My FLUID BODY (ON AN UNEVEN POLITICAL GROUND)
In this four-chapter-performance , Liraz is re-creating a process of embodying history/ies. She is being alive as shaped and shifted by her collective and personal past. She is searching, connecting and researching her Jewish family ́s, and especially her grandmother ́s history in Greece, at the same time as she is connecting to her personal choices and the search for a home(s).
Our bodies carry our personal and political histories. These re-inscribe our internal and external world. Our actions in any social space are to a certain extent guided and shaped by these scripts. Sometimes, to such an extent that we reproduce our ancestral past without any conscious awareness. Who are we then as descendants of those who have not fought their last battle? Is it possible to have an inward gaze and be able to separate what is ours and what is not? What good is it to do that?
By creating an organic space made out of those experiences, Liraz produces new channels to share those collectively. The interactive performance aims to create a temporarily set counter-public and a sense of solidarity.
This project was performed in the frame of the lab series of the NOMEN Collective: The Body and the (Neo)Colonial Gaze on December 20th, 2016 at Bilgisaray, Berlin Kreuzberg, as part of the series: Speaking Feminisms - Preliminary Exercises, 6th exercise with a series by NOMEN Collective: Unfree: Racialised Bodies in the European Neocolony, May 2nd, 2017 , as part of the two performance event: "Marked" at the Gallery Circle 1, Berlin Kreuzberg, July 20th 2017 and recently, at Xart Splitta, Berlin, Neukölln in June 2018.
My Fluid Body, June 2016 at the Kindle Brauerei, 48 Hours Neukölln
A durational performance in a course of 4 hours, in which the artist is writing a poem on her own body and then embroidering it on textile.
My body is fluid. Just as my identity is. It is shifting between time and space, it goes back to search what to hang on in the past, in my collective (her)history, in my family name(s), it is drifting, stopping, colliding, turning, going back and forth. My history is not linear, as my individuality is not only mine.
My body exists between two homes. Sometimes even more. It overlaps the distance and creates a new physical space. And sometimes it clings only to my voice. It is conceiving, producing, and creating new worlds and realities. It gives birth to new rooted life with belonging to this space, which I have created.
How do we deal with all the layers, which make us who we are? How does our background influence our political decisions and positioning?
In my work My Fluid Body I confront with my past and my collective and individual history.
I am interested in the stories, which have not been told. In the marginalized voices. In the non-hegemonic non-colonial gaze. In learning traces, in changing the discourse, creating a new knowledge, perception and practice, in giving focus to what was previously ignored of.
By working with text, textile and texture, a none-academic form of storytelling is being produced, passing information and creating new knowledge.