APORETIC PATRIMONY

Aporetic Patrimony (2019) is an evening length work that stemmed from reading my maternal cousin’s informal research on the Palatine German exiles in the US, my paternal grandfather’s memoirs of surviving the Armenian Genocide, and my family’s experience of war in Beirut. I embodied these texts by utilizing vocal and movement practices dealing with “aporia”: an attempt to speak the inexplicable, uttering slippery, murky half-sentences, generated by utilizing my multilayered history as an impetus for performance. I then lead the audience in breathing and voice exercises, and asked a central question: What parts of our ancestral histories do we want to keep, and what do we want to move past? Each iteration of the work was responsive to the social fabric of the site. I performed it during memorial periods for a murdered queer activist Zaki Kostopoulos in Greece, asking how we could both take their gifts forward and hold our societies accountable.