Archive of gestures

Abstract

Through my practice-led research, The Archive of Gestures, I unearth gestures and alternative narratives left out of the Israeli accounts of the occupation in Palestine, dealing with the body as a form and source of archive. I do this by re-enacting, analysing, and commenting on these gestures and the contexts in which they were produced. Most importantly, I develop processes that allow me to engage with the bodies of the audience members through participatory choreographic work. In this way, I aim to disseminate the bodily archives I generate, making them accessible to others, and reflecting on who can create, own, and access archives in the Palestinian colonial context. My research, which I consider a form of a decolonial gesture, collects and revives fragments of a gestural collective narrative in confrontation with the structural erasures of the colonial situation. In my thesis I engage with different theories—from archive reappropriation as decolonial practice, to the body as a valuable site of the archive, to audience participation theories on creating afterlives of the event and facilitating the emergence of new decolonial subjectivities. I also analyse relevant artisitc works from Palestine and around the world that deal with decolonial archives, the body as a source of archive, and audience participation as a form of creating shared experience. My gestural archive retrieves stories related to my own biography as a refugee in the Palestinian diaspora, later as an occupied subject in Palestine, and now as citizen of the world living in the United Kingdom. Methodologically, I construct my bodily archive by engaging with informal archival material (videos, pictures, written documents), oral histories, and imagination. I explore using these different forms of physical archives in tandem with the bodily archives in order to investigate techniques to unearth, as well as revive and disseminate, the movements and gestures in the archived narratives. I also combine theory and practice to discover forms of constructing and transmitting a living archive of gestures as a contribution to the production of new knowledge.