Aya Razzaz
Athar Jiddo (2021) is an embodied exploration of inherited memory. Aya returns to the abandoned prison where her grandfather (Jiddo) was held for 3 years as a political prisoner, after being accused of attempting a coup. Armed only with letters between her grandparents from the 50s and 60s, she excavates and retraces his footsteps within the confines of the prison, and discovers where and how his memories exist in her body.
Aya Razzaz is a performance artist and choreographer whose work ties the exploration of personal, communal, and intergenerational histories. She excavates stories from the occupation of Palestine, the Syrian refugee crisis, and various liberation movements in the Arab world. As a queer Arab American performer who grew up in Jordan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and the United States, Aya’s work encompasses all aspects of her identity and lived experiences. Focusing on the embodied experiences of displacement, occupation, and incarceration, and how these experiences are inherited through the body, Aya’s solo and community based works invites the audience to witness and fall into various states of kinesthetic empathy. The way these somatic experiences echo and evolve through the body is at the origin of Aya’s work.
