Choking I, 2024

Festival Act Basel, 2024
in collaboration with the e-guitarist Mathilde Court.

The black sheet utilized is satin intended for luxury bedding. This performance strips away its connotations, instead addressing the oppression and suffocation experienced by the body’s constraint. It also serves as a way of shaping forms without directly revealing the body, but rather through its influence on the sheet. Indeed, by repeating the Dhikr, I will fall into hyperventilation and my body will have to release itself from it. This is emblematic of Swiss neoliberal policy, which often seeks to choke its inherent racist and Islamophobic tendencies. For example, the law of November 29, 2009 « against the construction of minarets », or the law of March 7, 2021, « ban on face covering », which obviously targets the wearing of the burqa, and the way in which the representation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine is censored today. During the performance, my voice chants the call to prayer, Al Adhaan, while I simultaneously engage in the breath practice of the Dhikr, drawing from Sufi tradition. Through the repetitive motion, shaping the black sheet, and the electric guitar’s clusters, there’s a tangible suffocative effect. The rearrangement of John Dowland’s Renaissance composition for electric guitar introduces a profound pathos, reigniting a sens of poetic-revolutionary fervor. Palestine was a former British colony, the choice of this song underlines this fact and the Western imperial hold on the region. In confronting the oppressive realities, the plea « Let me mourn » seeks acknowledgment, urging to grasp the material reality of these struggles.