Farah Saleh

“Past-inous” dance video
A dance installation video that treats the bodies of the performers as living archives. It aims to exhibit the daily gestures of refugeedom and to examine the relationship between the performers and the gestures of family members who had been displaced in the past in the framework of a contemplation of the future of the refugee question. Work on this project will be conducted on a digital platform with ten Palestinian dancers who represent the second generation of refugees. Some of these live in Palestine and others in the Palestinian diaspora.

Created and choreographed by Palestinian dancer and choreographer Farah
Saleh and her collaborators, this interactive performance intends to archive
latent stories of refugeehood through the bodies of refugee artists and those
of the audience, and also by using other archive material and real or fictive
testimonies.
The alternative archive includes present, past and even future stories of
refugeehood, in an attempt to interrogate the collective responsibility and
to find bridges between the past and the present of Europe, with the aim of

developing a collective gestural identity that might challenge the passive-
victim image that refugees are often subjected to.

A contemporary dance performance with interactive video that examines the role of the artist in creating change by using the body as an archive in the process of discovering and exploring collective memory and political narrative. The performance will archive some of the movements and gestures that exist in alternative stories of refugeehood that have been omitted from the official archive. Refugee artists from Palestine and Syria will come together from the different parts of the world in order to collaborate in the re-enactment, interpretation and contextualization of gestures and other physical movements related to the refugee experience.