performance
Year: 2022
Hold my hand and keep me afloat / Fragment 1 is a performance that takes on a lecture format, which questions recording and preservation through film and its encounter with the ephemerality of ritual.
In a reenactment, I film the redwoods, and the redwoods film me. My body multiplies in the dance and, within the duplication, turns into fragments. The relationship and dissonance between my body initiating the performance in the studio space, my body initiating the ritual on screen, and my body holding the memory of the first ritual, are reflected in the way images, sounds, and my live reading interact.
There is disembodiment in the refraction in the mirrors, the ghostly presences, between the camera, the editing software, the computer hardware, the projection screen, and my body standing behind a lectern. I read from different registers, from personal and experiential to academic, from Moroccan darija to English, some translated, some not. Navigating archives between rigidity and fluidity, recording and salvage ethnography, self-representation and opacity, the (mis)translations speak to the fits, pain, and jarring of a body that appears to be still behind the lectern.