Exhibit A

"I've always had pain in my body. Knees, ankles, back. It's a family thing. It's crazy, right? Just like my white mates inherit money, I inherit my grandmother's heavy legs and support hose. I get screwed up. So, anyway. It all starts with a visit to the osteopath. Exhibit A: "

In Exhibit A, Haddioui seeks to interweave her family history with History - from the intimate to the political, addressing questions of oppression through the prism of bodies on the margins. By putting the spotlight on invisibilised bodies, Haddioui invites us to question, in a furiously joyful performance, the mechanisms of oppression exerted on her body and that of her family members by capitalism, colonisation and patriarchy.
In a pared-down set design, a living room, a typewriter and an exhibition space with pieces of evidence, Exhibit A takes the form of a joyful trial that is reminiscent of the cultural, systemic and structural injunctions that weigh on our invisibilised identities.

"The history of the body is a human history because there is no social practice that has not been applied to the body first," wrote Silvia Federici in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin. What if, in the end, a backache was only the starting point of the most incredible journey?

• Sihame Haddioui, 33, is a Brussels-based feminist, anti-racist and queer artist, actress and political activist. After Stigmate (Citylab) co-created with Esther Gouarné in 2018, which already mixed intimate, collective memory and alternative democracy, Haddioui returns with Exhibit A in a performance that questions systemic and structural oppressions with regard to the exploitation of bodies. Another reading of her political participation and of the #MeTooPolitics she initiated in 2022. Since 2018, Sihame Haddioui has been a municipal councillor for culture and equal opportunities at the Commune of Schaerbeek (Brussels).