To Bless with Salt and to Call to Life

Performance, 2023

The premise was simple: 1) to call back to Life those who are confined to a spiritual death by those who profit and feed off their suffocation, 2) to introduce myself and my group to these Beings, to this restless space, and bless with salt the things we are putting there.

I had to shout as loud as I could because the ones that I address are behind heavy doors, thick walls, storage rooms filled with gas to keep them from natural decay, spread all over ethnological museums and other white colonial institutions including human remains at Berlin-Weißensee Art Academy and within and beyond the European Fortress. Rigid control (physical, structural) is used to maintain their existence because structures built on fear are fragile. The body becomes the first and last tool of resistance.

I was not arrested or kicked out, like many others before me were, because I had the privileged protection of our group exhibition, because it was “art”. Under any other circumstances, possessing this particular body, I knew the consequences could be very different. Expression was the impulse but Relation was the reason, and what pulled and carried it beyond the trap of “performance”. Unplanned re-actions took place within the bodies and energies present in the space. These conversations and re-actions will continue to take place, but they are not all mine to tell nor are they for everyone to see.

To exhibit in this space also means risking being swallowed by its appropriation of the decolonial movement and some in our group chose not to exhibit. To honour their decisions and everyone doing important work beyond white colonial institutions, addressing their own locations and different circumstances - written in red: “But I choose to live out there, in the inbetween, in the cracks and in the shards.”

Documentation by Mohamad Halbouni