Alluvial is a microfestival of artwork created by the first year MA students in the Human Rights & the Arts program at Bard College. The microfestival took place in a variety of locations on campus and in Tivoli on Tuesday, May 9 and Friday, May 12. Students shared multidisciplinary work, installations, performances, live art, interactive work, and film as part of the Collaborations and Community-based Art course taught by CHRA Fellow and artist Sabine El Chamaa.
From My Grandfather’s Chair I Rage is a live performance about the violence of watching an occupied home from afar, from the outside. The performance takes off from the artist’s childhood home in Amman, Jordan, where she grew up watching her grandfather relentlessly monitor news broadcasts to keep up with updates on his home in Palestine. The artist takes the audience on a journey of pilgrimage and puts in motion the inherited rage and helpless monitoring of an intergenerational, exiled Palestinian woman.
Home Is A Fever is a live and immersive artwork that invites its audience to reflect on the notion of home. It explores the acts of memory and concept of time. Home being an associative and intimate concept, Home Is A Fever engages with associative notions of home and the house of its viewers while reconstructing the conventional meaning of home through storytelling, language, text, and an architectural outline of the artist’s home in Khujand, Tajikistan. Based on a personal story of a home of abuse and absence, the project reflects on the intimate experience of private spaces, being exiled either by choice or necessity, and the inability of a physical return.
Cheap. Suit is an interactive lecture performance that explores the role of the suits and the human body in narrating the city, spatial environments, and lifestyles. Precisely, it will use the suit as a lens to trace corporate class temporalities and their intertwinement with contemporary capitalist lived experiences.
Waste of Land is a live performance that tracks the artist’s attempt to visit a family member’s grave in a cemetery located on the Saudi-Jordanian border. The audience is invited to join the artist in an attempt to locate the lost grave in the desert. The performance examines the relationship between political borders and transnational grave infrastructures. It also addresses the tensions between the dead body and the state.
Dispatch from Exile is an immersive video installation that blends drawing, creative writing, and filmmaking. After being exiled from Russia in the summer of 2021, I turned to extensive diary writing to cope with my new reality. I found myself mourning my pre-war self and revisiting my past through my diaries. Grief is a universal experience, extending beyond losing a loved one to the loss of a homeland, freedom, or ideal. Freud argued that it’s not a pathological condition but a natural process that passes with time. Interrupting grief can lead to unhealthy melancholia. Dispatch from Exile invites the audience into my journey of coming to terms with exile and rediscovering a part of myself that I had started to forget.
Experience the taste of Georgia and immerse yourself in a cultural feast with Baby Luka Has Finally Realized. This interactive performance is a journey through traditional Georgian cuisine and customs, where you’ll be seated at a Supra [სუფრა] table as a guest of honor. Our Tamada [თამადა], or toastmaster, will guide you through an evening of storytelling, infused with humor, wit, and SUPRAnatural magic. As you enjoy an abundance of food and drink, you will become part of the Supra’s forging of a social bond that resists the influence of external powers on Georgia and its people.
World Light Heavyweight Champion takes on the battle of the year against an old foe! They’ve prepared for this moment all year long. We’ve been patiently waiting. It is all about to explode in a fight that surely will go down in history. Get your tickets! Tune in! Show up to finally see two massive beasts completely obliterate one another. RiSE. TOP. DOMiNATE. is an immersive live performance.
Cranes and Ships is a poetry film that takes its name after a children’s poem by Daniil Kharms, a repressed Soviet writer. The film ponders the silences and small acts of resistance by anti-war Russians at a time when mass protest fails, when the state introduces military censorship, and the full-scale war is not experienced directly. The film seeks to approach the variety of ways in which the war uproots people – even when they are not displaced physically.
Body Politics invites the audience to a lecture performance situated in a fictitious museum where borders between concepts become blurred. What does it mean to have a body in an intermingled net of political effects? How do our immediate bodily experiences, such as pain and pleasure, get enmeshed in power relations and exploited in different practices. This project explores the corporeality of being and reflects on the historical developments around both the protection and violation of bodies.
Of Rust and Starch is an immersive video installation that portrays the relationship between Fridge and Batata, a speculative fiction depicting a non-human bond between two non-sentient beings. This project is an attempt to question the notions of aging and expiration time in the age of mass consumption, while speculating about possible links that can take place between objects that are overlooked by humans.
Ten More Minutes sheds light on the immense struggles that Palestinians face when it comes to accessing healthcare due to the Israeli occupation. The story takes us back to May 1st, 2019, when Salma, a 13-year-old girl, and her father were on their way to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. To get there, they had to pass through the 300 Checkpoint that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem, which serves as a crucial component of Israel’s colonial security infrastructure. This checkpoint acts as a barrier erected by Israeli Security, further complicating the already challenging journey for Palestinians seeking medical assistance. As Salma describes the incidents that occurred on their trip, we get a glimpse into the harsh reality of life under occupation. IDs are required to enter the performance space.
In 2020 millions of Belarusians took to the streets to protest the electoral fraud that granted dictator Alexander Lukashenko president for a sixth term. Since then thousands of Belarusians have been arrested and tortured, with the Viasna Human Rights Center recognizing almost 1,500 people as political prisoners. It is crucial to understand how circumstances would have been different if, in 2020, the war criminal Vladimir Putin did not support the dictator Lukashenko, and missiles could not fly from the territory of Belarus into Ukraine. The installation Zhyve Zhyve reflects on the 2020 events, through textile and a collection of clothes that conveys to the audience the expressed will of the Belarusian people.
Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, it is the space between the notes.” So what exactly goes on in between the notes? It’s not always a literal silence, is it? Each note is usually still ringing out before the next one is played, right? But yes, something is happening that relates to silence. We are listening to the sound of Silence. The space between notes allows them to resonate, reverberate, and reach their full measure of expression. The invisible yet visible silence of the symphony of melting ice. The urgency of the slow violence of the sounds of the cracking ice can be another way of communicating knowledge to the audience, a different way to experience nature through music and visuals.
Bleeding into My Dreams is a multi-medium short story that follows Onaye, whose menstrual cramps awaken in her the embodiment and inhabitation of uMakhulu (Grandmother). uMakhulu fills her spirit, her breath, her voice, and her body. I invite the audience to help me trace Onaye’s idiosyncratic inheritance that welcomed her to remember. Remember amaphupho kaMakhulu.