How are bodies written?
In this project, five writers – from the Middle East, North Africa and The Netherlands – were invited to write a text collectively. Fadi El Tofeili, Driss Ksikes, Liwaa Yazji, Lina Mounzer and Babs Gons. The first writer started from our proposal of Second-Hand Body; by attributing the protagonist of the text with a second-hand body, quality or identity that has been used and embodied in a history of its own. How are bodies written and what is written through them? The writers were invited to embark on a journey through different pages, using writing itself as performative; where the text, its writers and protagonists move between different lives, lived and imagined, between borders, cities, socio-political realities and (hi)stories. Sharing a longing to surpass borders and singular identities and narratives and a desire to imagine a future that does not reproduce or give a ‘second life’ to the violence and injustice of the past(s), or its hegemonic narratives, but disrupts, undoes and re-writes them instead. The festival ‘assumes’ a collectivity by working with the Middle East and North Africa. It is a fictitious collectivity though and we are asking what it means to encounter and what are ways to counter it?
Second-Hand Body is a collective writing project curated by Lina Issa, which started in August as a pre-text for our festival’s working vision. The process can be followed and the texts can be read in our Online Magazine. There will be two presentations during the festival: as a part of the Opening Program (13 November) and in one of our DOTE-Mezrab Nights (20 November).
