Dictaphone Group creates live art performances based on findings and stories produced through urban research and oral history. It is a collaborative project initiated by live artist Tania El Khoury and researcher and architect Abir Saksouk. Together, along with performer and producer Petra Serhal have been making site specific shows informed by research in places such as a cable car, a fishermen’s boat and a disused bus. The aim of these projects is to re-question, as citizens, our relationship to the space of the city, with a focus on public space and its redefinition.
Recently, activists friends of the Dictaphone Group were invited to speak at a blogging conference in Tunisia. They were prevented from entering Tunisia on grounds of their nationality. For them, this event catalysed a series of thoughts on the effects of borders on networks and solidarity, on the passing and sharing of knowledge and experience between countries and on the deeper political implications of territorial attitudes and sovereignty.
Dicatphone Group’s current project explores the continuing existence and complications of borders between Arab countries. In, and along these borders a memory of a colonial past is maintained and nurtured through a bureaucratic visa system, replicating the idea that the ruling elites within nation states should dictate who can travel and where they can travel to.
Dictaphone Group will gather stories and recollections of travel between Arab countries in a time before visa enforcement became routine. They will use these oral histories and conversations in an attempt to re-imagine, redraw and recreate this moment or possibility now. We will use the research findings to create a lecture performance that presents an imagined environment created by memories of times past that remaps a different understanding of shared space and a new set of political propositions.