Theatrical adaptation of The Thirty Names of Night
In 2023, Noor Theater Company commissioned me to adapt my second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, as an immersive theater piece set in New York City. Nadir, the protagonist of Thirty Names, is a Syrian American trans Muslim searching for the connection between his late ornithologist mother and the mysteriously vanished bird artist Laila Z, who both encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. Following his mother’s ghost, Nadir uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community and learns that Laila Z’s secrets are intimately tied to his family’s–and his own–in ways he never could have expected. The process of art-making is central to the novel, as are the artistic coming-of-ages of the contemporary trans protagonist, Nadir, and Laila Z. Much of the novel is dedicated to visual and performance art and artists, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Etel Adnan to Roman Opałka, and I often found myself betraying language to get at the raw sensations bricked in behind the words. The story is also a love letter to the New York I grew up in; I can’t wait to see what nuances theater as a form and the city itself will bring to this story. The project will run through 2024.
Vertigine: “Il paradiso trans è una casa piena di fiori, dove la parola vergogna non esiste” (Trans heaven is a house full of flowers and no word for shame)
In November of 2023, as part of Museo Burel‘s show Vertigine (“vertigo”), curated by Daniela Zangrando, three excerpts of my Italian translation of my 2020 prose poem “Trans heaven is a house full of flowers and no word for shame” (“Il paradiso trans è una casa piena di fiori, dove la parola vergogna non esiste”) were posted on billboards throughout the city of Belluno, in northern Italy. The billboards also rotated over a series of weeks to feature other texts by Alessandro Giammei, Chiara Portesine, and Enzo Cozzolino. The poem was first published in English and Italian online in 2020 as part of Cherimus’s project Isuleddas. The graphic design of the billboards was done by Paolo Tirelli; photos were taken by Francesco Titton.
“The Secret Sea / البحر السري”
Immersive, bilingual (ITA/ENG), site-specific guided stargazing walk in Venice, Italy (8 Sep 2023) for Ocean Space/TBA21, in collaboration with Italian visual artist Matteo Rubbi.
There is a whole part of the night sky that hides the sea. This sea exists only at night, made up of stars and seemingly deserted spaces. At the latitudes of the Mediterranean this secret sky is almost completely submerged, emerging cyclically on the horizon, rising along the arc of the ecliptic, without ever betraying it, and then sinks again, underground or underwater. The abysses of this sea remain deep below, invisible and monstrous, as big as the whole sky under our feet. The faint line of the Hydra is a demarcation, a border, the basis of the world.
It seems strange to observe the sea looking at the sky, to glimpse in that iridescent reflection the complex intertwining of the first urban and agricultural cultures, together with nomadic ones. All this scattered, contradictory knowledge suggests that identities are more like segments, broken lines, waves that push other waves rather than easily identifiable roots clinging to solid ground.
This stratified knowledge that was born between Persia and Mesopotamia, between the Gulf and the Mediterranean was ordered and described by important astronomers such as Al-Sufi in his Book of Fixed Stars. This, together with other sources, will be the starting point of the workshop: a book from the 10th century. These waves and this sea are still there, almost illegible today, like heavily faded frescoes.
The proposal consists of a naked-eye observation workshop of the night sky during a walk that takes us to a place that is sufficiently dark and free from light pollution. The aim of the workshop is to make this sea re-emerge in our eyes and in our imaginations by recomposing maps, fragments, hypotheses, and stories, then weaving the threads that connect this secret sky to us and to our lives today.
Part of the cycle of conversations “Venice as a model for the future?”: With the title “The lagoon / has the moon / between its legs / playing ball” (after a poem by Etel Adnan, from her book From A to Z, Post-Apollo Press, 1982), this series intends to explore how humans and more than humans co-exist in Venice and its lagoon after dark, when the wave of daily visitors leaves the city, nocturnal birds start to sing, beacons are switched on some boats to catch mullet and cuttlefish, and the moon dictates the movement of tides.
“L’atlante di e Meraviglie / أطلس الغرائب”
Curated by Fabien Danesi, the double solo show “L’Atlante di e Meraviglie / أطلس الغرائب” (“The Atlas of Marvels” in Corsican & Arabic) in collaboration with Italian visual artist Matteo Rubbi ran at FRAC Corsica from March through June of 2022. The show is part of an ongoing collaborative research project into the stories, legends, and history of the night sky throughout the Mediterranean, and was also awarded a fellowship residency at the Camargo Foundation in 2020. The aim of this research has been to explore the origins of the constellations, combining Ptolemy’s Almagest with many sources from Southwest Asia and North Africa to partially reconstruct a story that began in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. We center these sources, deconstructing and troubling the Eurocentric idea of the West as the heir of a Greek-born map of the sky, revealing the transcontinental origins of this map and the fundamental contributions of Arabic and Persian astronomers to preserving vast amounts of astronomical and astrological knowledge.
This show was envisioned as a reassembled found manuscript, part of an imaginary lost atlas called The Atlas of Marvels. The show’s title is derived in part from two of the sources Matteo and I consulted during our research of the common myths and stories of the night sky in the lands around the Mediterranean: the first is an Egyptian manuscript compiled by an unknown author between about 1020 and 1050 AD called كتاب غرائب وفنون ملح العيون , Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes, and the other is a 13th century manuscript written by Persian astronomer and physician Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini called عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات, Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing. By naming the show “L’Atlante di e Meraviglie” and الأطلس الغرائب, in both Arabic and Corsican, we decentered English as a mediator and also highlighted the common roots of myths between the islands and shores of the Mediterranean, including between Corsica and the Levant and North Africa. We also aimed to reimagine the encounter between audience and manuscript, reinscribing the idea of what a manuscript can be. We wanted to show that a manuscript is not only page and ink; it is also hidden archive, erased history, rewritten record, and repository of oral storytelling. A manuscript is not only words, but can also be sculpture, image, and gaze. Using Arabic and Corsican for our titles honored the location of the show on the island of Corsica, too, illustrating the possibilities for the islands and southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean to be cultural centers as important as those in continental Europe. This multilingualism also communicates the concept of the show as a polyvocal manuscript.
The titles of each of the works (which I retitled for the show, including extant works) are an artwork in themselves. This artwork is titled ‘The Bright Star of the Boat’. Together the titles form a story that unifies the show. Each piece consists of its own shorter title (which is a line from a longer excerpt) and a page, designed as a page from a medieval Islamic astrological codex, that displays the full excerpt. Each of these ‘excerpts’ is a piece of a longer story that runs through the entire show through these manuscript pages, which may be collected, taken home, and compiled to create–by connecting the points on each page–the constellation of Pisces. ‘The Bright Star of the Boat’ is a piece of the imagined atlas of the show, a fictional found manuscript which consists of writings, sculptures, and images. Thus, the stories told throughout the show via the titles bind the entire show together.
The erasure and rewriting of the stories of the sky that we observed in our research directly gave rise to our approach to our work for the show, including a video of shape / erasure poems produced by local high school students during workshops in Corte and Bastia which became itself a constellation when inverted and projected on the back wall of the citerne, the main space at the FRAC. Throughout the show, we aimed to emphasize the multilingual, complex nature of the material and of the stories we have access to—both for the sky and for ourselves. The multilingualism of the titles, in particular, embodies the interconnectedness of the languages and peoples of the Mediterranean in the making of the sky as we know it today, reorienting our gaze toward the deeply rooted roles that cultures outside of continental Europe have played in the creation of culture, myth, and history in the Mediterranean. It also reveals how interconnected we remain, and gives us the opportunity to question the stories that are told about the Mediterranean by structures of power. Especially in this time when “fortress Europe” violently prevents migrants from crossing the sea, it is important to realize how much of our cultures are actually shared, and to realize that the Mediterranean has been a connector for much longer than it has been a dehumanizing political barrier.
The show also featured collaborations with Sardinian sound and visual artist Carlo Spiga, photographer Leonardo Chiappini, & Sardinian textile artist Eugenia Pinna.
Read more in this interview in In Corsica magazine (FR).