At 8.00 p.m.
Free entry until full capacity is reached.
‘In October and November 2016, I presented the project entitled READING_State of Siege, in collaboration with the International Art and Human Rights Festival ARTifariti. This Festival is held every year in the Tindouf refugee camps in Algeria.
My proposal was very simple: a group of performers-actors (men and women) would read the poem State of Siege by the Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish. The public invited to the event would sit around the readers for approximately 30 to 40 minutes at a venue specially chosen to hold the performance. The place chosen was a silent tent, which created the perfect atmosphere for reading the poem.
The audience could follow the reading with the help of a small book containing the poem State of Siege, which had been published specially for the event. The Arabic edition of State of Siege had a print run of 1,000 free copies, which were distributed to anyone from the camps who was interested. The covers of the books were red, black, white and green. These are the same colours of the flags of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic and of Palestine.
The reading of the poem in Arabic was an event in itself since the performers read the entire work in the dark, aided only by a small lamp. These conditions were specifically designed to create a particular, highly-aesthetic response to the reading. The voices inside the tent resonated with special intensity in the darkness, despite the action taking place in an unaffected untheatrical manner. Following my instructions, the readers (two Algerian women, two Saharawi men, and two Algerian men) read at a leisurely pace in front of a large audience as if reading to themselves, with a soft and focused tone of voice. I think that the outcome of the project as a whole was extremely positive, stimulating and cathartic. Consequently, the idea of proposing a similar initiative again has been suggested, to coincide with the We Refugees exhibition in the city of Santiago de Compostela in collaboration with the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art.’
Jesús Palomino