Stranger Within
A fragmented cartography of Norway through its movements of populations, minorities, political tensions and cultural territories within the North of Norway, Hedmark, South of Trondelag.
We perform in people’s homes in exchange for dinner or coffee, pace the land, read the archives. We are attentive to the local environment: everything is material, everything performs - mythology, social tensions, geography, local archives, poems, songs, local news, names, crafts, ways people travel, ways people meet each other.
Press: https://www.shakespearetidsskrift.no/anmeldelser/poltergeist-teater/221356
Since 2017 Mia and Jassem have performed in people's houses in exchange of a dinner or a coffee. The work has been developed in the spirit of hosting strangers with strangeness, where art is stuck inside reality. Habib and Hindi use found objects, lo-fi recordings, fantastique-realist poems and their own bodies. Stranger Within is a collective endeavor, and for many of the editions they invite guest artists they have met along the road. The guests add their own perspective to what absence and strangeness feels like.
Stranger within is the making of a haunted, embodied cartography of Norway - by observing migration movements, past and present living beings on the land, techniques of hospitality, moments of strangeness.
It is a long term artist research and performance project by Jassem Hindi and Mia Habib. It is a serial project, where the country is divided in non administrative borders. So far we have done ‘Stranger within Nord’ and it is now followed by ‘Stranger within Hedmark’.
Following this work on site, we reshape the work so that this experience can be transmitted. Stranger within then becomes an overlapping of performances, installation, dinners, projection of a documentary, lectures, concert and a book.
Stranger Within is a tale set in Norway, exploring the fabric of what makes a political unconscious. This broken history of Norway is shaped like a haunted land, fretting at the remains of the day. Stranger within is the work of a sleeper: the story unfolds using displacement, condensation and disruption. It is a haunted landscape that maintains a multiplicity of absences; organic, historical and ecosystemic. They start to behave strangely; shaking bodies, breaking objects, shaping menacing figures.
Haunting: That which roams unseen and quiet upon the land signals that what is not here is moving us. Absence is a powerful drive. The word is often found at a muddy crossroad between performance and politics. Stranger Within is a haunted landscape that maintains a multiplicity of absences; organic, historical and ecosystemic. They start to behave strangely; shaking bodies, breaking objects, shaping menacing figures.
‘’Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde wrote. Perhaps the Stranger Within are mind-bodies who challenge the lies our Western art institutions are built upon, and that make us believe that poetry is a luxury: the aura of unattainability surrounding the figure of the artist, the space relations between the work of art and its beholder, and the very notion of work of art, beyond performance’s nature as both material and immaterial phenomenon’’
Locality in transit: impressions on Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi's Stranger Within
Deise Nunes
Pre-production for Stranger Within was by Kira Senkpiel / Mia Habib Productions
Stranger Within premiered during Bastard Festival 2018, September 11 - 14 at Galleri KIT in Trondheim. With guest performers Siri Broch Johanssen and Sina Seifee.
October 11 - 20, 2018, Stranger Within was shown at Interkulturelt Museum, Oslo, with guests Nils-Rune Utsi aka SlinCraze, LATERNA / Inger-Reidun Olsen & Marianne Skjeldal, Ingun Mæhlum and Sina Seifee.
October 23 - 24, 2018, Oktoberdans, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen.
SITE, Stockholm, December 2018
Produced by
- TrAP
- Mia Habib Productions
Co-producers
- Black Box teater
- Interkulturelt Museum – Oslo Museum
- Teaterhuset Avantgarden
- BIT Teatergarasjen
- SITE
Other partners
- Sina Seifee
- Siri Broch Johansen
- Kirsten Opstad
- Helle Siljeholm
- Ingunn Mæhlum
- Pikene på broen
Supported by
- Arts Council Norway
- Fond for lyd og bilde
- Municipality of Oslo