Invisible dances for everyday survivors

Collective booklet by Choreographic Translations, Rotterdam 2022

Did you ever think words could dance? Invisible Dances for Everyday Survivors is a booklet that bets on it.
Playing with words, concepts, and our minds, this booklet invites us to connect in surprising and unreasonable ways to ourselves, others, and the space around us. As the title suggests we try living in this world but we often manage only to survive; those conditions of survival and contingency are, according to this text, the basis of great choreography. The chapters become a map to inhabit our skin, and the texture of the world, differently. A guide to help disrupt our assumed relationship with the world and a pool of ideas to reimagine what those relations could become. In between paranoia, calmness, and wilderness, the words in this booklet play out an improvisation in our minds:  what could this new world look/feel/sound/dream-like?

ISSUE: An Archive of Collective Struggles

Ghaith Kween Qoutainy &

Cooperative Independent Publication, edited and produced by Ghaith Kween &

Fer Gonzalez Morales, Amsterdam, 2024

A STATEMENT

An issue calls for problems as it does for practices; [Issue is a problem. A good one.] it evokes raising topics of concern, it leans to conflict, to crisis, always unfolding. [A problem that you want to have. To commit to. To desire it was differently; so that you would have something to look forward to. An ideal. A utopia. Always present by means of its absence]. An issue can also bring about the shared experiences different bodies encounter, struggles that we experience systematic and embodied; always situated, in many ways collective yet never total. [A fantasy. A fact. A pact. A promise. A way of going about things. A way to say things. To talk. To listen. To give. To take].

This approach to the idea of ‘issue’ (affective, dissentful, shared, incommensurable) allows us to take the space and experiment with ways of being  [To be becoming. to be a whole. It puts together a whole as it takes it apart.A part of a whole-er whole] and thinking about life in a way that is non-exhaustive and that is capable of bringing about and highlighting things like affect, belonging, traumas, desires, fantasies, gossips, orientations, and all other utopian imaginative practices that we invent along the way.

Issuing is also a verb, it implies a making (of) public, [to issue is to bring to public to publicize, to dramatize, to move forward] the act of making the problem come to the surface with an intention of igniting a discussion. To problematize. [ Upwards, or downwards, in all directions; to have many destinations, always on destination, always more; just never enough to be the more] With these meanings of the word as our base, this publication seeks to mobilize and entangle some of the shared struggles we live in today. Problematizing our way through and making space to exist in the vast trajectories of multiple and intersecting regimes of violence. [Issue is for everybody to take in their hands].

This issue came about from a series of connected, contingent, and contradictory conversations. [to take note of]. Conversations around questions on belonging [to remember] and displacements, the politics of feelings, identitary practices and notions of dissent [to make memory]. A few months ago we found ourselves imagining a (literary/metaphorical/literal) space where the conversations we were having and hearing could be amplified and contextualized [an archive]. We wanted to have a long, grounded, felt continuation of those conversations here [A generous infrastructure, an offer]. What are the issues that are out there? How are they being experienced by different bodies? [A distribution of efforts, of thoughts, of words, of images, of experiences, of wealth, of knowledge, of knowings, unknowings, doings, undoings, learnings, and unlearnings]  Never exhaustive or complete, never universal or neutral, this archive has an orientation towards joy (the one that stems from anger and pain, the one that rots only to flourish entangled and charged with life). [Issue is not by everybody, it is by us, the queers, the marginalized, the racialized, the othered, the others, the ones who are hurt, aching, who want to scream, but choose to talk, to whisper, to care, and to give.] 

We seek to b(l)oom.