Project Description

Where We Are Not

‘Where we are not’ is a reading/performance by Lina Issa in collaboration with Aitana Cordero.

As a student from Lebanon, Lina was denied her residence permit in The Netherlands for strictly bureaucratic reasons. Since she appealed against this decision, she was not able to leave The Netherlands and re-enter the country. Not being able to travel home herself, she cast a replacement and sent Aitana, a Spanish choreographer, to Lebanon for 10 days as her stand-in, messenger and recording device. Aitana visited different people –Lina’s family and friends, and traced the places of Lina’s memory and what constitutes the idea of ‘home’ to her. Aitana performed lots of ‘tasks’ that Lina gave her in a hand written notebook and she wrote impressions and experiences in a notebook. Both notebooks play a major role in the performance.

Where we are not is not about anywhere, but about those places we carry with us in our bodies. The places that are part of us, and as well, that have made us who we are.