the words
of the artist: “The environment is understood as a total integration of var-
ious factors, a social construct where art is configured as a possibility in a
scheme of connections where all are generating the same movement, but in
all directions, being power not a phenomenon of massive and homogeneous
domination of an individual over others, nor something divided between
those who have it and those who do not have it and support it, but rather a
transversal and poli-directional chain of actions that is not still in individuals”
(Caro Melo 2008, 51).
The operation of art in a territory is then projected as a social tool for
the collaborative building of a community that sets out to both overcome
the bonds of citizenship and put down the restrictions imposed by public
policies.
The process of Chileanization through public policies in a territory is part
of Camilo Ortega’s artwork The Land of Champions from 2019 in which he
reflects on the changes suffered in the Tarapacá region, by industrial processes
and by the use of sports as a way of building and excluding national identity.
The demythologization of the desert as the symbol of a static and pacified
landscape, according to Andaur, means that “the look we have assigned to
the desert will also continue to be modified by those same community oper-
ations, many of which used sport as a synonym of emotional stability before
the untidy grievances that workers suffered, and still suffer, at the hands of
their employers” (Andaur 2023, 331).
Communities self-construct their constantly changing identities also
through food. The artist Natasha de Cortillas works with culinary perfor-
mance in her performance Proyecto Sobremesa (2015), presented at the
Sismo workshop in Concepción, where she traces the different products used
in the Biobío region. Food and eating not only are the memory of a ter-
ritory but also provide the moment in which affective ties are also consti-
tuted and foreground the heterogeneity of communications between local
communities and the territory. The community in its affective, trans-border
relationship, exceeds the limits of national landscape and citizenship to take
root in autonomous, non-hierarchical affinity groups. This is the case of the
Trans-Arica project in 2015 from the artistic collective Cholita Chic, from
Arica, a border city in northern Chile, which analyzes the stereotypical rep-
resentation of the Andean woman, known as la cholita, and how mestizo
identity overcomes the national divisions between Chile, Bolivia, and Peru as
it takes root in a shared territory.
The curatorial work carried out by Rodolfo Andaur between 2010 and
20210 in the search for an expanded artistic community fully conveys the im-
 THE AFFECTIVE COMMUNITY OF ART / 89

Figure 2: Cholita Chic, Cholita Chic (2014), Courtesy of the artist.

90 / TURBA

portance of the aforementioned relationship between territories, community,

and affectivity. As the curator points out, communities are transformative,
rhizomatic, and in constant change, allowing us to think of artistic practice as
being situated on a performative horizon that is neither trapped in the local
or national discursivity, nor draws its meaning from the traditionally static
and object-based, centralistic museum model.

This article first appeared on April 20, 2023, in Spanish on the online plat-
form Artishock—Revista de arte contemporaneo. The English translation was
edited by Juan Menchero.

Mariagrazia Muscatello is an Italian art critic and independent curator who

lives and works in Santiago de Chile. She holds an MA in art criticism and
communication, and is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy (aesthetics
and art theory) at the University of Chile in co-tutelage with the University
Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy). Her research focuses on biennials as an aesthetic
system of contemporary art. She is co-founder of the Curatorial Office proj-
ect, having curated exhibitions in Chile and abroad, and writes for several
magazines such as Artischock (Chile), the Italian publications Flash Art,
L’Ordine, and Artribune.

Works Cited
Andaur, Rodolfo. 2023. Territorios Transformativos 2010–2020. Santiago, Chile: Edi-
ciones Gronefot.
Caro Melo, Vania. 2008. “Practicas artísticas y espacio público: un problema de intere-
ses.” Revista PLUS 4, Concepción.
Depetris-Chauvin, Irene, & Taccetta, Natalia. 2019. Afectos, historia y cultura visual:
Una aproximaciòn indisciplinada. Mexico: Prometeo Libros.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parra, Nicanor. 2011. Obras completes & also + (1975–2006). Vol 11, Santiago, Chile:
Galaxia Gutenberg.

VIBRANT ART-MAKING IN AN AMBIVALENT DOMAIN

Ndèye Mané Touré

Live performance in Senegal is located in an ambivalent domain, at once

“formal” and “informal.” Public and political authorities are in a state of denial
over the function of the arts as a factor in social development, and so they
assign this sector to the realm of “entertainment.” This approach to the arts cul-
ture is characterized as the poor cousin of other socio-professional categories.
By way of a past cultural history in Senegal that had linked the arts exclu-
sively to that of a traditional social function—one in which dance and music
may only legitimately be practiced by griots—the arts in general have under-
 VIBRANT ART-MAKING IN AN AMBIVALENT DOMAIN / 91

taken an inconsistent evolution in recent times. Our abundant creativity has

situated our national events and artistic institutions among the most notable
on the African continent. As so it was that, just after our independence from
France in 1960, the president of our new republic Léopold Sédar Senghor,
called the Poet President, organized the first Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres
during which he also constructed the ethnographic Musée Dynamique in Da-
kar. In 1976 this museum was transformed into the Mudra-Afrique school of
dance directed initially by French choreographer Maurice Béjart and later by
Senegalese choreographer and dance teacher Germaine Acony. In 1977, Seng-
hor created the Village des arts and many other foundational arts projects.
At the same time, there existed profound tensions between the artistic
community and the central authorities, which gave birth to movements such
as Laboratoire Agit’Art. Founded in 1973 by writer and performer Jussouf
John, this art collective aimed to revitalize artistic production and critique
institutional frameworks—and the philosophy of Negritude in particular.
Even as national officials continue to this day to stage internationally rec-
ognized cultural events in the mold of the Dak’Art Biennale, they have not
developed any real state cultural policy for the arts. There are no funds allo-
cated specifically for dance professionals nor policies to support structuring
this sector, and these officials continue to perpetuate the antiquated sexist
concept that dancing is an exclusively female domain (unless deployed in the
context of the national sport of “fighting” or certain traditional ceremonies).
While there do exist state-sanctioned public and private schools for train-
ing dancers, there is no education offered in arts administration, production,
technical skill-building, and not the least, in curation.
It is also certain that artistic directors (those who curate) and choreog-
raphers are not at liberty to choose the themes and ideas that they wish
to express. They are always subject to sanctions that might result in being
thrown into jail if, for example, certain associations, NGOs, or even groups of
individuals, file a complaint against an artist for something like a perceived
immodesty in the costumes the performers are wearing on stage. The sub-
jects that are commonly expressed by Senegalese artists are suspect (and
so dangerous): their fears, their fragility, their family environment, and pol-
itics. This has led to a quasi-systematic turn-over throughout the years in
dance companies as many abandon their vocation or choose to live abroad,
while a minority remain to mediate their art through street performances
and demonstrations that serve to sensitize the population to their condi-
tions. I am thinking here, for instance, of L’Association 1er Temps founded
by the Congolese choreographer Andréya Ouamba and with whom I have
been associated, and a precursor in the organization of interventions in pub-
lic spaces. It is of course also the hip-hop dancers with their free outdoor
rehearsals in so many corners of Dakar who give access to so many onlookers
and, in particular, the talibé child beggars who are their most faithful public.
Another vibrant example is La Ville en Mouv’ment group, led by the Sene-
galese choreographer Fatou Cissé, who have collectively been “curating” their
92 / TURBA

Recontres Performatives projects. (They

don’t name their role or use the term “cura-
tion,” only heard so far in Senegalese muse-
ums, and so “artistic direction” is often the
generic term for this work.) In 2019, they
organized the Ouakam en mouv’ment (Ci
lu nu bokk) event throughout the streets
of Ouakam, which Cissé describes on his
Facebook page as a “March / installation /
performance.” He tells us that it included
fifty-six women artists’ “voices,” with the
traditional association of the grandes
dames of GOUYE SOR in Ouakam per-
forming alongside the grand team of slam-
mers from Dakar and its underprivileged
suburbs. They gathered to speak publicly
about the problem of “irregular” immi-
gration, to celebrate the two generations’
cultural engagement, and to reflect on the
roles of mothers in the future of the family
and society. (See also the cover photo of
the Ngoyaan performance with recuper-
ated objects, as part of their Dakar event.)
As a final thought, allow me to ac-
knowledge that despite the propensity for
Figure 1: Dancer Antoine Danfa strolls down the streets of sudden political turns of events, the Sene-
the Médina dressed in a reinvented mask during the parade of galese live arts community is burgeoning.
the event La Ville en Mouv’ment, organized by the Companie New initiatives continue to surface, ren-
Fatou Cissé during the time of the COVID pandemic. Dakar, dering artistic practices ever more accessi-
Senegal. July 13, 2020. Photographer: Elise Fitte Duval. ble and advancing the professionalism of
the actors in this sector. It is this very kind
of vibrancy that, I believe, demonstrates the potential of the arts to foster so-
cial development. Those artists who have remained in the country have come
to fully grasp the stakes in question as they fervently persist in educating
politicians and the public about the impact of the arts in, and on, our society.

Translation from French to English by Dena Davida.

Ndèye Mané Touré holds an MA in business administration from the Afri-

can Institute of Management (IAM Dakar), heads MAKEDA Productions, an
artist production and management company. She managed the 1er Temps
contemporary dance company for ten years (2010–2020) and coordinated
the Cie Fatou Cissé dance company’s tour in 2015. She also manages Côté Jar-
din, a taste and culinary laboratory bringing together agriculture, art, culture,
astronomy, and technology in relationship to our daily lives.
 THE POWER DYNAMICS OF GRATITUDE / 93

THE POWER DYNAMICS OF GRATITUDE

Francesco Venturi

Dear music curator,

“I do not thank them anymore,” a colleague once said to me while we
curated a live music venue. He referred to newcomers who transitioned from
a supportive role to full team membership. The perspective seemed clear:
“When you assist us, I thank you. Once part of us, no need for thanks: we
are a team.” Yet, as I delved deeper, I realized the subtext was nuanced. And
it had to do with power dynamics and how they are articulated by gratitude.
Philosopher Peter Costello has written an insightful essay about grati-
tude (2005), in which he reads Plato’s Euthyphro through the lens of Mar-
tin Heidegger’s (1968) and Melanie Klein’s (1984) thinking. Although as an
atheist I do not share some of his positions, Costello highlights four crucial
aspects of thankfulness. These can be summarized as follows:

1) Gratitude is a continuous meditation that requires ongoing effort and

reintroduction.
2) By expressing gratitude, individuals acknowledge their vulnerabilities
and limits.
3) Gratitude cannot be practiced in isolation.
4) True gratitude involves recognizing others as equals.

To me, these four “adages” resonate deeply with the challenges of music cura-
tion. Gratitude encompasses the recognition and preservation of things that
enrich our experiences—this is especially vital when working with intangi-
bles like live music. It involves acknowledging vulnerabilities while maintain-
ing a state of reflection and relaxation, crucial when dealing with multiple
stakeholders and stressful work environments, such as, for instance, a del-
icate sound check. True gratitude demands mutual recognition, meaning
the acknowledgment of others as contributors to the journey. The objects
of gratitude—such as a great performance, good teamwork, or a fair fee—
become valuable only within a relationship where all parties appreciate each
other’s roles. And isn’t this the very moment we all agree that it was a great
concert? Without communal recognition, thinking of others can lead to neg-
ative emotions and perceptual errors. Is it truly a great concert if someone is
hurt, treated unfairly, or frustrated? Indeed, gratitude is not just a fleeting
feeling, but a fundamental structure of human experience. Like a compass, it
guides us to embrace what is given and to uncover implicit aspects of other-
ness. Gratitude must never be taken for granted.
Then, if those adages are four general truths about gratitude, and I hold
them to be true, what is the truth about stopping to give thanks? Is it im-
plicit gratitude to stop thanking, or is it inherent ingratitude? And what is
ingratitude? Is it the opposite of gratitude? Following this line of thought, I
arrived at a thought experiment. Here is the opposite of the four statements:
94 / TURBA

1) Ingratitude is a constant disconnection and a state of neglect.

2) In being ungrateful, one denies their vulnerabilities and limits.
3) One can be ungrateful on their own.
4) With a lack of thanks, one fails to recognize the other.
These four new adages are even more thought-provoking. Constant dis-
connection, in fact, hinders individuals from recognizing the goodness of
objects and others. The resulting state of neglect does not require effort or
reintroduction. Ignoring vulnerabilities, however, prevents the emergence of
enriched experiences. Furthermore, practicing ingratitude in isolation, means
disregarding the presence and contribution of others in a way that ingrat-
itude and isolation coalesce. Failing to recognize the others means then to
deny their own unique experiences, dismissing their rights and paths. Such is,
to me, not only the definition of ingratitude but the problem of ingratitude.
This leads me to you, dear concert organizer. As you grapple with the
pressures of curatorial practice, I encourage you to explore a personal passion
that is closely tied to a broader, urgent issue impacting the wider community.
I implore you to embrace gratitude. Why?
While co-founding and co-managing a live music venue in Italy, I encoun-
tered pressures. These ranged from ethical dilemmas to tangible challenges.
Such strains originate from a curator’s self-expectations, as well as the artists
and audience they serve—distinct groups with overlapping demands. The
intensity of this pressure also depends on the scope of the concert program.
The European experimental music scene is diverse and complex, yet it of-
fers limited opportunities for both artists and audiences, particularly in Italy.
Establishing a venue like ours led to swift growth, driven by an enthusiastic
scene and zero competition in the city of Brescia. We provided the platform.
Over time, I recognized the risk of self-centeredness arising from perceived
attention. The impetus for growth came from the music community, not just
the venue. Recognizing this dynamic is not only an act of intellectual hon-
esty; it is an experience of gratitude. Such an experience revolves around
an understanding of the difference between giving and extracting value.
Businesspeople know that where there’s scarcity, there’s potential for profit.
However, cultural producers should be driven not by individualistic impulses
but primarily by collective ones (see Venturi 2022). I urge you to ask yourself:
where does the credit truly lie?
Another kind of pressure arises from the base—not from the under-
ground artist, but the individual who invests time and money to enjoy and
support live music. They’re the audience you curate for, and their desires
resonate. Open a channel of communication, and the pressure from em-
pathetic response intensifies. Apathy in your curatorial duties negates all
pressures. Listening, caring, and assuming an ethical stance, on the other
hand, magnifies the pressure. Lenin famously asked, “What is to be done?”
A question originally posed by a man in prison (Chernyshevsky 1863).
Consider this question as grounding gratitude, which transforms pressure
 THE POWER DYNAMICS OF GRATITUDE / 95

into connection, and which, as Martin Heidegger stated clearly, isn’t about
reciprocating gifts. Gratitude lies in reflection—thinking about what’s
given, and what’s to be thought about (Heidegger 1968, 143). Thanking
is thinking.
Further, you contend with pressures from within. From your team, stake-
holders, each carrying a certain type of influence and authority. There are
the co-founders who sowed the seeds, the team members who offered their
energy, the latecomers who joined the team once it had matured. Power dy-
namics inevitably manifest within these relationships, influencing the work,
the psychophysical health of the workers, the artistic decisions, and thereby
the audience and the ecosystem. Pay attention, dear music curator, to your
expressions of gratitude and those directed toward you. Ask yourself what
are the underlying dynamics—who is truly working for whom?
In curating live arts, one must strive to dig deeper, beyond what’s readily
available. Consider representation within the European experimental scene.
Don’t fall prey to curatorial laziness or unreflective xenophilia that mirrors
larger capitals. Shun flattery and place the empowerment of the scene and
the public at the center of your work. Always remember, friend, the future of
your music venue hinges on your ability to be thankful.

Francesco Venturi is an Italian musician. He has been curating concerts since

2012 and is co-founder of the venue Spettro in Brescia. As a composer and
voice artist, Venturi has scored award-winning productions across cinema and
live arts and has performed throughout Europe as a soloist and with various
ensembles since 1999. A dedicated researcher, he has lectured at the Milan
Conservatory and published scholarly works. He is currently a PhD candidate
at Kingston University London.

Works Cited
Chernyshevsky, Nicolay. 2014 [1863]. What Is to Be Done? (Translated by Michael R.
Katz.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Costello, Peter R. 2005. “Towards a Phenomenology of Gratitude.” Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association 79: 261–277.
Heidegger, Martin. 1968 [1954]. What Is Called Thinking? (Translated by J. Glenn
Gray.) New York: Harper and Row.
Klein, Melanie. 1984. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: The
Hogarth Press.
Venturi, Francesco. 2022. “The Value of Curating Music.” TURBA. The Journal for
Global Practices in Live Arts Curation 1(1): 71–84.
96 / TURBA

Curating KPIs for Disincorporation

a worker’s tutorial

Benjamin Ross Nicholson

CURATING KPIS FOR DISINCORPORATION

(A WORKERS’ TUTORIAL)
Benjamin Ross Nicholson

Part 1: Corpo-reality
The Corporation
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Blackrock, Comcast, Disney,
Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, McDonald’s, Meta, Mic-
rosoft, Monsanto, and Walmart are United States corporations. These legally
recognized persons, these derivations of corpus, while lacking the apparent
singular presence of the human body command an incomparable capacity
 CURATING KPIS FOR DISINCORPORATION (A WORKERS’ TUTORIAL) / 97

to build the world to their purpose. This purpose, of course, is exponentially

expanding profit—forever. Corporate efforts towards this endless end are
aided by the state, which provides unfettered welfare to corporate persons in
moments of self-inflicted crisis while permitting corporations to grow with-
out meaningful tax obligations. Given the prevailing conflation of wealth
accumulation with significance, it is unsurprising that corporations and their
conglomerate of white masculine executives occupy a deeply entrenched po-
sition of material dominance.
There are powerful corporations and they appear to extract, exploit, ex-
haust, expunge, and dispossess all the matter of the Earth at will. Yet for all
the corporations, the Corporation is more than the sum of the stock values
tracked by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500: the
Corporation is a reckoning of the world’s very construction. In its authority as
the granter of wages, the Corporation requires a devotion to those behaviors
that would maintain the supremacy of its regime: the belief in immortality
(for the Corporation), the pursuit of possession, the exercising of efficiency,
and the staging of competition. What performances are possible in such a
world?
With such a repertoire on offer, the Corporation has set up shop in the
minds of workers, those who must receive wages from an employer to secure
their subsistence. The Corporation imposes that its brand of labor is the only
product that workers could ever desire in the company town—all you need
is job; job is all you need. To suggest otherwise is an act of insubordination,
a punishable offense. For the Corporation is a legal fiction, a story created
and reproduced by humans. It has no volition of its “own”; it cannot be said
to inhabit a distinct form, a body. The Corporation’s ontology is one of doc-
uments, property claims, brandmarks, but most of all the performances of
human workers who have been instructed to imagine the Corporation presid-
ing over them, judging them, waiting to smite them. Further, to the extent
a given worker is troubled by this notion, they are advised that under no cir-
cumstances should they socialize their discontent and attempt to ameliorate
it. The atomized worker is in fact the blood cell circulating through the corpo-
rate vasculature. Wherever we find employment, we find the specter of the
Corporation and its implicit threat of austerity, layoff, downsizing, outsourc-
ing, wage stagnation, immiseration, job loss, and, ultimately (terminally),
death. And this threat is the basis of our encounters with the Corporation’s
weapon of choice, deployed to curate the performances of workers’ bodies:
the key performance indicator, or KPI.

The KPI
The Corporation prefers the world it concocts to be data-driven. In order to
evidence claims concerning its perpetual ascent, the Corporation must proffer
to the market various metrics which prove that its valuation is indeed grow-
ing and will continue to do so. The KPI serves as an internal management
tactic to align employee efforts towards the Corporation’s aggrandizement.
98 / TURBA

The KPI is composed of three elements: a duration, a quantity to be mea-

sured, and a threshold. Corporate parsings of time include the month, the
fiscal quarter and year: industry-standard intervals over which growth can
be meaningfully discerned and rewards reaped. By means of these parsings,
the Corporation seeks an accounting (indication) of the most valuable (key)
facets of its output, as realized through those human efforts (performances)
executed in the Corporation’s name. Net profit margins, total assets, aver-
age conversion times, percent market shares, and average salaries are familiar
indicators in the corporate sphere. Pegged to each indicator is a threshold
value. If the performance of workers surpasses the target value, the Corpo-
ration has succeeded. However, if the threshold is not crossed, the workers
have failed. They become subject to termination.
The KPI diverts all attention towards accelerating profitability, necessi-
tating an incrementally increasing threshold value that pressures a critical
mass of employees to adopt a mantra of professional survival: “more, faster,
forever—or death.” Such duress sets the grounds for an incrementally inten-
sifying style of worker performance, those second-to-second actions that
produce not only commodities but also the experience of the workplace, in
which care and wellbeing are often sacrificed to meet the demands of the
Corporation’s desired data. The KPI tends to produce paranoid workers who
fight to maintain their positions while resenting peers who appear to be out-
pacing them.
Ultimately, the KPI reflects the Corporation’s curation of worker perfor-
mance. This curation, benefiting the Corporation’s total subsumption of all
things, is deeply harmful both to the bodies of workers (including their psy-
chic, social, and emotional dimensions) and the planetary body from which
the Corporation wrests its energies. Whether one toils at the employ of an
actual corporation or some other wage-conferring entity, the Corporation
exerts its competitive pressures upon the atmosphere of labor at large, its
model of worker governance emitting a pervasive miasma that hovers over
the neoliberal landscape. The Corporation and its KPIs, in their pursuit of
immortality, require that we work our bodies to bits.
What is to be done?

Disincorporation
Perhaps the Corporation has made a miscalculation. Confident in its declara-
tions that there can be no viable genres of social organization beyond neo-
liberalism, the Corporation assumes workers will continue to acquiesce. It is
as though the Corporation believes its prophesies of profit-to-come are suf-
ficient to guarantee such a future. Yet the Corporation overlooks two critical
realities: it is the work of human people that constitute its very existence as
a corporate person and, like all things, the Corporation’s entropic tendency is
not to endlessly grow but, in fact, to decay.
For corporate growth isn’t summoned from the ether of executive dreams,
but rather requires massive and ongoing influxes of energy. Any form, when
 CURATING KPIS FOR DISINCORPORATION (A WORKERS’ TUTORIAL) / 99

left to interact with other forms in its environment without replenishment,

will exhibit a tendency to disperse, to share its concentrations of organized
energy with those forms less organized. While the science of thermodynam-
ics attempts to describe this mathematically, human beings also understand
this process in terms of dying, that procession towards death in which a form,
once recognizable, ceases to be “itself.” The Corporation, in all its elaborate
distribution of matter, is doubly effected by decay, for it is not sufficient for
the Corporation to achieve a reliable homeostasis but instead it must always
grow, requiring an unending supply of new inputs to hold together its accu-
mulated mass. The Corporation is not inevitable, it does not precede labor;
without workers, the Corporation has no limbs to pull in its nourishment, no
organs to digest it, no immortality to speak of.
How might workers participate in a disincorporation of the Corporation
amidst its oppressive extortions of wage earning? How might workers curate
their own performances of labor to help spur the emergence of an otherwise
world rid of corporate coercion? In articulating KPIs, the Corporation con-
fesses to those performances which would indicate its failure—any perfor-
mance that does not meet or surpasses a given KPI’s stated threshold. Here
is where the Corporation’s vulnerabilities are laid bare, where eventualities
that signal its decline can take shape, where a map towards its repudiation
can be drawn. Let us propose a new curation of KPIs, designed by workers,
to acknowledge decay while affirming the wellbeing, joy, and sociality of the
bodies of those workers.

Part 2: Curating KPIs for Disincorporation

Modifying the dispossessing flows of matter that engorge the Corporation
and harm the bodies of workers is not achieved by some simple act, such
as the refusal to work; the Corporation knows that the immiseration it has
wreaked will blunt the effects of individual workers withholding their labor:
it is trivial to substitute a rebellious worker for an obedient one. Further, dis-
incorporation knows of no silver bullet. Rather, it is an iterative process that
might only reveal its contours over generations: the Corporation has had cen-
turies to establish its position and the moment of its collapse cannot be easily
predicted. In order to curate KPIs for disincorporation, it would serve us to
establish some ground rules that chafe specifically against the Corporation’s
KPIs.
The curation of disincorporative KPIs, if used to guide how you approach
the workplace and your comrades in the shadow of the Corporation, will
allow you to enact an alternative repertoire of performance, a repertoire that
accumulatively and across ages might lay the Corporation to rest.
Further reading will divulge five concrete examples of such disincorpo-
rative KPIs and the performances they might foster. Please use them as a
starting point for curating your own KPIs, KPIs that counter the particular
harms you endure and provide the nourishment you need and would share.
100 / TURBA

Step 1
Identify an existing KPI in your place of work (variously called “KPI” or
“goal” or “expectation” or “quota” or “performance review” etc.).

Step 2
Analyze the effects of this KPI on the wellbeing of your body, the well-
being of your coworkers, and the wellbeing of the broader world; in what
ways does this KPI enjoin you to mete out harm for the benefit of the
Corporation’s advancement?

Step 3
Craft a new KPI that attempts to measure that which would alleviate
those harms. Do this with coworkers where possible or in secrecy where
necessary to guard against corporate espionage and reprisal. Consider
generating a KPI with the following elements:

○ Whereas the corporate KPI valorizes performances that yield mea-

surable profits, the disincorporative KPI prioritizes immeasurable
performances of the circulation of care.
○ Whereas the corporate KPI points to an acute threshold that cleaves
success from failure, the disincorporative KPI indicates a general di-
rection towards which to turn and begin to pursue your wellbeing.
○ Whereas the corporate KPI is fixed to a business cycle, the disincor-
porative KPI may begin at any time and be altered whenever work-
ers agree to do so.
○ Whereas the corporate KPI is intended to motivate an avoidance of
punishment, the disincorporative KPI is designed to encourage the
ongoing affirmation of workers.

Step 4
Once your KPI is articulated, attempt to turn performances of work to-
wards that new KPI; as you encounter obstacles and make mistakes, it is
important to protect each other, to forgive each other; iterate upon the
KPI, allow it to mutate, allow it to divide into other KPIs, make promises;
begin again and again.
 CURATING KPIS FOR DISINCORPORATION (A WORKERS’ TUTORIAL) / 101

Example 1
○ Corporate KPI: Average Salary
○ Harms: As the Corporation is fixated on minimizing costs and maximiz-
ing profits, the wages paid to employees will be of great concern; keeping
these wages as low as possible promotes worker precarity, desperation
(as wages fall behind inflation), and resentment over wage discrepancies.
○ Disincorporative KPI: Wellbeing Margin (against immiseration)
○ Possible performance: To unburden your body of the anxiety, dread, and
exhaustion imparted by the stagnation (or, perhaps, elimination) of your
wage, consider taking radical solace in the company of your comrades by
saying to them, “I am feeling unwell.” This will allow you to experience
the rejuvenating effects of affinity as they respond, “So am I.”

Example 2
○ Corporate KPI: Percent Market Share
○ Harms: The Corporation seeks monopoly and detests not only ceding
profits to competitors, but also having to provide competitive (and costly)
services to win customers; work is thus framed as a battle towards domi-
nation, including over one’s peers for the reward of career advancement.
○ Disincorporative KPI: Percent Sociality (against competition)
○ Possible performance: Consult with your comrades as to how the refusal
to compete will usher in an epoch of eusocial thriving; so long as such
efforts are not codified by unionization, the Corporation might permit
you to enjoy the mutual care of cooperation until the first comrade to
betray the community is promoted to become your direct manager.

Example 3
○ Corporate KPI: Average Conversion Time
○ Harms: Time binds the Corporation’s claims on growth, causing the
Corporation to squeeze ever tighter to pressure productivity from em-
ployees; the compulsion to do more, faster, not only yields physical,
emotional, and psychic burnout, but also leads to a creeping expansion
of time worked.
○ Disincorporative KPI: Emergence Ratio (against efficiency)
○ Possible performance: Resist the urge to commit your body’s full ener-
gies to the delivery of output and, instead, form a righteous pact with
your comrades to withhold from the Corporation each worker’s maxi-
mum capability; this will ease suffering and allow for the exploration of
joy in the workplace prior to your next performance review.
102 / TURBA

Example 4
○ Corporate KPI: Total Assets
○ Harms: Given the aforementioned conflation of wealth accumulation
with significance, the Corporation believes any action is justified so long
as the ends of an improved valuation are achieved; the Corporation de-
prives workers and the broader world of life-affirming resources.
○ Disincorporative KPI: Crop Shared (against possession)
○ Possible performance: Work with comrades to identify the Corpora-
tion’s least guarded assets and find ways to siphon them towards the
bodies of those from whom the Corporation levies its extractions; revel
in abundance and luxury before the quarterly audit reveals your theft
and new draconian austerity measures are implemented to recoup the
Corporation’s losses.

Example 5
○ Corporate KPI: Net Profit Margin
○ Harms: That the Corporation presides over its hoard is not sufficient,
for that hoard must widen and deepen at an accelerating pace; this
preoccupation with growth renders any sort of lessening exhibited in
employees as a symptom of failure, meaninglessness, and humiliation.
○ Disincorporative KPI: Net Decay (against immortality)
○ Possible performance: Utilize employee birthdays as a rationale to host
clandestine parties in which workers’ aging and decay are honored
and celebrated as vital facets of being (let your comrades eat cake); if
you are employed in the United States, indulge in the imagination of a
world in which meaningful health insurance and, thus, access to bodily
welfare were not tethered to full-time employment.

With this curation of possible performances, the workplace begins to

house whispers of an otherwise in which the Corporation is no longer re-
garded as an inescapable natural phenomenon but, rather, a human story
that only temporarily organizes the social, subject to mutation and revision
and decay.
The obstacles to disincorporation are many: there are powerful people
deeply invested in the furtherance of corporate oppression; there are risks
to those who perform against corporate interests, differentially distributed
along lines of privilege; there is the radical unpredictability of action.
Yet we cannot cede the world to the Corporation’s harms, for there is care
and wellbeing to be circulated beyond the pressures of profit. This workers’
tutorial is an invitation to cultivate a repertoire of performance that attends
 C(UR)ATALYZING A PLURIVERSE / 103

to the shared desires of those in whose company you labor and, with hope
and iteration and camaraderie, to discover the new forms of being that dis-
incorporation discloses.

Benjamin Ross Nicholson is a performer, musician, and researcher. He recently

completed his PhD in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia and now teaches at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. His
work focuses on white supremacist neoliberalism, its relationship to death
and dying in the United States, and how this relationship is disclosed through
performance. He is particularly fascinated by corpses and potatoes.

C(UR)ATALYZING A PLURIVERSE
IN IRHINI GRAHAMSTOWN MAKHANDA
Gavin Krastin

We need to contextualize matters first. The Live Art Arcade is a national

creation and exhibition platform for emerging and early-career South African
artists working in interdisciplinary live performance with interests in dura-
tional and site-responsive work (particularly LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC artists).
Nomadic in nature and dwelling in different sites, spaces, and places, our
aim is to produce immersive assemblages of experimental body-based live art
performances: an arcade of durational, itinerant and cyclical live art, where
all encounters happen simultaneously, and where audiences can engage with
the performances at their own discretion and structure their journeys as they

Figure 1: A home-
made neon sign
reading “Arcade”
juxtaposed against
a cut-off verse by
Thomas Pringle inside
the Monument,
Makhanda (South
Africa), March 24,
2023. Photograph by
Lithemba Nziweni,
courtesy of the Live
Art Arcade.
104 / TURBA

wish. These have become known as our annual Arcades, which take place
in different cities and spaces each year. For Arcade2023 we found ourselves
in the bowels of The National 1820 Settler’s Monument The Monument in
iRhini Grahamstown Makhanda (South Africa).
We also need to break the news that the curator is dead (Pather 2019,
102), certainly as a singularity. Condolences. Our approach to curating live
art and performance is one of collaboratively and communally worlding a
pluriverse in a speculative manner, hence the “we” and “our.” I consider my
own role as that of a “c(ur)atalyst”—a facilitator and instigator of innova-
tion and artistic exploration (and steward of the project’s vision and goals in
terms of contractual and funding matters). In collaboration with the resident
dramaturg, Alan Parker, a revolving technical team, animateurs, and the art-
ists themselves, the curation of each Arcade remains a collective energy and
dynamic of “ontological design” (Escobar 2018, 105) drawing from expertise
and connections that promote and inspire change while also preserving and
managing ideas as they come to fruition.
Located in Frontier Country in South Africa is a small city, iRhini Grahams-
town Makhanda. The colonial capital of Albany during the Cape Frontier-
Xhosa Wars, iRhini was claimed and renamed as Grahamstown after Colonel
John Graham’s invasion in 1812 to set-up a frontier garrison post in prepara-
tion for the British settlers’ arrival in 1820. The city is home to the monument
formerly known as the National 1820 Settler’s Monument. In an act of deco-
lonial re-renaming, in 2018 iRhini Grahamstown was renamed as Makhanda,
after Chief and Prophet Makhanda (also spelled Makhana), who in 1819 led
a troop of Xhosa warriors in an attack against the British imperialists but
was consequently imprisoned on Robben Island and drowned trying to es-
cape. iRhini Grahamstown Makhanda remains a place of patriarchal colonial
hauntings and the monument is now simply referred to as the Monument
in Makhanda.
The National 1820 Settler’s Monument The Monument isn’t a sculpture
(although there are some) nor is it decorative architecture (although there
is some), but rather a large multifaceted resourced building and functioning
infrastructure filled with spaces of potential for creativity. It is built into a
large hill atop the city. For Arcade2023 we rerouted notions of monumen-
talization through live art, as eleven artists from across South Africa occu-
pied the Monument in a constellation of long durational performances as
vehicles to subvert, transform, and redirect the historical undercurrents of
the Monument. The various gallery-like spaces, theatre-like spaces, archive
rooms, dressing rooms, smoking booths, passageways, nooks and crannies
comprising the two basement levels (the foundations of the Monument)
were destabilized and reimagined through participatory, intimate, and im-
mersive live art performances, interventions, and activated installations in an
amplification and/or a cleansing of the space’s hauntologies. The artists and
artworks confronted, questioned, and archived current realities of facing the
past in order to postulate and consider alternative futures.
 C(UR)ATALYZING A PLURIVERSE IN IRHINI GRAHAMSTOWN MAKHANDA / 105

Arts journalist Steve Kretzmann (2023) explains that in one space, Mar-
tinique Kotze sewed and re-sewed a series of incomplete dresses left by her
grandmother, while down the passage, Obusitswe “Birdking” Seage had col-
lected trash from across the city and hauled it into the Monument to create
a loud and interactive performance of political ecology. Luke Rudman com-
bined drag performance with the natural environment as he became a living
sculpture within a maze-like infrastructure, while Axl Forder unraveled into
a nightmare of maladjustment, isolation and fugue as he was trapped in the
Monument’s archive room. The artist Carbon transformed into Sisyphus as
they carted, unloaded, and reloaded a wheelbarrow of rocks, digital anima-
tion, and poetry from point to point in an act of enduring neurodivergent
world-making within a cement chamber. Inhabiting a defunct glass smok-
ing room, Rafé Green was on display offering alternative means of presence
through the gaze/gays, and Qondiswa James roamed the many passages,
intervening in all venues as a beggar-cum-priest-cum-clown on her soapbox,
reclaiming space. Lastly, Christelle Futshane, Lethabo Makweya, Teresa Wil-
loughby, and Thabile “Terry” Rala-rala comprised a unlike-minded quartet,
cheekily playing at being seen and unseen in the dark basement of the build-
ing. Kretzmann (2023) concluded, “In what order you choose to experience
these cutting-edge performances, how long you choose to participate in
each, or whether you try to catch part of one, is up to you. It is your journey,
your space in which to play. But of one thing you can be assured: it will never
happen like this again.”
Arcade2023 drew an audience of diverse cultural identities and ages from
across societal borders in Makhanda. This was perhaps partly because en-
trance to the performances was free, which was a deliberate choice to make
live art as assessable as possible. How hypocritical it would be to establish
financial borders for supporters (the public participants) when the germi-
nal concept was one of open-border experiences of artistry and audience
ambulation. Apart from the crowd we usually expect at our live art event,
Arcade2023 drew a significant number of young spectators, teenagers and
school groups. This is an audience demographic often excluded from live
art due to its adult content and form, and the age restrictions thereof. As
a collective we agreed that we would continue to deliver risky encounters
while considering the need to sow such seeds from a young age. We would
therefore pivot and adapt the artworks so that they were welcoming and
enticing to younger patrons. The intrigue was palpable as my colleagues
and I took students on tours, engaged in debates, introduced artists and
concepts, and answered numerous questions on “what is live art and how
can we be a part of this type of expression?” New connections to schools,
teachers and curricula were forged. The event was positively reviewed in
the media as journalists Selenathi Botha and Aphiwe Ngowapi (2023, 18)
reflected on how such unapologetically the queer and black live art perfor-
mances effectively destabilized the foundations of a colonial monument in
the heart of Frontier Country, noting the collective bottom-up approach to
106 / TURBA

place-making and autonomy in how the “Live Art Arcade 2023 builds com-
munities through art.”
Speaking to several attendees, what was apparent is that audience mem-
bers felt complicit in the process, like co-composers, who could not grasp the
event as a whole, but only as a collection of fragments due to the simulta-
neous and de-hierarchal approach to curation. In reference to the occupation
of space, Doreen Massey called this the “throwntogetherness” (2005, 151),
when everything happens altogether at the same time. It’s an experience in
which the multiple stimulations and interpretive processes expanded one’s
sensory apparatus into tentacular hyperdrive as one sought out patterns and
negotiated connections. Listening to these kinds of reflections I wondered if
meaning remained subjective, and in postponement. Did Arcade2023 suc-
ceed in providing fertile ground for self-actualized becoming and autopoie-
sis/aesthesis, and to what degree? What is next?
iRhini Grahamstown Makhanda remains a frontier of sorts, and Arcade-
2023 aspired to be at the forefront. One thing is certain, that for this occasion
we had gathered a troop/troupe of wildly avant-garde, unapologetic, and
curious performance artists employing alternative strategies of live art cura-
tion to scrape open the skin of our histories while at the same time providing
balm to its scars.

Gavin Krastin is an interdisciplinary artist straddling the worlds of theatre

and live art performance, both educator and curator with an interest in the
body’s representation, limitation and operation in alternative, layered spaces.
For Gavin the body is a medium for subversion, slippage and challenge. He
performs, exhibits and teaches across South Africa and internationally. He
currently lectures at Rhodes University, Makhanda, and is a PhD candidate
at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance
Studies.

Works Cited
Botha, Selenathi, & Aphiwe Ngowapi. 2023. “Unapologetically Queer and Black Con-
sciousness Approach to Live Performance.” Grocott’s Mail, March 31. Accessed on
July 16, 2023 at https://grocotts.ru.ac.za/2023/03/30/using-an-unapologetical
ly-queer-and-black-consciousness-lens-to-destabilise-the-foundations/.
Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Auton-
omy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University of Press.
Kretzmann, Steve. 2023. “Arcade2023: Never in your life. . .” The Critter, March 19.
Accessed on July 16, 2023 at http://thecritter.co.za/?p=4982.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications.
Pather, Jay. 2019. “The Impossibility of Curating Live Art.” In Jay Pather & Cather-
ine Boulle eds., Acts of Transgressions: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa,
82–104. Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press.
 IN WHAT CONDITION DO WE LEAVE THE PAST? / 107

IN WHAT CONDITION DO WE LEAVE THE PAST?

Omar Rajeh

“Art is simplicity,” yet artistic creation is a quest to ask the most complex
questions of being. It is, as well, a need to comfort our souls and minds with
a tune, an image, a gesture, especially when the answers are always hidden.
What is constant in such a process is the duality of artist and citizen, and
together they make meaning.
My personal and professional journey of more than twenty years of ar-
tistic and cultural work in Beirut and beyond was not much different than
a quest to make meaning. A commitment to the profession as it is also to
the cultural and social context. I believe that this laid the foundation of my
thinking as an artist but even more as a curator. Originally, I wanted to study
physics but ended up studying theatre and then attaining a master’s degree
in dance, discovering the order of things through dance and questioning the
presence of the body as a physical container for thought.
I start with this introduction to highlight my core understanding of cu-
ration as a process of making meaning, that is, opening new horizons of
understanding and progress. In the context of Lebanon, a country with no
public cultural infrastructure and no presence for dance as a profession. How-

Figure 1: Citerne Beirut: An innovative choreographic and cultural center founded by

Omar Rajeh | Maqamat in 2017 in the heart of Beirut / Lebanon, setting up a firm
ground for the establishment of an interactive contemporary performing arts scene and
allowing further international cooperation, mobility, and cultural interaction. Photo
© Maqamat.
108 / TURBA

ever, this process, that was not a deliberate choice of mine, at the beginning,
brought me into the core understanding of curation as a “vision of being”
implemented through cultural and artistic manifestations. Curation, in this
sense, goes beyond the mere organization of an artistic event, into proposing
a logic of composition that reflects a vision of the social, the cultural and
the political. BIPOD (Beirut International Platform of Dance), in my under-
standing, was a political and social statement carried by the artistic. Hence,
a cultural manifesto carried by local and international artists that are propos-
ing new forms, new thoughts, and new perceptions. The inner dynamics of
the festival, together with Moultaqa Leymoun, a showcase for artists from
different Arab countries, proposed a call for action towards change and new
aspirations of thought towards active artistic participation and presence on
the international dance scene.
Our fight, as a company and festival, was against the “machinery of
power,” when it oppresses, imposes, and works towards sustaining normality
in everyday life and hence, in artistic exploration. It was a fight to build new
horizons as much as it was against preconceptions, rigid mentalities, and
supremacies. I use the word fight because this was my sense at the time, as
if it was a moment of no return. I believed that the local dance scene needed
to resist, be open, catch up with the international contemporary dance dy-
namics, and propose a unique vision that reflects its own artistic, cultural,
and social environment. To begin with, it needed to face the reality of where
it “belongs” and bring change forward.
To elaborate on this idea, the dance scene in Lebanon, after the civil war
and precisely in the first years of the twenty-first century (after 2000), was
undergoing a local fight to be present artistically, socially, culturally, and po-
litically. It was, equally, undergoing a similar fight to exist in the wider inter-
national context against preconceptions, supremacies, and unawareness. This
is not an accusation, but a reflection on the need to reassess ‘our’ understand-
ing of the artistic and cultural dynamics within their own different social
and political contexts. Another question that follows here is, how to present
this work locally and internationally, in what context, and how to allow it to
escape labeling.
“Belonging” is a delicate process and my biggest fear was to fall in the
labeling of the artistic and the cultural, thus limiting our vision to the geo-
graphical or even to the social and political preconceptions and clichés. Thus,
“belonging to the process” rather than the labels was the safe net by which
“we,” as a local dance scene, managed to belong to the bigger body of the
profession, the artistic and the creative, while at the same time belonging to
the social and political dynamics of “change.” It is important, here, to high-
light that this process was towards the local and the international, simultane-
ously. Belonging to the process rather than the labels initiated a new level of
understanding of our actions towards the artistic as well as the social.
The complexity of the situation, at the time, was far beyond proposing a
cultural or artistic event only. In this sense, the act of developing and building
 IN WHAT CONDITION DO WE LEAVE THE PAST? / 109

was in itself an attempt to destroy. Destruction, here, as an act of hope. That

is, to break through the rigidity and stagnation of the situation into better
conditions of creative and social dynamics. It was an act of building, in op-
position, to the act of fear. Here again the fear of change and new ideas of
action. “Identity is never discovered; it is always created and the answers are
in the body” was my closing sentence for the BIPOD 2012 editorial.
For this reason, as a pre-requisite to the “presentation” or “programming,”
we focused, as a festival, on a special project and approach of education.
Strong artistic voices, fully aware of their artistic tools, and fully understand-
ing of their cultural environments. Aware of their social discourse, with the
ability to take these concepts beyond the local and enrich the international
dance scene. In the wider picture of curation, I am convinced today that the
act of curation cannot and should not be separate from the urgency and the
need to go beyond the normal, the static, and the safe. Our task in Beirut
was to initiate dynamics and prepare the ground for what is to be proposed.
Curation, for me, was beyond the single event of programming a festival but
was a process of initiation, motivation, and hope over several years.
For this reason, I am more than concerned today how to reinforce, and
protect, the creation of meaning, between artist and citizen, towards a
relationship that reflects the concerns, aspirations and causes of our times.
The question is how to protect this meeting, bring it to the front, and
try as much as possible to allow it to exist beyond the normalization and
impositions of power of the administration, certain cultural policies, trends
of funding, and political agendas.
Developing dance in Beirut was not the decision of the state or the city.
It was the decision of individuals, and specifically the artists themselves.
As much as it was difficult, and probably unsustainable in many ways, it
possessed a sense of freedom to engage in what is needed and what is
necessary individually and collectively. I tried, through the festival, as a cultural
structure, to follow such motivations and look for strategies that could secure
these proposals and strengthen them in the long term. I envisioned, as an
artist and programmer, an act of curation that proposes an idea towards the
future, and equally invites us to responsibly ask ourselves, in what condition
do we want to leave the past?
Today, as an individual artist, and as co-artistic director of the company
and the festival, I believe that we have failed to sustain and secure that past.
The progress and achievements that were established in Beirut, Lebanon and
beyond had suffered a great deal after the political, and economic collapse
of the country in 2019. Regardless of the why, that was much bigger than
our capabilities, this is the reality as I write these lines. Nevertheless, I still
didn’t lose faith in the approach which had always enabled the creative
dance culture from losing its own needs, motivations, and meaning. After
many years of development of dance in Beirut, I am still looking for ways to
keep the essence of what drove “us” into the dance culture without becom-
ing part of a dance industry. In other words, without losing the priorities of
110 / TURBA

creativity, in comparison to the priorities of the administration. This might be

my biggest concern today towards curation, programming, and directing, so
that these actions are always seen within the culture of creativity rather than
a static industry of creativity.
Curation as a need, an urgency, an action, a vision and a strategy, brings
me today to join my voice to many artists and programmers in the dance and
cultural scene, that express the need to reassess cultural dynamics in order
to free the artists and allow them to make their own decisions and direct
their own choices. Curation is the sharing and framing of ideas by which
the artistic is at its core. Building a condition to engage, shake, and continu-
ously question the meaning, and the way, by which we carry our bodies and
thoughts.

Omar Rajeh is a choreographer, dancer, founder and artistic director of Ma-

qamat. Initially based in Lebanon since 2002, he moved and set up his com-
pany in Lyon in 2020. He is the founder of the Beirut International Platform
of Dance (BIPOD), Takween intensive training program, and Moultaqa Ley-
moun, a platform that showcases and develops the work of artists and cho-
reographers from Arab countries and co-founder of the Masahat network.
In 2017, he designed and established Citerne Beirut, a choreographic and
cultural center in Lebanon which, following its forced dismantling in 2019,
gave birth in France to Citerne.live in 2020.

UNDERGROUND
Saman Hajimohammad

The dance culture in Iran has a long and rich history, derived from various
cultures, regions, cities, and countries. However, after the Islamic Revolution
of 1979, dance and other forms of artistic expression became increasingly
restricted and censored, particularly for women. Despite these challenges,
underground dance movements emerged, providing a space for Iranian
women to express themselves through their movements and unite in the face
of adversity. This essay examines the emergence of an underground dance
movement in which I was a proponent, and explores the challenges faced by
Iranian dancers and their resilience in the pursuit of their passion.
This narrative will unfold in an emotive narrative, written in a poetic and
metaphoric voice, one which traces the journey of my dance. It all began in
my childhood when I was a shy girl with a secret love for dance. Over the
course of more than two decades, I evolved from a novice into a professional
dancer, choreographer, teacher, artivist, and curator, now relentlessly pursu-
ing my goals. I aim to provide insights into the challenges faced, successes
achieved, and the relentless pursuit of goals and dreams I continue to pursue
 UNDERGROUND / 111

in the Western world, particularly the United

States. Throughout, I discovered the enduring
dedication required to follow a path in the
world of Iranian artistic dance. It is a testament
to the power of passion, perseverance, and a
commitment to personal growth.
At the age of eleven, a turning point ar-
rived. It was my mother who urged me to em-
brace change, to step into the realm of formal
dance classes (underground). Prior to this piv-
otal moment, I had already begun my private,
hidden foray into dance within the clandestine
underground world of dance. However, it was
a new challenge, posed by one of my second
cousins during a grand family gathering in the
privacy of our home, when she invited me to
dance in front of everybody, that pushed me
further along this transformative path! Little
did I know that this seemingly innocuous mo-
ment would shape the course of my life. It was
with trepidation and determination in equal Figure 1: Portrait of the author Saman Hajimohammad,
measure that I eagerly accepted the dare. From Photographer: M.K.
that moment forward, the steps I had practiced
in secret became an integral part of my identity. Dancing became my refuge,
my passion, and my means of self-discovery.
As the years passed, my dedication to dance grew stronger. What started
as a simple presentation of dancing at a home celebration gradually became
an unwavering commitment to honing my craft. Through countless hours of
practice and the guidance of a professional instructor, I cultivated my dance
technique and expanded my artistic horizons. With each new routine (dance
phrase, study, composition), I found myself venturing beyond the boundar-
ies of my comfort zone, discovering the vast possibilities that dance offered.
My story took place amidst the hardships of living in my home coun-
try of Iran, under the governance of the Islamic Republic with its stringent
adherence to Islamic beliefs and regulations. Each movement, each gesture
became an intimate part of my artistic vocabulary, depicting emotions and
narratives that transcended the constraints of what was considered accept-
able or permissible that were imposed by Iran’s social norms. While navigat-
ing the complexities of an ingrained Islamic society, I immersed myself in
the study of various dance forms, drawing upon multi-faceted histories and
unique movement styles. This quest for knowledge and exploration not only
expanded my repertoire but broadened my artistic perspectives.
While living under the Islamic Republic meant adhering to strict codes
of conduct, I discovered innovative ways to adapt and perform within the
boundaries of my restricted environment. In this intricate world, abiding by
112 / TURBA

strict codes of conduct was paramount, particularly in matters of dress codes

for women. Customarily, we adorned ourselves with attire that concealed
every part of our bodies, leaving no room for any glimpse of our femininity.
In a realm where gatherings were prevalent, it was interesting to observe that
most of their audiences consisted predominantly of women and the younger
generations.
It was uniquely difficult, but we did find innovative ways to express our-
selves. I found solace in the sanctuary of underground dance communities
and the support of like-minded individuals who shared the desire to stand
up to the status quo, and our hidden spaces became havens for artistic free-
dom. In this clandestine environment we were forging together, and where
creatively thrived, dancers and choreographers were finding solace and
connection.
One of the significant concerns that arose was the need to create meeting
places for fellow dancers and choreographers. But these endeavors had to be
pursued discreetly, adopting terms such as “body movements” and “advanced
skills aerobics” to circumvent scrutiny. After a while, within this secret yet
vibrant Iranian dance landscape, I yearned to create an actual physical space
where dancers could freely teach, share skills, create, and perform. This burn-
ing desire ignited my journey as a curator of dance events, a role that would
eventually allow me to be someone who could reshape the cultural landscape
of the Iranian dance scene.
And so it was that I embarked on a path less traveled, determined to bring
together skilled and talented dancers from all corners of the country. Collab-
orating with those who shared my vision, we set out to establish an extraor-
dinary, unprecedented dance event. And so it was that the inception of the
Iranian Dance Festival became the embodiment of our collective aspirations.
It was a three-day event bursting with dance performances, workshops, and
competitions, ranging from contemporary and hip-hop to the cherished tra-
ditional Persian dance.
I vividly remember the inaugural year of the festival in 2012, a time when
the underground dance movement was beginning to gain momentum. With
every step we took, we navigated the complexities of organizing an event
that celebrated an art form still deemed controversial and defiant in the con-
text of our homeland. The difficulties were sometimes daunting! As word of
the festival spread, dancers and enthusiasts flocked from every corner of Iran,
forged connections, traded stories, and reveled in the beauty and energy of
movement. During those precious moments of the festival, the underground
dance community came alive, weaving a tapestry of unity and resilience.
But our story didn’t end there. Fueled by the success of this first dance
festival, I yearned to further bridge the divide between cultures, to build an
international exchange of dance that would ripple far beyond our borders.
Thus, in 2017, the Tehran International Underground Dance Festival was con-
ceived. Thinking back now, I realize that it was an audacious endeavor, one
which invited dancers (people who I knew, or to whom I was introduced)
 UNDERGROUND / 113

from around the country and even abroad to converge in the heart of Iran,
Tehran, where our movement was flourishing.
It was through these two festivals and with the unwavering dedication of
countless individuals, that the dance scene in Iran has continued to evolve.
From the depths of secrecy, dance has emerged as a profound expression
of the human spirit, transcending restrictions, and igniting a collective pas-
sion for movement. With every performance, workshop, and competition,
we formed the essence of a veritable dance philosophy, breaking free from
preconceptions and immersing ourselves in the power of this art form. We
forged connections that united our souls, unraveling the boundless potential
of dance to inspire, heal, and liberate.
Let me transport you into the intricacies of putting together these small
underground festivals, in which every detail became a puzzle piece in the
grand mosaic. As a curator, a group member, a dancer, and a choreographer, I
faced a myriad of questions and uncertainties.
The very notion of organizing these festivals seemed both daunting and, at
the same time, exhilarating, as I tiptoed through a delicate dance between se-
crecy and expression. Safety loomed at the forefront of my mind. How would
I create an environment that embraced creativity and freedom while ensuring
the well-being of all involved? The weight of these concerns bore down upon
me, challenging my resolve and forcing me to seek innovative solutions.
Collaboration became the heartbeat of these festivals. Gathering a collec-
tive of individuals who shared an unwavering passion for dance, we set out to
craft an unforgettable experience that we hoped might enchant both dancers
and audiences. Each member of the collective brought their unique expertise
to the table, specializing in various aspects such as costumes, photography,
makeup, music, and DJing. We formed a tightly-knit network that embraced
and nurtured ideas, surmounted obstacles, and fostered a profound sense of
unity.
Logistics played a crucial role, encompassing practicalities that required
the support of numerous volunteers at each stage in view of venue selection
(including a private basement), lighting and music (wherever we could find
expertise, we sought help and volunteers), and the creation of costumes (my
grandmother even made them for many dancers). These intricate pieces of
the puzzle were essential for making our vision a reality. We maintained a
delicate balance, seeking places that would offer solace and safety, while also
enhancing an artistic ambiance apt to ignite the spirit of dance. Permissions,
or lack thereof, created a web of uncertainty that we navigated with the
utmost caution. Sometimes, we referred to what we were doing as “work-
out performances” for women or “private shows” for everyone, making pro-
nouncement like “this is not merely a dance or performance show; instead,
women, in particular, gracefully walk through the event while observing full
coverage with an Islamic hijab, in accordance with our country’s rules.”
But the challenges extended beyond the logistics. Naming and describ-
ing these festivals became a creative art form in and of itself in our pursuit
114 / TURBA

of meaningful titles. We carefully considered the dance ethnography and

anthropology in Iran, seeking names that would deeply resonate within our
community. Our goal was to foster unity and inspiration among both dancers
and non-dancing participants, all while ensuring that our choices wouldn’t
attract any unwanted attention. Through an abundance of creativity tem-
pered with practicality, we found names that whispered secrets of the dance
world, acting as a guidepost for those in the know (in the dance world), but
not for the leaders of this regime!
With each festival, we embarked on unraveling the threads of uncer-
tainty, skillfully weaving together movement and expression. Each festival
was a celebration of diverse Iranian dances, enriched with their special music
genre, along with creatively designed lighting, despite limited facilities and
the multitude of restrictions we faced. Among the most significant high-
lights was the inclusion of folkloric and “authentic” dances. These cherished
dance forms hold a special place in our hearts, embodying an essence of
our cultural heritage and evoking a sense of nostalgia. The pulsating energy
of the dancers harmonized with the carefully crafted environment, evoking
emotions, sensations, thoughts, and visions and so igniting a sense of awe
in all who bore witness. Our festivals were sanctuaries of liberation. From
the subtle flicker of a spotlight to the enchanting melodies that reverberated
throughout the space, every element contributed to creating an extraordi-
nary experience.
Yet, as each of the festival dates approached, trepidation crept in. Would
our efforts be welcomed by the Iranian community? Would the dancers and
festival participants embrace the clandestine nature of our gatherings? The
anticipation was palpable, hanging in the air like a suspended breath. And
so, when the time finally came, a wave of relief washed over me as I wit-
nessed the large numbers of dancers and enthusiasts filing into our events,
eyes twinkling with anticipation and hearts brimming with excitement. It
was a testament to the resilience and tenacity of our dance community, to
the hunger for the creative expressivity that could not be silenced.
Along the way, there was another challenge that wove its way through
the very fiber of my existence: that of being a woman in a country where
the rights of women were severely constricted by societal norms and tra-
ditional beliefs. Even though I was born into a modern, non-religious fam-
ily, remnants of deeply ingrained customs persisted and particularly when it
came to outlawed artistic pursuits such as dance and music which, since the
ascendance of Islam, have been branded as blasphemous. In Iran, a nation
steeped in its own complex culture and heritage, there was also a prevailing
belief lingered that artistic practices were mere hobbies, fleeting indulgences
reserved for the privileged few, rather than a viable career path. It was as if
I was dancing on a tightrope, delicately balanced between the realms of tra-
dition and innovation, seeking authenticity and rebellion. To forge a path in
the world of dance, I had to navigate the narrow corridors of prejudice and
 UNDERGROUND / 115

discrimination, striving to prove that my aspirations were not mere whims

but burning desires that ran deep within my soul.
At times, it felt as if I stood alone against a tidal wave of skepticism, as
if my dreams clashed with the established order of things. The road ahead
was arduous, strewn with obstacles and self-doubt. But the strength and
resilience of women who had walked similar paths before me inspired my
persistence, exemplified by the old folks of various generations. Despite their
extraordinary contributions to the art form, these seasoned dancers have re-
mained shrouded in anonymity, primarily driven by concerns for their safety
and preservation of traditions. Their mesmerizing choreographies and age-
old techniques held the key to unlocking a captivating historiography that
deserves to be shared and celebrated with the world. Their stories reverber-
ated within me, fueling my determination. With every step I took, I sought
to pursue an artistic career that would challenge the status quo, aiming to
dismantle antiquated beliefs that sought to suppress the creative spirits of
women. Through my actions, I aspired to redefine the role of women in the
realm of dance, to prove that our passion and dedication were not to be dis-
missed, but to be celebrated. Together with other kindred spirits, we forged
a sisterhood, a collective force that refused to be silenced. With each whirl,
each choreographed project, we shattered the shackles of societal expecta-
tions, determined to leave an indelible mark in Iran’s dance history.
Yet, the struggle is still far from resolved. At each performance, through
every act of self-expression, we need to challenge anew the stereotypes and
shatter the glass ceilings that threatened to confine us. We must demonstrate
over and over that the pursuit of a career path in dance is not only a legitimate
but a profound calling and vocation that deserves recognition and respect.
And finally, dance in Iran has long possessed deep roots, always growing
deeper within the hearts and minds of its people, a sentiment I have come to
recognize and appreciate even more through the emergence of the new rev-
olutionary movement marked by the slogan “WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM.”
It has taken shape following the tragic death of Mahsa Amini on September
16, 2022, at the hands of the morality police, quickly becoming a pivotal mo-
ment that has punctuated over four decades of suffocation and oppression
endured in the name of “virtue” by Iranian women at the hands of rulers like
the Taliban. It was during this solemn period, as the earnest cries for basic
rights have been echoing across the nation, that I once again found myself
drawn into the fray.
Dance had been an integral part of my life, and now, as a curator, dancer,
choreographer, and artivist, I am determined to utilize my knowledge as a
dance scholar with skills and abilities accrued over time, to support my peo-
ple and to rekindle the flames of an old life left behind. From across the
ocean, here now in the United States, I strive to make a difference, to lend my
voice and passion to the cause that has ignited the spirits of Iranian women.
Within the depths of my being, I bear the indomitable strength of those who
have come before me, propelling me forward as I traverse the intertwined do-
116 / TURBA

mains of art and activism. My relentless endeavors revolve around bringing

the untold narratives of my country’s people, and especially those of women,
to the forefront. I aim to carve out sacred spaces where their voices resound
and channel the transformative potential of dance to ignite change and lib-
eration. We are unyielding in our pursuits, unapologetically bringing spoken
word into our underground movements, dancing defiantly in the streets and
orchestrating events that amplify our collective message of hope and resil-
ience. We will leave an indelible mark on the world. In this new chapter of
my life, I stand resolute, driven by a deep-rooted desire to honor my heritage,
and to rewrite the narrative of dance as an agent of empowerment, healing,
and revolution for all.
In the trajectory of my journey in the dance world, the delicate interplay
of collaboration, logistics, secrecy, and creative ingenuity has brought un-
derground festivals to life. It ignited the power of dance to break through
societal constraints and inflame the spirits of all who dared to partake. From
within the depths of these festivals, expressive movement became the lan-
guage of freedom and self-discovery, capable of unraveling profound truths.
The pathway was strewn with struggles and setbacks. But despite mo-
ments of self-doubt that threatened to extinguish the fire within me, the
embers burned bright and lit the flame once again. As I reflect on the past
while writing these words, I stand in awe of all that has transpired. What
began as a daring moment of dance performance at a family celebration had
blossomed into a lifelong passion, a joyful and liberating calling that has
become inseparable from my very essence. Dance, once a mere hobby, now
defines who I am at my core.
As the curtains rise on each and every performance, whether I am en-
gaged as a dancer, choreographer, or curator, I embrace the profound respon-
sibility bestowed upon me. I am a storyteller, weaving narratives through
movement, inviting audiences to glimpse the beauty and revelations that lie
outside of the confines of tradition and conformity.
So, I continue dancing. With each gesture, I carry the flame of passion,
perseverance, and resilience. As rhythm pulsates through my veins, I know
that this is not merely a personal odyssey; it is a testament to the human spir-
it’s infinite capacity to overcome, to create, and to ignite the world through
the transformative, transcendent power of dance.

Saman Hajimohammad is an Iranian dance professional, choreographer, and

educator, currently pursuing her research in the graduate program in dance
at Florida State University. As a fitness enthusiast, she has also studied sports
science and exercise physiology, kinesiology, and anatomy. She has toured
her theatrical productions, including Fence and The Coming and Going of
the Spring, across the United States, Iran, and beyond. As a dance instructor,
she teaches in performing arts academies across the United States, Canada,
India, the Middle East.
 LICHT AND THE DANGEROUS THEATER / 117

LICHT AND THE DANGEROUS THEATER

Tea Tupajić

The Atrocities
When I traveled to Germany last April to meet the women who would pos-
sibly participate in the performance of LICHT, their first question was not
“why our story?” That part was clear. In our times, there are very few horrors
unheard of and unimaginable. The story of the Yazidi women is one of them.
In 2014, ISIS carried out attacks on the Yazidis, a religious minority in
northern Iraq. After executing a large part of the male population, they cap-
tured the women. By gynecological examinations, the captured women were
divided into three groups: married women with children, married women
without children, and virgin women and girls. Considered as spoils of war,
over seven thousand women and girls have become sexual slaves to the ISIS
fighters, enduring repeated rapes, subsequent forced abortions, and torture.
The industrial scale of the sexual violence has made this story much more
than an isolated atrocity. It has become the iconic story of the violation of
the female body today.
However, it was not the immensity of horrors committed to them that
has put the Yazidi women in the forefront of media debates. It was what
they came to represent. When, in 2018, twenty-five-year-old Yazidi survivor
Nadia Murad received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the use of
sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict, the symbolic image
of a Yazidi woman changed from being a victim to the symbol of a fighter for
international women’s rights.

Experiencing Trauma
As for myself, I learned about the story of the Yazidi women as had most peo-
ple—through the media. At that time, I was in the process of directing my
first feature-length film, Darkness There and Nothing More. The film dealt
with the Bosnian war of my childhood. I invited two veterans of the Dutch
UN peacekeeping mission, who were in Srebrenica during the 1995 genocide,
to spend one night with me in an empty theatre, from sunset till sunrise. I felt
that, after the film would be done, I could liberate myself from the specific
punishment (dwelling on wars, massacres, and horrors) to which I have long
sentenced myself to in order to pay the debt of my survivors’ guilt and to
make some sense out of my life.
I had enough and now wanted to dedicate myself to growing figs in my
garden.
It was then that, on a lazy afternoon of Googling, I discovered “Questions
and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves.” I didn’t spend much time on the
website. I remember getting slightly nauseous but moving on with my fol-
118 / TURBA

lowing Sunday plans. The memory kept coming back to me during the week,
while I was having a walk, doing the dishes, riding a bus. . . .It stayed with
me like a numb pain until it increased and, before I knew it, and although it
was not my time of the month, the pain turned into bleeding.
I had never personally experienced rape or any kind of sexual violence,
but still, it had touched some kind of pain inside of me that I couldn’t name.
I quietly decided to trust it and explore where it could lead me. I discovered
the work of the German Kurdish psychiatrist and trauma therapist Dr. Jan
Ilhan Kizilhan by way of an article about him in The New York Times (Percy
2019). Following his experience of treating traumatized individuals in war
zones such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Middle East, this article recounted
how he was one of the first psychologists who traveled to Iraq, in 2014, to
treat the Yazidi survivors. His unorthodox perspective on trauma therapy and
survival excited me. We talked a lot about the idea that what are commonly
understood as trauma symptoms are actually the body’s way to survive. The
body faints when emotional pain is too strong; it trembles in a panic attack
when the tension is too high. It has its own way of healing itself, which we
need to support, rather than attempting to fix. It was he who helped me to
locate and get in touch with the Yazidi women who later became part of the
LICHT project and who I later met in Germany.
Coming back to last April, the first question Awaz and Intisar asked of
me was “why theatre?” I answered that despite all of the media attention to
their plight, I don’t believe the world has really heard their story. I added that
their story can only really be heard when experiencing it in the body, like I did
on that Sunday afternoon. I could tell they were confused by my response or
maybe it was just my way of feeling like I was bluffing as a way to ask them
to offer to open the most intimate and traumatic wounds of their lives to me,
merely in the name of staging a theatre show. So, I further explained that
theater is a space of deep listening, where one body can actually hear and
experience another. I said that the breath of the spectator synchronizes with
the breath of the performer. Or something like that. Still, I didn’t have the
feeling that I had explained properly what I actually mean when I say theater.
There was something there that I myself did not understand.

Awaz, Intisar, and Najlaa

The first young woman I met was Awaz. I soon started calling her the little
lioness. She greeted me with a big smile, and I froze when I did the calculation
that she was nineteen years old and that it all happened to her seven years ago.
She told me that she was excited and still undecided about what she wants to
do professionally but that she would surely like to be in a position of influence.
She chatted on about the book she was writing. It was a book that she hoped
would serve as an inspiration for many other girls so they might see life’s end-
less possibilities. It was also about her experiences. And then she said some-
thing that I wasn’t expecting about being neither alive nor dead and still living.
 LICHT AND THE DANGEROUS THEATER / 119

Through Awaz, I met Intisar. I asked her what she had heard about the
project and about me. She said she heard something about a theatre perfor-
mance and concerning me, that I was a survivor of some other war from a
country far away. It fascinated me to hear the way in which they pronounced
the word survivor with such pride. It was the first time that anyone had ever
congratulated me for simply staying alive. Intisar came to meet me straight
from her study practice at a dental clinic, carrying a shiny leather bag with all
her notebooks. The bag looked pretty heavy, but still she suggested climbing
up a little hill in the sunshine. We laughed. It was not long before she felt like
a friend. It hadn’t even become dark outside before our conversation deep-
ened. I talked to her about my family, our war, and about the mystery of why
I was here now talking with her, immersing myself in another horror instead
of just sitting in my fig garden. She said, as if the answer was as clear as day,
“Because it couldn’t have all been for nothing.”
I remember this because, a year later, another woman named Najlaa,
opened the premiere performance of LICHT with these words: “When I was
in captivity, I said to him: ‘If I ever survive this, I will tell the entire world
what you did to me here. I will tell the story for myself and for all the women
in the whole world.’ He replied: ‘Hush. If you speak another word, I will cut
your tongue off.’”
This was also the moment when it became clear to me that the question
“why theater?” was actually one of understanding the meaning and purpose
of the immense tragedy they had endured.

Curating LICHT
I always thought that if I could only find women who would be willing to
participate in the LICHT performance, it would be an honor for which I have
a responsibility. Just because I have an idea for a performance, I cannot just
burst into someone’s life and rip their heart out of their chest.
My responsibility was not only toward the creation of the performance
itself, but more than that toward curating it from within. What I curated was
context, conditions, and legacy of the LICHT. It was about more than just
the conception of a theatrical work. It was about creating a particular theater
space and legitimizing it as a force apt to, and deserving of, carrying the story
of these women.
Quite early in the process, I made a decision that this work would be pro-
duced and presented in theaters and by festivals run only by female artistic
directors. This decision was important for me as a way of supporting the
work of the female directors, as this performance concerned what it means to
be a woman and a female director. Even though most of the collaborators we
chose would likely not be able to relate to the Yazidi women’s experiences,
there would still be the shared, visceral experience of womanhood.
I also decided that the work would be performed only a handful times.
The stories of the women and the sacrifices they were making to step on-
120 / TURBA

stage and tell their stories in front of an audience cannot be forced into a
conventional touring structure of endlessly repetitive presentations.

Why Theatre?
As I sat in the shade under the trees in the De Markten café in Brussels with
Barbara, Daniel, and Francesca,1 we talked about the immensity of our in-
vestments in LICHT—time, energy and financial resources—and we pretty
quickly moved to the same question once again of “why theatre?” that had
initiated my talks with Awaz and Intisar.
We paraphrased Deleuze by saying that to have an idea for the theater is
to have an idea about the theater (see, for instance, Cull 2009). In the case
of our project and topic, it means understanding what it really is that can
be done in theatre, that cannot be done anywhere else. It also means un-
derstanding that if we wanted to produce a different kind of performance,
we would have to produce it in a different way. It asks for different kinds of
processes, collaborations, relationships, and involvements with institutions.
I noticed that I kept spinning in circles, calling the performance vulnerable,
fragile. . . . Daniel, with his wisdom and decisiveness, then said, “Okay, let’s
call it dangerous theatre.”
At the heart of theatre there has always been a sacrifice. If we wanted the
women to sacrifice themselves by telling their stories, there must be also some-
thing that the institution sacrifices. Munich Kammerspiele is one of the largest
repertory theatres in Germany. For them to enter into a process that lasts for
years, is not rehearsed inside the theatre, and has unpredictable consequences
for the audience and the performers meant putting the institution in danger.
The most potent force of theater, and what differentiates it from anything
else in this world, is that it is fueled by the energy of living beings. LICHT
was produced in post-pandemic Germany, which had experienced night after
night of empty theatre halls. Inflation had also hit Germany, which forced us
to rehearse in our winter jackets. It was clear that if we were to lose our sub-
sidies, we would also lose the massive, expensive sets. What we would then
be left with would be only the unstoppable force of living beings working in
togetherness.

The Hand-Stitched Curtain

Many years ago, I dreamed that I was watching an unusual performance.
The stage and the audience were divided by a thin veil. This thin veil had
hand-stitched embroidery all over it of an image I couldn’t recognize. When
I shared the dream with our set designers Hannah van Eiff and Lisa Kohler,
they said that maybe it was about destiny, the one written for us in the stars
and the one we write for ourselves, and about the mystery that brought all
of us together in this project.
 LICHT AND THE DANGEROUS THEATER / 121

The women on stage are telling stories in which they might have been
killed. We decided to invite four hundred members of the theatre to hand-
stitch the star constellation of the night sky on the night of the premiere.
In each of the stars, they were invited to manually stitch the image of a
crucial story from their lives. When they asked us why, I responded with
what Intisar told me: “Because our lives and our stories couldn’t have been
for nothing.”

Telling the Story

To Awaz, Najlaa, and Intisar I proposed the following: After a year-long
journey of preparation, you will come on stage to tell the story of what
happened, exactly how you remember it. You will tell the story this once
and then and never again, tell it part by part, in the greatest detail possible.
Putting your faith in theatre, you will leave it with the audience. Every night
one part of the story will be told. It will last until the whole story is told,
from the day you were captured until your liberation. And at the end, we
will celebrate.
My encounter with them didn’t feel like the waters of sorrows that I had
expected. It felt like high noon and it felt like fire. In spite of the fire, ev-
ery time we would almost reach the subject of their time in captivity, both
Awaz and Intisar seemed to fly away from me. For a split second, it was as
if they had fallen into an abyss, one which I knew nothing about. When it
happened, I tried to follow them. But there was no entry. It was mute, like a
landscape before or beyond language. Maybe it was also a liminal space, the
in-between of existence. Like Awaz had said, “neither living nor dead.”
It felt like the story was stuck somewhere between their intestines and
uterus, wondering and kicking inside the womb like a pregnancy with a de-
mon baby who is screaming, kicking, and tearing one from the inside. Yet,
everything was quiet on the outside.
Philosopher Maurice Blanchot said: “The disaster ruins everything, all the
while leaving everything intact” (1980).
We needed to expulse, vomit, exorcise the story. Tables and chairs were
placed in our rehearsal space, but my body wanted to jump and scream. It
felt like a dirty rave party was the only space appropriate for us. “My heart is
beating like a bomb,” I remember saying to my dear Katrina.2
So, we did a simple ritual to prepare for the telling of the story. We
shook our bodies until our muscles became sore, until our faces were red,
and we were out of breath. Then we stopped and listened only to the
beating of our hearts. When our hearts calmed down, we closed our eyes
and I counted: Twenty, Nineteen, Eighteen, Seventeen, Sixteen, Fifteen,
Fourteen, Thirteen, Twelve, Eleven, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four,
Three, Two, One. . . And it was then that one of the women would begin
telling her story.
122 / TURBA

February 2023, After the Premiere

Each performance of LICHT begins with the women deciding whether or
not they want to come to the stage that evening and why. The performance
lasts between three and four hours. During these hours, the women recount
events that occur during a time period of a few days, in the greatest detail
possible. When they can’t speak anymore, they say to the lighting technician
Charlotte Maar, “Charlotte, please turn off the lights.” And the performance
is over.
The journalists called it brutal. The women stand the entire time, the story
is halted sometimes by aggressive, breathless crying that seems to last for an
eternity, after which they go on.
The audience leaves the performance worried about the mental and phys-
ical health of the women on stage. They want to help them.
I share Instar’s worries; she smiles. She says to me, “We don’t need hand-
kerchiefs, we don’t need therapy, we don’t need unemployment support. We
need a stage. If I cry, this is because I want the tears to come out of me. When
I tell the story, it feels as if I am bleeding it out of me. It’s strange. Now, after
the performance, it feels so beautiful. I feel so, so, so light, as if I was flying,
so free.”

Jan
On my way back from Germany last April, I made a stopover in Stuttgart to
spend some more time with Dr. Jan Kizilhan. I needed reassurance for the
hundredth time that I was not about to deliver the women to their worst
nightmares just because I believe that we find meaning and transcendence
from those nightmares by transforming them into a work of art. And who
cares about art anyway? I asked him to help me understand what I was ac-
tually doing.
When he asked me to explain what I meant, I said that first of all, theater
has nothing to do with therapy nor with creating a safe space. As a matter
of fact, there are very few places in this world more dangerous than theater.
I sensed that I was missing the point and so quickly added that there
seems to be a curious link between theatre and mortality. Like the myth of
Icarus. We watch him flying toward the sun with his wax wings, knowing
that he will crash and fall. On the one hand, theater is the utmost expression
of the banality and futility of our lives. Jan then asked, “And on the other
hand?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
Zagreb, July 2023

Tea Tupajić (b. Sarajevo, 1984) is a Croatian theatre and film director who in-
vestigates the potential of art to confront controversial political and personal
issues. Her works that have been presented internationally include LICHT
 LICHT AND THE DANGEROUS THEATER / 123

I-X (2023); DARK NUMBERS (2018); Spy School (2016); The Disco (2015);
Variete Europe “Orpheus” (2013); Objects’ Game (2012); The Curators’ Piece
(in collaboration with Petra Zanki, 2011); and La maladie de la mort (2009).
Her first feature-length film, Darkness There and Nothing More (2021), pre-
miered at the IDFA Envision competition. She is also a published writer and
served as a guest editor for the performing arts magazine Frakcija No. 55 (see
interview in TURBA 1.1).

Notes
1. Barbara van Lindt (general and artistic coordinator, Kaaitheater Brussels), Daniel
Veldhoen (artistic director of the Münchner Kammerspiele), Francesca Corona (ar-
tistic director of the Festival d’Automne, Paris)
2. Katrina Mäntele, dramaturge and production leader of LICHT.

Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. 1980. L’écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard.
Cull, Laura (ed.). 2009. Deleuze and Performance. Edinburgh, Ireland: Edinburgh
University Press.
Percy, Jennifer. 2019. “How Does the Human Soul Survive Atrocity?” New York Times
Magazine. November 3.