Lausanne

28: April 2013

25 Minutes.

The performance “Mountains, I am greeting you” opens an intimate time-space for the resistance and resilience of Kurdish bodies as bodies, grounded in material presence. This kind of presence is vital and crucial for creating a necessary struggle for radical change against colonial history. Through performative time-framing, artistic visual research and aesthetics of emotion, Wirya Budaghi aims to share a space for response, reflection, and participation with those bodies and histories, as well as with their struggle and pain.

In Kurdistan, sharing individual pain with the collective is an old tradition, which has now become part of the Kurdish struggle to survive. Due to the large extent of pain sharing through collective bodily presence, this tradition has become dangerous to ruling regimes of oppression. Collective mourning, in fact, can be transformed into political activism if, for example, it serves to draw attention to unjust murders, executions, and torture. This can mobilize the grieving and aching bodies to resist injustice. And this is why the regime in Kurdistan-Iran has tried to make this tradition impossible.

In resonance with the Kurdish mourning tradition and the recent Jîna revolution, “Mountains I am greeting you” creates an accessible space for and with the audience for the sharing of pain through collective physical presence.