Performance by Rana Hamadeh at 98 Weeks

“The Big Board…or And Before It Falls It Is Only Reasonable To Enjoy Life a Little”, originally commissioned by the Lisson Gallery for the Magic of the State exhibition, and later adapted into a lecture form upon the invitation of Landings within the exhibition “Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality” at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, is a theatrical/cartographic and choreographic work-in-progress, part of the umbrella discursive project, Alien Encounters, that Hamadeh started in 2011.

Hamadeh leads a journey amidst the legal coding of the terms ‘falling ill’, ’immunity’ and ‘quarantine’, to outer-space and land-sea relations plotted through science fiction projections, geo-political territory formation and cross-border travel. Thinking through the conjunction of the legal and the spatial, the work plays out an intensive scrutiny of the shared lexicons of criminology, epidemiology and theater.