banah el ghadbanah

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film




  • You were a cloud (I was a the gold on the horizon)

  • In this choreopoem video, I layer my original poem “Rage in nine parts” over Lena Chamamyan’s “Love in Damascus,” with contemporary dance I perform while on my aunt’s rooftop in Amman, Jordan. It was created while my aunts and grandmother were in the process of laying out kishik for drying on a rooftop. I slipped into my favorite dishdasha and decided to weave myself a realm of many colors and ephemeral layers under the guise of unsuspecting feminine daily work. I wanted to show the multitudes of timelines present in one moment—how we are walking in many parallel realities at once, and how we can interact with our many split selves in between.



This dance performance was inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s words in The Presence of Absence, “They forced you from the field. As for your shadow, it neither followed you nor deceived you. It froze there and became a stone. Then it grew green like a sesame plant, green during the day and blue at night. Then it grew and soared like a willow, green by day and blue by night.” In this video performance, I walk into time travel, into a space where my family was not forced to flee Syria in the 1980’s. I am the alternate universe version of myself, a farmer’s daughter. I rewind at to return where I am, under the eerie reversed voice of Fairuz undoing the time travel sequence. It is less about nostalgia and more a rumination on the possibility of nostalgia as a speculative fiction exercise.




This a short film set to the song “We and the Moon are Neighbors,” by Fairuz. It is about the quotidienne, seemingly mundane feminized tasks that are sites where identity is practiced. As Fairuz narrates a story about a collective love affair with the moon, I perform these mundane tasks on camera, and take the viewer through my grandmother’s neighborhood in the streets of Amman and then through layers of clouds in the sky. I explore the romantic essence of everyday life, and enact a subversive but brief moment of dreaming, where possibility lives.



Spoken word as an art form is often devalued because it is more colloquial and comes from oral traditions of resistance in the African diaspora. In SWANA cultures the oral tradition of the hakawati and of storytelling at large reflects what Sylvia Wynter in "Ethno or Socio Poetics?" calls the illegible oral cultures of indigenous civilizations, understood as a non-culture, a negation of modernity ("uncivilized") and that could thus serve as a weapon against European colonial domination because they could relay insurgent messages that were illegible within colonial epistemologies. This is a spoken word poem. In the revolution, in diasporic spaces, I witnessed countless men dismiss feminized voices as too idealistic, too nostalgic, too dramatic. What if those affects are secret keys to sensual experiences of freedom? My voice is set to footage from my camera roll, footage of Syrian women protesting, and Syrian children walking around destroyed areas in Eastern Ghouta. It is meant to circulate a brief, accessible, sensual, and temporary moment of freedom. Because freedom is not an idea, but a feeling and an embodiment. How can we, as a Syrian people, time travel to a time/space dimension where freedom lives when in the present we are structurally and materially unfree? In what ways can we move beyond intellectualizing our ideas of what the future looks like? Can we envision, in a few minutes, in the brief still of a protest, a space and time when all confines dissolve? Can we imagine a revolution that moves beyond patriarchal hierarchies of what “activism” looks like? Can we include visions of activism beyond militarized fantasies of dominance? This was written for Ghaith Mattar, for Raed Fares, for Fadwa Suleiman, for Razan Zeitouneh and the millions of unknown artist activists of the Syrian struggle.


  • Rima’s Red Raincoat

  • Codirected and produced with Janine Thiong as part of Dr. Ayoka Chenzira’s Digital Moving Image Salon. 
  • On a busy April afternoon Rima Dali, a 34 year old lawyer, stood on a Damascene street corner in a bright red raincoat holding a bright red sign. "Stop the Killing," it read. Days later she was arrested and an international flash protest movement began. The iconic Stop the Killing We Want to Build a Country for All Syrians slogan spread to surrounding cities and the rest of the world, invoking the possibility of a nonviolent strategy toppling a brutal regime—one where the voices of women, the voices of the youth, and the voices of religious and ethnic minorities could thrive. As Rima overcame imprisonment, ridicule by both the regime and the revolution, her evolving story reveals the importance of showing the world the transformative journeys of women who resist.This story not only highlights Rima's activism but also honors the countless Syrian women who stay fighting for peace.



  • Ishtar Awakens 

  • This piece is about sensuality and sexuality, a story of transformation and rebirth from the liminal spaces of revolution and larger society. In a time of great distress, a time when my home country was falling apart into pieces, at a point when I was losing many loved ones to revolution, genocide, and war, I became the goddess I needed. I decided to make myself into a human altar, adorned with all of the things I embody, the things that I as a Syrian socialized to be a woman am not supposed to be. I set up a mirror in front of me and positioned my camera between my legs, as an affirmation of my own subjectivity, that I exist, I am real, I am a sensory delight and inundation of details and color. With a portrait of Etel Adnan in the background, a picture of Ishtar on the wall, my jewelry making supplies and beads, and my favorite books around me, it was an act of adornment on the edge.