Tommorow I'll give birth to a fish

performance / video

with Amal Khlif (poems in Arabic - English subtitles)

Amal Khlif's poems are like a backwash: a cluster of themes come and go in variations: the unborn child or the unborn dead child; fear as a garment of skin passed down from mother to daughter; devouring, interchangeable mothers, distraught seamstresses; the abyssal womb with its starry wall where colorful fish swim. These interweavings weave an organic world: darkness with explosions of color, melancholy with bursts of childhood, profoundly feminine to the point of revolt.
While the usual labels - feminism, post-colonialism, trauma-resilience, tradition-modernity... - obviously apply, they flatten the strong singularity of these texts: a few obsessive and highly personal images are made and unmade, appear, disintegrate, recombine and are reborn always the same and always different, in a dreamlike flow of striking images.

Tommorow I'll give birth to a fish is a research-based performance project.