Soukaina HABIBALLAH

sous_Kaina 

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bilingual performance by Soukaina Habiballah

video installation: Zouheir Atbane

dramaturgy: Henri jules Julien

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Arabic/English version : auto-translation + subtitles

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sous_Kaina is a poetic performance conceived as the second part of a diptych initiated by Nini ya Momo (2022), which exposed the situation of a young woman, aware of the oppressive system in which society condemns her with the active support of the women in her family, understanding that to emancipate herself she must break the fatal circle where motherhood equals submission.

sous_Kaina exposes the emancipation of the same oppressive system, this time from the angle of relationships of love, marriage and parenthood, with men, husbands and fathers. All these aspects, which are also the most intimate in a woman's life (passion, sensuality, married life, raising children...), are also subject to men's law, in this case in Morocco the famous Moudawana, the Personal Status Code that governs the life of the family and of women. In an audacious writing gesture, Soukaina opens each of the prose poems in the cycle with a sentence taken from the Moudawana, which contaminates the paragraph that follows it and constrains the life of the woman who writes it.

Alone on stage, Soukaina traverses chapter after chapter of the law's prescriptions, with their organic intricacies and consequences for a woman's life. Echoed on a large screen behind her, articles of law and poems are projected in Arabic and French. The words and letters are brought to life by video artist Zouheir Atbane. They are threatening, invasive, oppressive, and the performer must fight with and against them for her life and her poem.