This workshop reflects on a collaborative research-creation project with Montreal-based multimedia artists Khadija Baker and Shahrzad Arshadi, education scholar Hourig Attarian, and Ottawa-based Film Studies scholar Kumru Bilici.
All four of us come from the Middle/Near East. Having lived in a volatile region before calling Canada home, we all have inherited memories of atrocities from our families, just as we have lived ourselves through civil wars, military coups, bloody revolutions, religious and political repressions. It is these inherited and lived difficult memories that also have become the fabric of both our individual work in our respective disciplines and the broader canvas of our projected collective work. Our project combines live performance with installation and seeks to recount stories of mothers, daughters and granddaughters attempting to come to terms with memories of war and genocide. The performance enacts conversations about “doing laundry,” a banal everyday activity that is generally associated with the female domestic sphere. Audience members are invited to join the performers as they sit around a circle of washtubs and explore collective stories of loss, dispossession, war, genocide, and exile. The goal is to break down barriers between audience and artist, and create an alternative methodology and language in which the process becomes the performance.