Abdalla Daif

“7 sisters” radio drama
In a surreal fantasy mode of a radio drama, a group of artists try to organize a collective illegal migration and commandeer a freighter in an Egyptian port and set off toward Europe. As a form of camouflage to ensure the operation’s success, they film it, casting it as an elaborate anti-establishment crime in order to win sympathy among a public that is increasingly discontent with the government and, simultaneously, to mislead the police. The work is inspired by how Egyptian audiences of the TV series La Casa de Papel (The Money Heist) identified with the criminal gang as a vicarious act of defiance against the authorities thereby gaining a false sense of victory.

He obtained the grant to travel from Egypt to Austria where he will conduct a workshop to complete the staging of The Dialogue about the White Man which deals with radical changes in political rhetoric and the use of language. Abdalla Daif will be working with the artist Claudia Bossa on an anthropological study on the “White Man”, in attempt to address the problem of ethnicity and gender as a basis for discrimination and abuse in contemporary political rhetoric. In the process, they will also examine the colonial history of prevalent ideologies.