WE INSIST

With and by : Jassem Hindi, Rani Nair and Mia Habib

WE INSIST is the meeting of two dance artists, Mia Habib, (Norway), Rani Nair, (Sweden), and one sound artist, Jassem Hindi, (France).

Together we work, insisting on a space that will fade away if it is not used, a common ground that will not exist if it is not walked on, paced on, if not repeated over and over again, if not shared with others.

We started working with identity as a crisis, as tension, not as a stable concept. This project is about looking at how, through sound and body language, we can question and experience this identity, which we understand as an unstable nomadic state, pierced by a multiplicity of tensions and traversed by layers of intensities. How does identity maintain itself, how does it transmute? How can it sometimes make us slip into madness or the void, into frenetic, tautological repetitions of ourselves -- or into an abyss of differences between us and the rest of the world?

"Just by practicing a language, we are pushing it towards a foreign language we don't know yet. By using it over and over again, we are making it into something different from what it was a second before. A language is condemned to die if it does not transmute into a new language."
-- F. de Saussure
Course in General Linguistics


Traveling and performing as a complete part of our artistic project

WE INSIST has always been considered an itinerant project, in constant contact and discussion with people from South Africa, Madagascar, Syria, Morocco, France, Lebanon, Sweden, Norway and Portugal – with more countries to come.

Our project must always be attentive to what is happening outside. In the aforesaid countries, we met or have talked to people who had something to say about identity. We saw contexts which would enrich our experience, modify our performance settings, and share our views.

We do not work on identity crises in a political language, but in a formal one, to point out structures, to examine what art forms bear the crises, how they are carried into bodies, into music, into art. We use the material those crises have produced, the gestures and the constraints they have generated. Having close contact with the people that invited us to visit them, as well as gathering a maximum of information through discussions, pictures, videos and sounds is an important part of our work.


Using fragments of identity: collecting archives, looking for traces, sharing documents

We wish to be able to construct traces, to be able to use and share our new experiences, we take a part of our time together to archive information. We try to compile any event (workshops, encounters, discussions, performances, discussions between us or with the audience) through various media (photos, sounds, body memory, writing, video).

We try to use as much as possible media that can be easily and quickly shared, because this documentation activity is of course for us part of the archiving and research, but it is also a way to share documents with the people with whom we work, so that they may use it as well.

This archive material will also be used by WE INSIST as source material, ranging from the type of movements we decide to insert in our performances, the sounds that are broadcast (a lot of the recordings will be edited and used in our performances), to locate and use in our project any pattern, any new idea that we’ve encountered and that strongly influences or enriches our researches about identity as a crisis.