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

In Nothing will remain other than the thorn lodged in the throat of this world, artists Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian build a collective performance from breath, vibration, and the fragile labour of remembering. Taking inspiration from the words of Wadih Sanbar—who described Palestine as a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat—the artists explore how bodies carry histories that exceed what language alone can hold. 

The extended correspondence between Abed and Aivazian (of anecdotes, poems, readings, songs, and everyday reflections) is reworked into a score of sound, text, and movement. Gasps, coughs, hums, and hisses activate the body’s internal architecture, with each organ introducing its own affective register, thus attending to the sensory and sonic residues of a historical moment marked by the intensified hum of genocidal violence. 

Throughout the piece, spectators are invited to join in simple vocal gestures. These shared sounds gradually transform the audience into a resonance chamber, a disparate and temporary choir. The theatre becomes a space of synchrony and action, where collective vibration momentarily counters isolation, examining the act of remembering as an active, collective practice. 

Commissioned by Mophradat for Read the Room Festival (Kaaitheater, 2024), the work returns within It Takes a City as an invitation to listen closely—to the breath that remains, to the histories lodged in the throat– and to keep breathing in a world strained by violence and fatigue. 

• 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.