Les Brigittines

With the project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have been, for the past ten years, collecting online recordings of people singing and dancing in communal spaces and landscapes in Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Yemen, as an act of protest, land reclamation, or testimony of displacement. From this, the artists created a performative video-installation for the festival – Only sounds that tremble through us – in which these bodies interact with each other, and engage in dialogue with new video performances the artists created with dancers and musicians based in Ramallah. The result is an overwhelming landscape where voices, poetic language, and body movements circulate in the four corners of the Brigittines chapel. A series of barriers in front of the screens prevent the image from being seen in its entirety: the images break up, encounter walls, and disperse like a forced diaspora. They allude to something that cannot be reconstructed, like the shattered words of a poetic phrase. Presented for the first time in a theatre, Only sounds that tremble through us discloses its full performative force. Through song and dance, several fractured communities resist their erasure, and proudly claim the use of poetic language as a form of resistance.