Rehearsal Mirrors

"Rehearsal Mirrors" is an extension project that stems from the FictioningLab, a collaborative initiative created by curators Darya Aloufy and Maya Bamberger. The FictioningLab aims to bring together creators from Israel and Palestine to work collectively, exploring the potential and challenges of fictioning as a subversive tool within the geopolitical context of Israel-Palestine. While the lab itself is still in the process of becoming, Rehearsal Mirrors stands with one foot inside the lab and one foot outside—projected into the polarized international discourse. It serves as a rehearsal space to perform, critique, and examine the ethical and political complexities surrounding the lab, as seen through reflections—and distorted reflections.

It is a space that seeks to bring together all of these reflections not through predefined categories, but by being with what is seen from the outside and what is experienced from within. The project is also an invitation to anyone who is willing to look at this mirror and confront the most violent and ugly facets of Western imperialism, offering room for attempts and mistakes to be made in the effort to break free from its grip.

Guiding Rehearsal Mirrors’ ethical compass is a vision of decolonialism that seeks to dismantle colonial structures without destroying the lives of the people involved.

Its ways of working include being present and honest while refusing the instinct of flight, fight or freeze, incorporating techniques of perspective change such as the cut up and deep listening.

This text is a series of textual rehearsals and cut-ups, an attempt to make sense of the past year.

Rehearsal is not a starting point. There is no single source, no singular moment in time where it all began, when someone was right and someone was wrong. Only one rehearsal, followed by another, and then another.

Rehearsal I

FictioningLab - Revised proposal

Art that operates within existing language and tools only reproduces those conditions. Art that operates within existing language and tools in Israel/Palestine, art that documents atrocities and represents them according to predetermined frameworks fails to bring about change. This is our premise. Stemming from our desire to live a life and foster relations and practices that are different from those we inherited, and the doctrines we were raised on, Darya Aloufy and I established the FictioningLab - an independent, non-institutional group, inviting Israeli and Palestinian creators to join us in shared process engaging with Fictioning.

Our understanding of Fictioning draws from the works of David Burrows and Simon O’sullivan¹. Fictioning as a verb, distinguished from fiction or science fiction, encompasses a range of literary and artistic techniques and technologies that hack the fictions of our time, practices that summon the parts of us that are still becoming, that have the potential to facilitate ‘coming communities’.

Rehearsal II

FictioningLab - Reality

After months of forming the groups and preparing ourselves, our inaugural meeting was scheduled for October 2023.

It did not take place.

When we relaunched the group a few months later, the Palestinian members decided to withdraw from participating, at this time, feeling unsafe to collaborate with Israelis, at this time.

We were not ready yet.

But we wouldn’t become ready unless we took the first step.

Rehearsal III

Rehearsal Mirrors

When presented our initial aim—and our failure to come together in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza—we faced strong concerns coming from some participants from the School of Commons. The emotional and intellectual journey that emerged from this encounter, from the perception of what FictioningLab seemed to do or represent against the backdrop of the reality in Israel/Palestine, became Maya's project at the School of Commons: Rehearsal Mirrors.

While the lab itself is still in the process of becoming, Rehearsal Mirrors stands with one foot inside the lab and one foot outside—projected into the polarized international discourse. It serves as a rehearsal space to perform, critique, and examine the ethical and political complexities surrounding the lab, as seen through reflections—and distorted reflections.

It is a space that seeks to bring together all of these reflections not through predefined categories, but by being with what is seen from the outside and what is experienced from within. The project is also an invitation to anyone who is willing to look at this mirror and confront the most violent and ugly facets of Western imperialism, offering room for attempts and mistakes to be made in the effort to break free from its grip.

Guiding Rehearsal Mirrors’ ethical compass is a vision of decolonialism that seeks to dismantle colonial structures without destroying the lives of the people involved.

Its ways of working include being present and honest while refusing the instinct of flight, fight or freeze, incorporating techniques of perspective change such as the cut up and deep listening.

Rehearsal IV

Boycottable

Following the first response to the project I was overwhelmed with fear, guilt, shame and anger. I was asked to respond to the concerns and questions. I felt that those who followed PACBI guidelines wanted to understand if they should boycott me or my project. I did not have answers. Under the current conditions, is it possible not to replicate the violent power dynamics happening outside? To what extent am I complicit in what is being done? Can anyone truly be free of complicity in the atrocities committed in the place where they were born? Should I boycott myself as advised?

Rehearsal V

Embracing Chaos

I have started writing. I wrote down my conflicting thoughts—my emotions, concerns, histories, and desires. When we all gathered in Zurich, I shared the letter with the group. At that moment, I felt like I had become human again. At the end of the letter I shared some instructions:

1. Take a pair of scissors and randomly cut the paper.
2. Put all the cut pieces in front of you and start playing with them until something happens.
3. Has something new surfaced? Did a thought emerge that hadn't appeared when you first heard the text as a whole?
4. Continue to dissect, this time with a more deliberate approach, extracting parts that intrigue you. You're allowed to choose the scale that suits you. Is it a sentence? Is it a word? I give you the permission to put my words out of context.
5. Create new connections. Compose a poem, a sentence, or play visually with the words on a piece of paper. Add your own words. Introduce a voice that was absent before. Add your subjectivity.
6. I would love to learn from the voice you add. When the text is ready, you can choose whether to read it in your own voice, ask me (Maya) to read it in mine, or keep it to yourself.

I invite you to follow these instructions as well.

I am full of blind spots. Even when I try, I cannot fully open my eyes to everything I fail to see. Most of the time, I can only acknowledge the blurry areas, accept the chaos, and strive to be better. As a Jewish Israeli, I was born into belief systems—various fictions—that have led me to this point. I am taking steps toward reorganizing myself, shaping a subjectivity rooted in a reality where my freedom does not come at the expense of someone else’s.

I still believe that encounters, conversations, and heterogeneous spaces can help shape such a world. That it’s not an easy path. There are many mistakes along the way. Expecting, in advance, to determine whether the person in front of you shares your worldview as a prerequisite for entering into dialogue—especially when you, too, are shaped by the fictions of modernity and imperialism—assuming a stable perspective, a godlike, all-knowing vantage point of the world, holding exclusive knowledge of what is right, what is wrong, and the path to repair, I believe that it is an illusion, another residue of Enlightenment thinking, assuming a singular forward movement—even when that movement is towards dismantling systems of power.

I have learned that when pain and blood make it too overwhelming to see clearly or to act, it is necessary to shift your gaze to the side, to learn from those who have succeeded in other histories to create spaces, where relationships are not bound to essentialist domination structures but are formed otherwise. This marked the beginning of a journey of learning how to engage with marginalized cultures and epistemologies to dismantle imperialist frameworks without reenacting the very violence I seek to undo.

Rehearsal V

Cut-Up

The cut-up technique involves slicing up existing texts and rearranging the fragments to create new meanings. Its origins trace back to the Dada movement, which emerged during World War I as a response to the chaos and destruction caused by the war. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, the technique was further developed and popularized by the writer William S. Burroughs and others as a way to dismantle control systems.

Cut-ups remind me of the limitations of my ability to think outside existing regimes or doctrines, outside of Zionism, and it’s an attempt both to acknowledge that and to break free from it. It is a form of embracing chaos.

Question for the next lab

If chaos isn’t embraced, what happens to it?

What have you learned about chaos from water and the life within it?