#adiliraz

NOMEN Lab #4 The Fluid Body on an Uneven Political Ground

Our bodies carry our personal and political histories. These histories reinscribe our internal and external world. Our actions in any social space are to a certain extent guided and shaped by these scripts. Sometimes, to such an extent that we reproduce our ancestral past without any conscious awareness. Who are we to judge, decide, chose in life, when we do not always understand in what kind of political time we were born into, and what kind of personal desires it already produced and destroyed? Who are we then as descendants of those who have not fought their last battle? Is it possible to have an inward gaze and be able to separate what is ours and what is not? What good is it to do that?

“The colonial gaze is shaping my body in two ways. By doing so it re-inscribes an older unfinished history of persecution and saving life into my corporeal presence. First, the colonial gaze defines my body as privileged, desired, and hierarchized in relation to other bodies that it deems abject. In the second way, my body is a fetishized token standing for the afterlife of a 6 million dead. In both ways, my body is used as a tool of oppression. Yet, my body is located in a space where it should not be living, but rather be commemorated as death, its existence in this space is an act of resistance to the German politics of memory and to the Zionist project of a homogeneous Jewish homeland.

As such, my body contains many moments of a past that are mine personally and it is shaped by the genocidal brutality that is supposedly humanity’s responsibility.” Adi Liraz

Through a four-chapter-performance, Adi Liraz will re-create a process of embodying history/ies and being alive as shaped and shifted by the colonial gaze of German and Israeli nationalisms.

By creating an organic space made out of those experiences Liraz produces new channels to share those experiences collectively. The interactive performance aims to create a temporarily set counter-public and community. How we act upon this and in this will define how we can have an empowered space of belonging. In the second part of the lab, we will  reflect verbally and collectively on what we have produced. What good did it do for us and as a form of political action?

Since we would like to keep an intimate atmosphere and the space cannot contain more than 25 people, we ask all interested to register to the following address until Sunday, December 18th: [email protected]. Please introduce yourself briefly alongside with your registration.

Tuesday, December 20th 2016, from 7 – 9:30 pm at Bilgisaray, Oranienstraße 194, Berlin Kreuzberg

Happy Nouruz, happy Easter, happy Purim!