Mapping the devoid of subjecthood of the invisible Rohingya refugees
The venue was not possible because of Corona. (29. 3. - 5. 4. 2020 Different Venues in Bangladesh) The interventions were extended to several months and could be carried out in an adapted manner.
As partner from Bangladesh, Ebadur Rahman chose the topic “Mapping the Devoid of subjecthood of the invisible Rohingya Refugees” with the title “10 days that shook the World”. The series of events planned for Dhaka, Bangladesh could not be carried out from March 29th to April 5th 2020, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, but limited interventions took place. The films, pictures and inter views produced in the process will now be shown in Villach and expanded with contributions and discussions from Carinthia on the subject of the refugee crisis.
Curatorial Note by Ebadur Rahman:
to the pdf of the curatorial note in bengali
„In 10 Days That Shook The World, to perform the dual role of artist and curator, I attempt to collaborate with a generation of architect, archaeologist, anthropologist, writer, filmmaker, performing artist who interrogate the cartograph of displacement—of body, labor, language—from the contemporary reality, on the societal level; together, we will (re)write, and/or (re)organize connections between grand narratives of living histories—in organic and ephemeral forms—vis-à-vis displacements; we will trace the physical, behavioral, political and chemical realities enacted through these grand narratives in the Bangladeshi society. We will, at the same time, describe and appraise the underlining relationships of world-making—that displace feminized labor, erase genocide and activate politics of erasure—that sustain these grand living histories, by investigating and making visible the organic and synthetic relationships that composes these histories, rather than with strictly social or personal facts or artistic objects.
Without abandoning our positions of intersectional artists and collaborators, we submit our practice to participate in a performative architecture that shows a keen grasp of different strata of displacement by utilizing Rohingya refugee crisis as a central and polemizing issue in Bangladeshi society which is, ironically, virtually invisible in the US agenda dominated international news cycle.
Since late August 2017, more than 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Burma’s Rakhine State to Bangladesh to escape the military’s large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing. The atrocities committed by Burmese security forces, including mass killings, sexual violence, and widespread arson, amount to crimes against humanity. The United Nations described the military offensive in Rakhine, which provoked the exodus, as a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing". Before August, there were already around 307,500 Rohingya refugees living in camps, makeshift settlements and with host communities, according to the UNHCR.
Disavowed by history, and devoid of subjecthood the invisible Rohingya refugees, do not even qualifies as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call "Multitude," which proclaims the "multitude" as an "active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities share in common". In fact, multitude turns out to be a class concept. The multitude is a whole of singularities. On these premises we can immediately begin to trace an ontological definition of the concept of the people which took shape within the hegemonic tradition of modernity and precludes Rohingya as a category of people or subject.
Adopting a low-brow relational account, 10 Days That Shook The World’s one of the most prominent operational activities is inaugurating a performative architecture to embed a temporary autonomous zone for community interaction formed as radical hospitality: for cooking and sharing meals, teaching, reading, watching or making film, playing music, sleeping. Within this space, the power dynamics between host and guest or self and other interchange and dissolve into those of multitudes in spontaneous social action. Building 10 Days That Shook The World as a site of open ended experimentation, we set up the conditions for which social interactions—in all its possibilities, uncertainties and paradoxes—are negotiated and continuously performed and reperformed by invisible bodies, spoken and re-spoken in inaudible voices—10 Days That Shook The World carries important voices that celebrate years of resistance - of resilience - of making more visible voices and stories that must be heard.
10 Days That Shook The World clears new paths for discourse via a form of sensuous knowledge production: food, spiritual traditions, erased oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Our collective practice is based on three activities: performance, adda-social interaction and documentation-dissemination.“
©ebadurrahman
The 8 day program is available here:
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, March 29th, 30th, 31st
Venue: Dhaka
(Rented house and some street side places where performance will take place.)
Themes:
• Introduction: Sharing of Identity and Experience
• Why there is no Audience
• Why everybody is an Artist
• Workshop with Rosalia Kopeinig
• Core theme: Displacement: Arakan-Kashmir-Palestine : Muslimder body-r displacement;
• Bengali and Rohingya historical relationships’ Contextualization
• Film shows with live Concert
• Poetry reading/ Performance
Venue: Norshingdi & Wari-Boteshshor Archeological site
Theme:
• Art, Craft, Tradition vis-a-vis Bengali history
Thursday, Friday, April 2nd, 3rd
Venue: Dhaka
(Rented house and some street side places where performance will take place.)
Theme:
• Tradition and the process of displacement; erasure
Venue: Narawangonj-Mawa
Theme:
• Film and screen based arts and displacement
Venue: Rented house, church and few other place
Theme:
• Palm Sunday, Ending, Meeting and greeting with all participants
