"OK. Whatever. We're just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren't responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicize, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home." "The Undercommons" Stefano Harney & Fred Moten
Welcome to Think Much. Cry Much. A performance piece that will not change your life.
For your safety, this piece will not represent refugees, or try to create empathy towards refugees and asylum seekers. For your security, this piece will not attempt to reach an understanding of human suffering. It will not explain terrorism, Islam or sexual harassment in public spaces.
This piece will work to keep you comfortable, so that you don’t go through the experience of a refugee crossing a border. You won’t feel like a refugee at all. This piece will not create an emergency, so it will not explain or offer a solution for the refugee ‘crisis’. It will not mention the word ‘crisis’ at all.
This piece will assist you by working on border rituals, to understand borders as a construct, and on the sound body of the borders. This piece will explain how we are all responsible for borders.
Welcome to borderlines and boundaries.
Welcome to Think Much. Cry Much.
Rima Najdi is a Berlin-based performance artist. Her work occupies and (re)negotiates in-between spaces. She grapples with the ways in which identity is constructed and perceived, focusing on the lived experience of the body. She is interested in the vulnerability of the body in relation to the politicized tropes of gender, safety, mobility and representation. In action or as artefact, her art questions stereotypes, the failure of language and both real and imagined borders.
Her work has been presented throughout the United States, Europe and North Africa, including in an exhibition for "Entangled Perspectives on Participatory Citizenship," a symposium of German and Turkish academics, artists and activists held at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2015, and at Tunisia's international feminist art festival Chouftouhonna.
Najdi has also taken part in residency programs around the world, including the Watermill Center International Summer Residency program in 2011 and the Sundance Theatre Lab in Morocco, She is currently a member of Urban Heat, a four-year project initiated by the Festivals in Transition (FIT) network and supported by Creative Europe. She is the winner of CTM Radio Lab 2017.
