When It Comes To Truth I Wouldn’t Dare To Tell It
A narrative anthology consisting of anecdotes, poems, songs, and radio drama.
The performance is a sub-episode from the series “Dramatic Episodes About Locomotion” (since 2014) by Mohamed Abdelkarim, a performance and essay-based project that explores myths, histories, and ideologies by employing a variety of aesthetic forms: from poems and prose to narrative; from oral storytelling to religious rhetoric. Personal anecdotes are interwoven here with historical events in which real and imagined protagonists appear. The collective desires crystallize into fictitious personae. As a result, speculative historiography emerges that relies as much on conspiracy theories, plays, and dramas, as on facts; a performative essay in which the historical truth unfolds as an encounter between an event and its manifold mediation. Conceptually the project consists of re-reading and re-examining the opposition between materialist and cultural vision of history through different social phenomena such as religion, gender, nationalism, and identity. It utilizes stories from the medieval era as a paradigm to understand contemporary issues. In this episode, the project revisits a number of stories through the performer Haroun Kanshour whom the artist imagined and encounters. Stories float over characters that are marginalized in what is known as History.
Episode #1: Christopher Columbus Meets Diego Diaz
Episode #2: The Journey Of The Meteor To Meet His Beloved
Episode #3: Isabelle Searches For Monad
Episode #4: Oh I’m So Sorry I Didn’t Mean To Scratch Your Face
Episode #5: A Gift To Those Who Contemplate The Marvels Of Renegades
Episode #6: Count! How Many Renegades I Still Have
Sub-Episode: When It comes To Truth I Wouldn’t Dare To Tell It