one-to-one performance for the passers-by in Camberwell Road
3-7 July, 2024, 2 till 7pm
Camberwell Kabinett, London
supported by RomaTre University & ABAROMA (Academy of Fine Arts of Rome)
“…telling you this story is for me an exercise in remembrance and empathy that I hope we will make happen together…”
This project was conceived to explore consent, risk and care in relation to one-to-one performance, as part of my ongoing doctoral research. I asked my participants for their consent several times; to touch them, to be touched, to partially undress in front of them, to be looked at, to let me write with a biro names on their skin. I let them touch my pregnant belly, saying that it was the most effective way to explain the meaning of the word “untold”: the story of this baby is completely untold – as not out of the belly yet – but there are other stories, of other people, some alive and some dead, that are as equally untold as the one of my baby.
The point of the work was to convey those stories, referring to the people of Mosul who didn’t manage to escape during the ISIS occupation between 2014 and 2017 and, after the liberation, dealt with the bitter reality of being considered collaborators by the Iraqi government. Stories of parents that saw vanishing their children and their loved ones under the liberation bombs, then obliged afterward to go back to their crumbling houses with no support, living with the ghosts of their lost ones, always present, always near.
Participants could choose which story they wanted to hear among the names written on my belly and later they were offered the chance to shift symbolically and physically the chosen name from my skin to theirs, hoping that in this way the story will be kept alive a little longer, before fading again.
The stories come from the painstaking work of interviewing and collecting done by the Iraqi journalist Mona Mahmood in 2018, written and published in the Guardian and yet still fading away, like many that don’t fit the kind of news that social media and the wider net aim to emphasise and virally spread today.
credits:
Camille Moreno, Camila Mora, Zsofi Stavri, Matthew Stevenson, Camberwell Kabinett Collective, Camberwell Road passers-by, Mona Mahmood and Mosul’s inhabitants.