“No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom”: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance

Co-presented with Jewish Currents.

This event invites artists to engage in public mourning of Palestinians martyred by Israel over the last year, reckoning with the immense scale of annihilatory colonial violence while centering the need for ongoing and escalating resistance to the forces of empire across the globe. Four artists spanning a range of communities, practices, and lineages will create short performance scores in response to these animating questions: What interventions might performance offer for ethically mourning mass colonialist murder? How might those interventions help us to connect this moment of mass murder to others across history and geography to build a stronger framework of solidarity and analysis? How can this work gather others up in a process of mourning which is inextricable from its political responsibilities? How can performance offer a way to mourn while avoiding creating monuments and memorials which distract from the urgent work of active, escalating resistance?

These scores will then be interpreted by a larger group of performers in The Poetry Project’s space, offering a multiplicity of ways to find space for mourning which supports, rather than distracts from, militant resistance efforts. This event takes its title from a line in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “State of Siege”, which (in Fady Joudah’s translation) reads: “The martyr teaches me: no aesthetic outside my freedom.” In the spirit of that reminder, this event is grounded in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, while making space to mourn those who have been martyred in that struggle.

Featuring Leila Awadallah, Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, Rasha Abdulhadi, and Fargo Tbakhi, interpreting performance scores written by Brandon Shimoda, Christina Sharpe, and Natalie Diaz.

If you’d like to attend this event, please make a contribution to Gaza Mutual Aid Collective. Venmo: @Yasmafs, Paypal: Taraalami

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.