Dounia Mahammed

Dounia Mahammed (she/they) graduated in 2015 from the drama course at KASK and describes themselves as a queer searching writing making performer. With a particular love for plants, clay, colour, chewing, wood, water, cornflour (thickener!), asking, moving and being moved. Dounia’s work often plays with language and sound in search of ways of (mis)communicating. It attempts to say something about being human, looking for connection, moving between astonishment and despair. Alongside the artistic work, loving activism and activity as a freelance confidant occupy an important place.

In 2015 Dounia created Salut Copain, a graduation performance which reflects in a faltering manner on the unusualness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the unusual. In w a t e r w a s w a s s e r (2017, with Alan Van Rompuy), whimsical associations around fluidity and connection enter into dialogue with live music by Alan, water and cornflour. PANIC & OTHER ATTACKS (2020, with Roos Nieboer) goes in search of recipes that can save us in threatening situations – e.g. with endangered species on an endangered planet – and GNAB◊RRETN¡ (2021, again with Alan Van Rompuy) is an experiment in (mis)communication, a strange concert about finding and losing that you remember well but that never took place. Dounia has appeared in Het betreft liefde by Tine van Aerschot, Giants by Laurens Aneca, Lucas van der Vegt and Jesse Vandamme, Operette by Tibaldus; has written text for Ophelia by Inne Goris and provided voice work and coaching for Bambiraptor by Jonas Baeke and Mats Vandroogenbroeck, and has acted as writing coach/directing assistant for Divide & Rule (postponed) by Khalid El Koujili.

Dounia occasionally writes for magazines such as rekto:verso, Terras and Deus Ex Machina; is a writing coach for a European project by ETC: Young Europe on ‘non-dominant voices’ in the repertoire, and recently participated in a panel discussion at UGent on microaggressions.

The next artistic step will be MALONCONICO, with Mira Bryssinck, Zindzi Tillot, Milan Vandierendonck, Sara Lâm, Larissa Kim and Fred Libert. Together, they will seek a collective, caring path towards a magic realist relaxed performance about what specific perspectives or life experiences do to our perception of melancholy.