Blue Gaze at the Future
The Apparitions of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma
Performance, 40 minutes, 2024
Blue Gaze at the Future, is a series of audiovisual performances, composed of text-based scripted materials, radio drama playback, and visual materials to structure a narrative in a play-like, embodied in a text-based performances.
The series questions the theater stage as a landscape composed of seen and unseen elements in a world-building process, and as a territory that is able to reorder fractured reality, composing, navigating, and proposing a different world.
Through the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, a woman who lived in the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula and was known for her exceptional intuition, sharp eyesight, clairvoyance, and ability to predict events before they occurred, the performance traces and contemplates her apparitions in contemporary literature following events in 1948, 1967, 2013, and beyond. It explores how we can imagine a future hope that copes with grief and reconciles defeat, considering notions of negativity, grief, and defeat as rational apparatuses rather than psychic affects.