Nothing Will Remain… Other Than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World

"Don’t be sad. No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat. No one will manage to swallow it. Don’t worry.” – The last words of Wadih Sanbar, spoken to his son, the Palestinian historian and poet Elias Sanbar.

Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds; gasps, coughs, hums and hisses, the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.

In an ongoing correspondence, Abed and Aivazian continue to exchange reflections including quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs, and recitations. The performance enacts the active labour of remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, and reassembling elements from their correspondence as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment, which is characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists’ respective trajectories.

Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, Abed and Aivazian attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a vibrating resonance chamber, transformed into a disparate choir.

* The first iteration of this performance was commissioned by Mophradat for Read the Room Festival, Kaaitheater, Brussels 2024.

• Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action. In 2020, she co-founded the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2022–24). Her book Stars at Midday was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.

• Haig Aivazian’s practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of 3 technologies: artificial light, computation and law. He examines ways in which the administration of light and darkness makes and unmakes persons and transforms material conditions of architecture and geography — how they are inhabited and moved through by humans, animals, objects, machines and other strange creatures. Aivazian was Artistic Director of Beirut Art Center (BAC) from 2020 to 2022, where he founded and edited thederivative.org.