Farah Saleh
For Interventions, I chose to submit a sound contribution, which consists of reading the fictive Apology Letter from my performance Balfour Reparations, by 10 artists and cultural workers based in Scotland, including myself, looped and remixed by Lucas Chih Peng Kao.
Through my practice-led research, The Archive of Gestures (2014- ongoing), I unearth gestures and alternative narratives left out of Palestinian history, dealing with the body as a form and source of archive. I do this by re-enacting, analysing, and commenting on these gestures and the contexts in which they were produced. Most importantly, I develop processes that allow me to engage with the bodies of the audience members through participatory actions. In this way, I aim to disseminate the bodily archives I generate, making them accessible to others and reflecting on who can create, own, and access archives in the Palestinian colonial context. The research has resulted so far in six artistic works that adopt a live art interdisciplinary approach and explore, through extended choreography, suppressed and counter Palestinian narratives that manifest in different artistic forms: participatory lecture performances, interactive installations, promenade performances and hybrid live and digital performances.
The performance lecture Balfour Reparations (2024-2044), is the latest choreographic work in this research. It investigates ways of confronting the United Kingdom’s colonial legacy in Palestine. In particular, the role of Arthur James Balfour—the country’s Prime Minister (1902-1905), Foreign Secretary (1916-1919), Chancellor and Rector of some of the most prominent UK universities (1886-1930)—in the historical denial of Palestinian political rights and self-determination in their homeland. I do that by layering history, fiction, and fantasy through the lenses of Speculative Choreography and Afrofuturism while engaging with and being inspired by archival material, such as videos, photos, and documents collected from accessible personal and public archives. The performance lecture takes place in 2044 to reflect on the fictive apology letter that the United Kingdom is imagined to have issued in 2024 to the Palestinian people, promising them reparations. The audience becomes members of the reparations’ evaluation committee created on the 20th anniversary of the apology and are invited to participate in the performance.
The performance lecture starts with Lucas Chih Peng Kao (the video artist and sound designer of the performance) and me in formal clothing greeting the audience members at the door. Lucas hands them copies of the Apology Letter as “the papers for today’s meeting”, and I give 11 audience members pieces of Palestinian embroidery and ask them to “keep hold of them”. After the audience members take their seats and have a moment to read the fictive Apology Letter, I tell them that we are in a meeting in 2044, in which they are members of the evaluation committee that will review the reparations process that took place between 2024-2044. Through this framing, I establish the contract with the audience as active members and co-authors of the performance. Then I suggest starting the meeting by reading the Apology Letter and asking the audience members to whom I gave the embroidery to read each aloud one paragraph of the letter. While the audience members read the letter, I move in response to their words in the space with my black suit that also has Palestinian embroidery, mixing daily gestures and visceral movements that reflect my physical state when hearing the words read aloud.
After the selected audience finishes reading, I ask them to pass the embroidery to the person sitting next to them, then I acknowledge the importance of reading the letter collectively in 2044 and propose to read it again. This time, I ask volunteers to hold the mic and read one paragraph on stage, “from where I stand”, and then go back to their place so other volunteers can follow. This part is meant to push people to reflect on their own responsibility and actions towards the current colonial condition in Palestine and how they can contribute to a different future. It also creates a sort of social choreography in the space, with people moving in and out in relation to my body. When the first volunteer comes on stage, I take off my black jacket and change into an academic gown, also decorated with Palestinian embroidery. This change of costume reflects the multiple roles Balfour had, both political and academic, and the multiple possibilities people can take action with. Then I repeat the same choreography I did before, this time by responding to the tone, movement and states of the audience members reading. After the last volunteer finishes, I take the mic and go sit on my chair on stage.
In darkness, I watch a 5-minute split screen video with the audience members, in which we witness five fictive reparations acts that took place between 2024–2044. On the left screen, one can see archive images of acts of dispossession and erasure, while on the right, one can see the reparations that took place to undo them. In the first act, on the left, we see Balfour advocating for colonialism at the White House in 1917 and on the right, a Palestinian activist (me) advocating for decoloniality at Westminster in 2027. In the second, on the right, we see Balfour inaugurating The Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925 on disappropriated land, and on the left, a scholar (me) inaugurating Palestinian Studies at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2035. In the third, on the right, we see footage of Balfour Forest, founded on Al Mujaydil land, a village ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 and on the left, we see Balfour Forest in Scotland, previously land owned by the Balfour family, being renamed Palestine Forest in 2038. In the fourth, we see a photo of Old College at the University of Edinburgh, where the Balfour Declaration was allegedly written in 1917 and on the right, Palestinians reappropriating their gestures and narratives at the university’s leadership headquarters in 2044 by dancing Dabkeh, Palestinian traditional dance. In the fifth, we only see one screen in which Balfour’s page is revisited on GOV.UK and retitled Our Colonial Prime Minister. These are all hopeful but incomplete fictive reparations that reflect my scepticism on how seriously the UK will take the reparations process.
After the video ends, I ask the audience, the members of the evaluation committee, to give their own recommendations on how the reparations process can improve in the future, including ideas for further reparations. In this part, I move the mic between the audience members and listen to their considerations while Lucas records their voices. In presentations of the performance in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, this element of the performance has drawn wide participation, with a major focus on the need for juridical accountability, cultural, economic and ecological reparations, with some people’s contributions spilling into the present and voicing their anger and frustration at the current situation. After giving the time and space to everyone to speak, I tell the audience members that I will move on their recommendations in the space and ask those who have the Palestinian embroidery to throw or place them in the space as a sign of endorsement, as a further invitation for action and social choreography. I place the mic on the floor, put the black jacket on again, and put the gown on top of it; while I do so, we start hearing the voices of the audience members looped and mixed by Lucas. I take the university cap and start moving in the space responding to the words of the audience members, but also to everything we lived and witnessed in the performance as a collective. Like the voices we hear, I end my dance in moving and walking loops until I stop and sit on the chair.
Again, in darkness, we see a video with the running credits of the performance, including the archives, and listen to a 1 min track composed by Kim Moore that recalls all the sounds we heard in the performance and functions as a sound archive of the performance. The video ends with a QR code that audience members are asked to scan to send “further recommendations for future reparations” in order to sustain the responsibility and urge to action after the performance ends. After each performance, I have received at least 7 entries with hopeful and imaginative recommendations.
With Balfour Reparations (2024-2044), I respond to the devastating, violent and absurd Palestinian present with acts of “speculative pragmatic mobilization” that choreographically interweave movement, archive and worldmaking to imagine counter and liberating futures and act as a critical intervention in the present.1 As Jussi Parikka suggests, counterfuturisms2 reconfigure time by imagining futures mediated through the past amid an unsustainable present. In the performance, I bridge past and future to imagine an attainable future of self-determination and accountability and propose to work towards it collectively. In the performance, I bridge past and future to imagine an attainable future of self-determination and accountability and propose to work towards it collectively. In that, I approach counterfuturism differently from other Palestinian artists who have been experimenting with it over the years, such as Khalil Rabah, Larissa Sansour and Ghalayini.3 These artists use science fiction to imagine dystopian Palestinian futures mediated through the past to reflect on the present violent daily lives of Palestinians under occupation and illude that alternate futures are unattainable under the current conditions.4 While these artists create fascinating work that makes us reflect on the absurd Palestinian present, my work aims at imagining and working towards an alternate attainable future.
Balfour Reparations is also inspired by Afrofuturism, but it is not science fiction and does not use futuristic aesthetics. As Anais Duplan argues, Afrofuturism is about the permission to speak, to dream and to imagine that your people will continue to exist in the future.5 It is about planning, growing and changing to make that future happen. It is also not about using one specific aesthetic or a single art form. Indeed, in the performance, I resist adopting a single art form as the only way to imagine the future. Instead, I opt for a live art cross-medium approach, interweaving movement, text, video, sound, and costumes, and allowing for the plurality of forms to support open dreaming.
Farah Saleh is an award-winning dancer, choreographer and scholar based in Scotland. In 2014, she started her ongoing practice-based research The Archive of Gestures. She was an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh 2017-2021 and in 2024 she became a lecturer in Global Majority Performance at Glasgow University.
Notes:
- Lepecki, André. 2017. “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary”. In: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (eds) Rebekah Kowal, Randy Martin, and Gerald Siegmund. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.149-168. ↩
- Parikka, Jussi. 2018. “Middle East and Other Futurisms: Imaginary Temporalities in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.” Culture, Theory and Critique 59 (1): 40–58. ↩
- See Rabah, Khalil. 2003. The Palestinian Museum of Human Kind.http://www.thepalestinianmuseumofnaturalhistoryandhumankind.org; Sansour, Larissa. 2009. Space Exodus. Video; Sansour, Larissa. 2012. Nation Estate. Video; Sansour, Larissa. and Søren, Lind. 2015. In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain. Video; and Ghalayini, Basma, ed. 2019. Palestine+100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba. Manchester: Comma Press. ↩
- El Shakry, Hoda. 2021. “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible.” Interventions 23 (5): 669–690. ↩
- Duplan, Anaïs. 2020. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Undercurrents). Boston: Black Ocean. ↩