Bodies, Art, and Protection: Breath

Fragments from Edwards Said’s most personal and poetic work “After the Last Sky” are repurposed to create a new script that reflects on what it means now to be construed as an ‘illegal’ person, an illegal body or entity: a person that should not exist or move in certain spaces, an impossible presence, continually threatened with potential disappearance at borders, security fences and walls. The script is turned into a song sung by the artists as multiple avatars. Using software that generates avatars from a single image, the avatars in the video are all people who participated in the ’March of Return’ that took place on the seamline in Gaza: an area that has been under physical siege since 2006. The relationship between fugitivity, fragility and futurity become manifest here, giving visual expression to forms of slow and silent violence involved in the circulation and construction of images. The work is an existential reflection on the impossibilities of the Palestinian condition but also the very generative potentials within his position, of existing while ‘not actually existing’, of being illegal: a mutable and disruptive presence. It speaks through Palestine to a much broader human condition: of bodies that are deemed illegal, disposable, invisible.

Language: English