The choreographic piece explores performative cultural practices and gestures that are historically used to affirm one’s gender. The piece unpacks notions of gender envy in relation to national pride and ways of representing symbolic elements of the Syrian heritage through an androgynous and non-binary body expression. Using a special made weapon prop as a screening space, Sarjon presents a combination of Arabic poems on the khanees identity (a word that is used as a slur, addressing trans, intersex and gender queer individuals) and personal stories and memories of immigrating to europe, the sang narration weaves the experience of fleeing both Syria and the gender binary and unpacks the intersections of longing, homesickness, body dysphoria and land diaspora. Commissioned by SIGN projects, Groningen, NL.
Sarjon (They/Them) is a multidisciplinary artist, working with vanity as a research space in identity politics. Across durational mediums of performance, writing and audio-visual research, Sarjon’s practice uses accelerationist methods to conduct spaces of dialogue between their many alter egos. In storytelling, Sarjon pulls focus on the characters as political consequences of the stories they tell, building worlds in the post-narrative which mostly involve real life social and cultural constructions, challenging the audience to trace back their own agency and impact on these worlds.
