LA PALESTINE COMME GESTE (OU LE SCÉNARIO D’UN IMPOSSIBLE FILM)
Performing the geography / notes on crossing Jordan and the mapping of desire
duration = memory = spirit (not a manifestation of matter) (Bergson)
the crossing and the movement
link between movement and emotion, to move and to be moved come from the same word -
how does the body not only cross lands but can also be ‘crossed’ by lands ? how can new definitions of geography appear, through the feelings that attach us to it ?
a geography is not only drawn by what it is, by the idea of a destination or by the image of its landscapes, it can also be drawn by the interest that we have for it, the desire we hold to go there, but also the missing of a land, the absence of a land - the longing that bears the lack of and the awaiting, notion of time - direct and double link between the bodies and the lands but also between the intimate feeling and what exists outside of us - to talk about inner geographies, to say that geography exists, that it makes itself exist through what we feel - it is the affects that create these notions of geographies and lands - the movement can trigger singular and precise emotions that are related to a precise geographical displacement - to also be able to find lands in other lands - the memory of a land exist in our body - exile, desired displacement or forced but able to re-trigger a place elsewhere - smells, colors, landscapes, tastes etc. the re-activation of memory through very specific things.
Palestine as a metaphor, as a gesture - as it’s like something that deploys itself and that we can re-activate in other lands - metaphorical because cannot be legitimate to be able to talk about it as a country that i’ve never been to and that i have no direct link to whatsoever. but real metaphor since there was a non-travel there, non-reached and impossibility to go there - it creates strong feelings that to know that there are specific geographies that are completely unaccessible to certain of us - asking those questions on memory, where does it constitutes itself ? in a being ? in a land ? memory is on constant movement, it’s never still - how it is continued ? how can third generations still feel their grandparents trauma ? can memory be lost with a territory ? is it transmitted ? is there a real continuity between man and lands ? can lands bear the memory of other lands ?
the movement and displacement can generate new methodologies of work, the idea that the thought system is built in a linear way is too limited, whereas if we include the notions of movement and deployment in a methodology or approach it can generate new perspectives - to the image of a destination that is never attained, to the image of that desire that animates us constantly to regain a land, that desire is a movement, something that moves within ourselves, that moves us - constantly crossed by those things and it is interesting to include that in the approaches of work as they are alternative ways of thinking, in relation to that idea of the rational thought that we absolutely need to set the thinking, as the physical laws while everything is inconstancy, those laws want themselves to be universal but they aren’t, they aren’t universal laws - we try to seize things that are beyond us and bigger than the human comprehension / so we bring it to our scale, but certain things we cannot hold while they hold us and there only, we can testify of them - when the macro crosses the micro and where the intimate can express the immense, because we all cross the universal and the collective but to an individual measure and the only legitimate way, measured and fair to be able to communicate on it in this scale of intimacy and micro.
important new methodologies related to the writing of History and the place that affective memories or in relation to History, because History gets written like a sum of events with their chronological timeline whereas History is also composed of triggers of affects and activation of memories in certain lands - it is important to ask where do we put those affects and those emotions when we write History, when we tell the world, where do we put the emotional and the intimate and the bond that it can have with the geographies. That experience was to be able to trigger and give a place for the intimate geographies, inner and in foreign lands but that aren’t that foreign -
the political, social and economical are the only grids to which we approach History, the only truth that are universal and valid are the more personal though - from the moment we talk about an intimate event its truth is able to pour in the universal and move other people, the idea of submitting oneself, the capacity to accept that we can change our method of approach, to demolish what has been built before etc. - it is also a compliance that allows to build a trust bond, something important when arriving in a new land, which is to break all the construct that has been brought by things that were external to us like mythes, projections, as it is very important to build this bond of trust with a place and in order to build it, we need to be able to keep our center and at the same time be able to completely loose ourselves, allow ourselves to be traversed / crossed by what surrounds us, the balance is very difficult to attain - the artist’s discourse find its importance here because it builds trust with the place where he intervenes, where he grants a gesture / is able to construct a trust bond with its spectator / important place as we don’t find this trust in the other discourses and constructs, and representations
the metaphor of Palestine as a gesture and Palestine as a methodology starts with the non-existence of ‘territory’
the territory is a man-invented notion (more specifically borders) but huge difference to take in the idea of movement, that lands are in movement, we are in movement, everything is in constant movement / constant dialogue / and the only constant data is inconstancy / so memories are also in movement and they can be re-triggered by being re-activated in places that are not related to them directly / Palestine as a metaphor of a forbidden land, that is missing, erased, looted, inaccessible, maybe a land but most of all it is a state, a state of being, a metaphor for all inaccessible and forgotten geographies or unnamed, it is a state that we carry within us and that we are able to reactivate indeed because memory isn’t set, fixed or glued to beings, memory is everywhere since they pre-exist us. Afterall, what we feel has already been felt by others, and they are things that could have been transmitted to us. The language of affect and emotions is very essential as we will always find a truth in what we feel and it is in those discourses, constructs, that we will find those truths and not elsewhere.
This land traverse wasn’t an intervention on landscape but rather the opposite, the intervention of that landscape within me - I don’t know if it the specificity of the Jordanian land (that is continuity of the Palestinian land, the minerals, the stones, the relief) - the land is continuous, the notion of borders have been brought by men - wether I was moved by this continuity that geography has entirely brought but it had an intervention in me since the body is a place, and the intervention of this place in me had an impact on the methodology and induced a change and a complete return to the intimate and the inside rather than to seize things that are bigger and outside of ourselves - to tell stories and represent things from the intimate scale, to get out of myths, of projections, to get out of constructs of thoughts not only rational and linear but that are simply in the continuity of what has been thought before rather than finding openings, flaws, breaches that allow us find new tools to be even closer to the truths that are within ourselves, of the things that move through us, the things that move us.
the body has always been a place, and when it leaves its land it becomes it own geography, it becomes a space for the space, it is inhabited by the memory of the missing and the absence but also able to generate affects and feelings of emotions that are really singular, forced absence or desired, we are able to generate things that can also become collective, as the feeling of exile etc. affects that we can join through experience. History has been written by leaving the affects on the margin, how can a body be freed from History to conjure its own story ? How can we generate discourses that allow to re-register those margins in the field of multiple realities ?
