Reading/performance at GENERATORprojects Member's Show 2024 Performance Night, February 2024.

A response to Emily Jacir's video work Letter to a Friend—originally written in 2021, performed and reframed at GENERATORprojects Member's Show to encourage contributions to E-Sims for Gaza.

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This reading was a revisiting of thoughts and feelings I had when watching—and attempting to respond to - Emily Jacir’s Letter to a Friend, screened as part of Alchemy Film Festival in 2021. The response was written the week immediately following the festival—a period in which Israel undertook a devastating 11-day military offensive on the blockaded Gaza Strip, and in which a close relative of mine went missing, with a police search over several days leading ultimately to the discovery of their suicide.

The writing tries to reckon with the multiple forms of disaster that can swarm upon our attention at once; how it feels to hold in our minds catastrophe and loss at a global scale alongside that at an intimate, personal scale, and having to continue among it all.

At GENERATOR, those feelings were reconfigured and amplified in the light of the atrocities that Israel is currently, continuing to enact, on the people of Palestine. 

Original text available here.