artist-in-residence
SITTING WITH DEATH
11.05.2024, 16-22h
This session is dedicated to listening. Listening to poetry, listening to our insides, listening to each other. In two readings, artist-in-residence Naghmeh Manavi shares her own writings as well as writings that influenced her in the past months.
During Naghmeh Manavi’s readings, we invite all emotions and thoughts that arise. Then, we take time to sit with them, find ways to share them and work with them in small groups. To support this process, the hosting team provides a framework of simple body practices and conversation techniques.
This event is a continuation of the format PS: Syncretic Sites that was facilitated at Shedhalle in January. It seeks to continue the processing of deadly political violence and its impacts – on the lives of attacked, abducted, displaced and prosecuted people and their loved ones, on global and local politics, on bodies, emotional landscapes and relationships worldwide.
CONTENT NOTICE: The readings include darkness, thoughts on death and on killing.
SCHEDULE (You can enter the session at 16h, 17h, 19h or 20h. Leaving is possible any time)
16:00 light bodywork
17:00 Naghmeh Manavi, poetry reading
17:30 processing in small groups
19:00 dinner
20:00 Naghmeh Manavi, reading “Letters to Death”- a series of letters written on a daily basis to death by Naghmeh. She explores her personal relationship with her own death and how it changes through time and geography as she travels.
20:30 processing in small groups
22:00 end
Readings by Naghmeh Manavi
Hosted by Naghmeh Manavi, Thea Reifler and Lucie Tuma
BIO
Naghmeh Manavi is a freelance theatermaker and performer living in Tehran. She studied theater at the Tehran University of Art. She has been working in performing arts as a writer, performer, director, and festival coordinator since 2010.
As a creator she is interested in power structures in any kind of human relations, as a writer, she is writing essays and lecture performances on the intersection of political, personal, and neuroscientific matters, her early works were mostly around object theater and the relationship between a performer’s body, and the objects.
In the last 4 years, she has been experiencing researching/directing in lecture-performance or documentary theater. As a performer, she has a broader view, works on different worlds and aesthetics, and discovers performative experiences. Her current works center around invisible overpowering, neuroscience, and the human brain, studying political matters at the personal daily life level, considering social and collective acts as a performance practice with the collective narrative as the scores …
Her latest creations are “ But, will I Remember?” a lecture video performance about narrative and human brain function in memory and information processing. She performed in Kaserne Basel in 2022.
“The Possible”- a lecture performance about inheritance as a biological and social phenomenon, and the position of watching and being watched as a personal and social relation. She has created and performed in Tehran in 2019, Istanbul in 2020, and Brussels in 2023.
