Lina Majdalanie
Rabih Mroué Hartaqāt (Hérésies)

Three exiled autobiographies from Lebanon bear witness to the crossing of frontiers, which separate countries, eras, languages, social classes, genders and religions. In three chapters, Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué weave together spoken word, music and visual arts in a stand against fatality and celebration of metamorphoses.

In Hartaqāt (Hérésies) Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué bring together the texts of three contemporary Lebanese authors, one female and two male: academic and activist Rana Issa (Incontinence), novelist Souhaib Ayoub (The imperceptible ooze of life) and poet and journalist Bilal Khbeiz (Non-functional memories). All live in exile despite never really having left Lebanon. They live in a sort of in-between, neither really in a new geography, nor in their homeland, which is indicative of how the physical, sensory and mental frontiers have become blurred, malleable and asynchronous. In their own way, and with a mixture of melancholy, self-derision and irony, the show’s three chapters evolve from the basis of this mobile threshold by joining together, each in turn, with the music of Raed Yassin, and the dance and music of Rabih Mroué. Summoning up an illiterate, liberated, Palestinian grandmother, the not-so-distant memories of queer nights in Tripoli and the experience of being uprooted, they maintain the possible passages between languages, genders, and bodies, despite the constraints and authoritarian make-believe.