In this performance, in an intimate form of storytelling and exchange with the audience, I try to move through landscapes of memory and loss, of grief and joy, exploring what it means: To inherit a tree that you can never touch, to pass on a trauma to your child, and to conserve seeds of people that are being exterminated.
This work was born during the ongoing genocide in Gaza and war on Lebanon. A simple humble gesture to re-narrate a story of a Palestinian peasant, my grandma Zohra and to undo the violence of the dominant narratives that attempt to erase the history of a land and its people.
The audience gathers around a 2×3 m piece of textile with more than 600 dried figs sewed on it. An image that I carry with me from the work my grandmother did. The narration moves between memories and reflections, alternated with recorded Sicilian songs by Curamuni, inviting the audience at one point to taste a fig, and later to replace it with a word about something they have inherited.
An invitation to place ourselves individually and collectively within the pain and the loss. To engage in a simple gesture of reparation and witnessing. To resist together the idea of a dead earth-as-resource, choosing instead to reanimate the soil with past histories and future imaginaries. To be in solidarity with others losing their soil and acknowledging that we are next.
This project strives to hold in tender balance the loss and grief we feel, and the hope that seeds, trees, children, songs and stories embody.
