During 2006 Lina Issa, an artist from Lebanon living in Amsterdam, was denied her residence permit for The Netherlands for strictly bureaucratic reasons. Since she appealed against this decision, she was not able to leave The Netherlands and re-enter the country. The decision created a ‘state of exception’ that excludes her from her own home country, and places her outside the zone of ‘contemporary mobility’.

Not being able to travel home, Lina cast a replacement and sent Aitana, a Spanish dancer and choreographer, to Lebanon for 10 days as her stand-in, messenger and recording device. Aitana visited different people—Lina’s family and friends—and traced the places of Lina’s memory and Lina’s idea of what constitutes home. Aitana performed lots of tasks that Lina assigned her, which relate to Lina’s very intimate and personal way of relating and inhabiting a place or a contact.

Where We Are Not is a narrative of exchange between two women, bringing forth their differences. What they exchange are not only ‘subjective’ differences, but also the reality of inhabiting extremely different political spaces.

In the reading/performance Where We Are Not Lina and Aitana appear together to explore the possibility and the impossibility of putting oneself in place of the other, and of sharing memories and experiences.

In an intimate one to two encounter with an audience member they try to challenge the personal private space of each of our bodies mainly that of the audience. They attempt to cross the physical separation/ border of ‘the other’. In a negotiation of power and authorship, among different confused layers of identity, sameness and difference, channeled through a mix of intense emotions of jealousy, manipulation, disappearance, exclusion, love, desire, fear, and embarrassment Lina and Aitana go through their memories enacting them and enacting the identities and all the places that formed each other.

The elements of this work are a short video, a notebook written by Lina of her memories and instructions to Aitana’s trip, a notebook written by Aitana of her experiences in Lebanon, and two implants. The implants play audience and spread subtly information about the points that formed the project. They also steer the audience through the different rooms where the performance takes place.

(description of the work by Lina Issa)