An Essay in Chorography | Talk by Alia Hamdan

An Essay in Chorography | Talk by Alia Hamdan

Tuesday, June 25 | 8pm

"Chorography is a practice of description of localities, midway between geography and the chronicle. I intend to borrow the notion and to shift it conceptually toward an intensive mapping exercise, drawing on Deleuze’s theory of affect: to chronicle how the geopolitics and colonial histories of localities such as Lebanon and Palestine affect the body and produce certain types of political affects. For this talk, I focus mainly on filmic excerpts from Baghdadi, Pasolini, Schlöndorff, Suleiman..., trying in each case to isolate an affect or a figure, its spatiotemporal and gestural expressions, and the politics it expresses. By putting these excerpts in relation to each others, I hope to be able to draw some notes around a political typology of affects, highlighting its gestural expression and putting it in conversation with choreography."

Born in Beirut, Alia Hamdan holds two Master's Degrees in Philosophy and Urban Studies from Paris Sorbonne and Paris Nanterre. Currently, she is pursuing her doctoral research in the  “Pratiques et Théories du sens” laboratory at the Paris 8 University. Hamdan's research activities revolve around the politics of performance and the relations of the choreographic field to cinema theory. She teaches several courses in visual arts and performance theory at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, ALBA. Hamdan also has a performing practice and has participated in several projects, including Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy (Beirut Art Center, 2016).



Image caption: Video still from Scouting for Locations in Palestine, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963.