Transaction

Recorded at the CND 21 June 2017 during Camping

There are so many ways of reporting violence, so many articles, films, books, manifestos, petitions, banners and processions, so many images. Our vigilance is dulled and our reasonable indignation is concealed behind a façade of compassion. The world’s silence in the face of what has been happening in Syria since 2011 is a symptom of this traumatic blindness. How can you depict a community that is living through an absurd reality? After Déplacement, premiered in 2016, in which he explored the idea of exile by drawing on the cultural heritage of his country, this new piece by Mithkal Alzghair, a Syrian choreographer and dancer, looks at the links between reality and art from different times and different places. This new project is both a performance and an installation, these two forms making it possible to present the different bodies generated by a state of war: bodies on the ground, floating, suspended or immobile. Transaction is about ‘after the catastrophe’. ‘How can we produce images today, show the world what is happening, the political violence, the reality of the murders that are being committed in the face of global silence, the inertia of our international system? How can we show the unshowable, make visible what blindness prevents us from touching? I have tried to open up a choreographic space where I can achieve equilibrium and the convergence of two parallel lines, reality and art. Creating images that murmur the better to hear the cries of terror that are hidden within them.’

Updating: June 2017