Constellations Series: 60 Seconds
Constellations is a series of responses to Mosaic’s virtual production of Dalia Taha’s KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA. We invited Palestinian artists, writers, and thinkers to contribute pieces which are in conversation with Taha’s play. Some pieces will directly respond to the episodes; some will merely take them as a point of departure. All of them will be thoughtful and beautiful articulations of Palestinian artmaking, thought, and expression. Our hope is that this series can expand on and strengthen Mosaic’s commitment to Palestinian culture-workers, creating a constellation of artistic expression which mirrors and honors the loose, non-linear structure of KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA.
Today, performance artist, Mosaic apprentice, and KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA cast member Fargo Tbakhi (who, it should be noted, also curated this series and is writing these words) reflects on the first episode of our webseries, “60 Seconds,” which he performs in. He writes about performativity, grief, and the colonizing effects of video.
Ahlan wa sahlan—welcome. Thank you for being here.
Salvaged Missives from the Colony of Video: A Web of Meanings in Response to Dalia Taha’s “60 Seconds”
“60 seconds. 1, 2, 3—"
Video cannot exist without the structuring logic of the timestamp. It is built upon the ability to render time visible, to turn our experience of the world into recognizable (and commodifiable) markers: seconds, minutes, hours. Not so long ago, time did not mean only the calculation of wages, the dividend of profit. But now it does. The moments are counted for us, against our will, in spite of our desire to live on an earth unconcerned with endings and beginnings. We know our lives occur because they are captured in footage, marked by time, and views, and virality.
As I type these words, my hands are covered in small flakes of glue, the lingering residue of a large paper-mache piece I am making to bring to a protest on the day 60 Seconds is slated to be released. The protest is in support of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in the occupied eastern part of Jerusalem, who are facing escalating violence as Israeli settlers attempt to evict them from their homes. At the same time, Gaza is once again being bombarded by Israeli forces. These ongoing colonial encounters make their way to us in the United States via video, though they are increasingly censored by social media sites invested in the erasure and suppression of Palestinian life.
“Theater doesn’t support repetition,” notes the man in 60 Seconds. Yet video, of course, does—its primacy as the language of our age is premised on its repeatability, its singular ability to inscribe and reinscribe our shared understandings of the world. The characters in 60 Seconds are, like all of us, trapped within this mediated relationship to the world, trapped within the colonizing totality of a video and the ways it will be taken up and (mis)remembered. Videos of Palestinian suffering feed the narratives which produce the circumstances of our suffering, cycling like a scene on a loop.
If I could speak to the dead I would ask them to tell me their wishes, and dedicate my life to carrying them out, vehicle for the making right of things.
When we perform, our gestures enact possibility. Something is imagined and done and then disappears forever, lingering like glue flakes in our memories and our bodies. Video, like the written word, becomes a tool to hijack temporality towards the archive, an alchemy turning breath and gesture into fodder for an algorithm. Now, my body is remembering the feeling of performing in 60 Seconds: creating a video of a performance of a video. A performance collaged of the shards of video which have made me: videos of Sheikh Jarrah, of the Great March of Return, of my 10 year old cousin’s funeral after a soldier shot him in the chest with a black sponge round for breathing, for embodying the terrifying reminder that colonization will not ever triumph. The sponge of my soul accumulating deaths, the language in which I swim dictating to me their non-meaning. The videos make me cry, and within every tear is a tax dollar paid to the instigators of tears. All my fears corrode and the global architects of eviction pixelate them and sell them as NFT’s. The video a sorry excuse for a séance. Intangible and suffused with the rhythms of profit, absent any hint of ghostliness.
If I could speak to the dead I would joke with them, and in their laughter find a map towards home.
What does an ongoing Nakba do to grief? What bricks is grief laid into, what sorrow caverns are turned into domiciles for us whose lives are grieflives? My father and I have been alive together for so many increments of sixty seconds. We will remain alive together for only so many more. Dalia Taha knows this, knows how the market hunger for the videos of suffering become a kind of shared understanding of our lives, until all that remains are days measured by how many videos of murder we avoid becoming characters within.
There is not much to say. I live, at the mercy of distance, a mediated life constructed of mediated meanings. And for those of us living in diaspora, the video becomes a paradoxical vehicle for a small, immeasurably painful return, these clips of grief our only way home. We return to the video and poke the wounds, to make sure they still hurt— to see if, after enough repetitions, they might not hurt anymore. And when that happens we will know we are lost.
If I could speak to the dead, I would say nothing. To sit in the shelter of a shared silence.
What, to a Western screen, are the pixels of Palestinian suffering? Not much, the martyrs sing to us. Not much at all. And now, the ghost of somebody’s daughter is reaching through the screen to you. Someday freedom will find us again, she’s saying. And freedom will sing, “Welcome back. Welcome home.”
Additional Threads:
At the end of each Constellations entry, we’ll ask the responding artist to share Palestinian organizations, artists, or pieces they think we should know. Here are Fargo’s picks.
BDS Movement |: learn more about the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
Tell Congress: End U.S. complicity in Israel’s abuses of Palestinians - US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (uscpr.org): USPCR campaign to call on Congress to end US complicity in Israeli violence
Larissa Sansour: performance and visual artist
MOHAMMED EL-KURD (mohammedelkurd.com): poet and activist from Sheikh Jarrah
The Freedom Theatre | Generating Cultural Resistance: community theater in Jenin, Palestine (Dalia Taha dedicates KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA to its late artistic director, Juliano Mer Khamis)
Home | Decolonize Palestine: a new resource for learning about Palestine through a decolonial lens
Home Page (alqaws.org): a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting queer Palestinians
Palestinian Youth Movement: a grassroots organization advocating for Palestinian rights in North America
Muhammads in Gaza | Porter House Review: an essay by the poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha which echoes many of the griefs in 60 Seconds
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist and writer. He is the winner of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and a Taurus. He has received fellowships or support from Rhizome DC, VisArts, Desert Nights Rising Stars, Halcyon Arts Lab, Mosaic Theater, and RAWI. His writing appears in Foglifter, Mizna, Peach Mag, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, the Shallow Ends, Prolit, and select bags of Nomadic Grounds Coffee. His performance work has been programmed at OUTsider Fest, INTER-SECTION Solo Fest, the Rachel Corrie Foundation’s Shuruq Festival, the Alwun House Monster’s Ball, Mosaic Theater, and has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Find more at fargotbakhi.com