From Gaza to Cairo: Mobilizing the Body Politic

From Gaza to Cairo is a live cinema performance at the Collective Alchemy: Turning Grief into Action at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics GSI Convergence 2013. The show interrogated “how do networked communities turn grief into action? In the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict, this year saw communities turning grief into action on a huge scale. Yet this is also a science of the oppressed that we use all the time, sometimes daily. In the case of trans women of color, our communities find themselves mourning and acting on another death every month. When we are not mourning a community member lost to violence, there are millions of people around the world lost to imprisonment, deportation and psychiatric institutionalization. Yet still, we persist in finding ways of turning these feelings into action to end these forms of violence. How can we imagine collectivity in the present moment, after new media, when connection is often mediated down to 140 characters, coalitions are negotiated through Facebook and embodied occupations of the streets have reinvigorated people around the world? The performances in this event address issues of lost children, uprisings in Egypt, immigration detention and anti-black violence.”

More information: facebook.com/events/1422159204666687/ hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/hemi-gsi