Would We Know It If We Couldnt Feel It

Nancy, Mustafa and I spent five days confined in a room for around five hours a day immersed in intensive conversation. We spoke at length of a particular instance of extreme emotion, and what kind of physical reactions those situations elicited. We tried to deconstruct a single situation that touched us deeply and what we carried as its memory, simultaneously working towards reconstruction of the situation, our emotional responses, and its immediate and protracted effects. All these sessions were recorded.

Through the edit, I tried playing with the see-saws of what patterns emerged, moving in and out of spirals of self-affirmation and negation. High levels of constant self-awareness ultimately altered our perceptions, what it meant to experience something and how all three of us were tied together in language, location, intent, and intensity. Nancy, Mustafa and I came in with three different experiences totally independent of each other, but left after five days with an eerie sense of similarity where the particular and the generic collapsed into each other just for a moment.

Performed by Nancy Naser Al-Deen, Mustapha Jundi and Aarti Sunder