Performing Spaces — Exploring urban structures and their inner-narratives
Since 2016, Sana has been developing her research project Performing Spaces — Exploring urban structures and their inner-narratives. What began as a, now Brussels based, continuation of the poetically disruptive, in-situ performances she starting exploring at the research group for Relational Architecture at Umeå University of Fine Arts and Architecture, slowly expanded into a layered, transdisciplinary practice influenced by architecture, visual arts, performance, historic research, theatre, storytelling, and poetry.
Poetic Disruption — Public Interventions
These unannounced performative interventions in public spaces explore how small, well-known gestures can be subverted to turn passersby into spontaneous audiences asked to poetically re-imagine their surroundings. The interventions were documented to function as research material alongside Sana’s theoretical readings and as visual narratives presented in video-installations.
a selection of some public interventions and shared research practices:
The boat is sailing away (@Metro green line, Milan 2015)
Trams are circling the city taking people from where they enter to where they get off.
Their solitary flow gets disrupted when a beggar goes round, distributing a piece of paper to each of the passengers. Before arriving, the beggar goes round again, collecting the pieces of paper he distributed. This performance uses the same methodology. The performer writes down a dream they had the night before on the papers. This small poetic confession questions the possible exchanges and interactions amongst the people who inhabit this moving space as a brief collective.
The closing time (@Gare du Midi Sunday Market, Brussels 2016)
In collaboration with Juan Duque
Looking to open up, share, and make tangible the empowering sensation of resistance experienced by performing these small poetic interventions, a score is developed and performed by the participants of the a.pass postmaster for artistic research.
Gather at the market around closing time on Sunday, remain still in the same spot as long as the dynamic of the context allows.
- Find your own position in the space, your own point of view.
— From your own practice pose questions that you find relevant to the place.
‑Use inputs from your surroundings as data for a new subjective map of the place.
The playground (@Touhid metro sta#on, Teheran, Iran 2016)
It is a familiar and practical rule to keep to one side of the escalator when wanting to stand still, and to keep the other side free for those in a hurry. It makes a line, each person facing front, faces becoming invisible. Some escalators come in pairs. One goes up, the other down.
If a performer stepped on the escalator, facing a person coming up or down the other way, would it then be possible, by turning very slowly while standing still, to keep facing them the entire way? Would eyes meet for a second or longer, what would their reaction be?
Rhyme the temporary wall (@Port de Neuve, Brussels, Brussels 2017)
in collaboration with Esther Rodriguez
During this guided walk a collective attempt is made to map the bright blue and yellow, corrugated fence that surrounds a construction site. The works have been going on for so long, the fence has been here seemingly endless. Bends and cracks in the metal have started to appear, through these viewpoints emerged. At the end of the walk we gather and share the mappings of these views we each discovered.
Evoking Places — Staged Performances
A shift occurred in Sana’s artistic practice following an extensive study of the practices developed by Forensic Architecture, a research agency focussed on developing, employing, and disseminating new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence combining the expertise of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers. Inspired by their transdisciplinary creation of legal narratives with real world impact, Sana started exploring wether reports of diverse public gestures could be woven together into a storytelling practice that could transmit the poetic experiences and acts of subversion, resistance, and empowerment inherent in the kind of subtle gestures she had previously used in her public interventions.
This storytelling practice intertwines spatial mapping practices, poetic anecdotes, concrete descriptions of gestures, personal memories, and personal fictions, with rigorous research into the history of specific public spaces. Supported by residencies in KWP, Sana further developed several performances that she had been working on in gallery and studio settings during the past years. Now staged in a theatrical setting, but without acting, Sana’s stories slowly layer the lived experience of a place onto the imagination of the audience. They evoke a proximity and familiarity with passersby and public spaces sometimes far away in distance or time.