Sea of Stories

“The water is made up of a thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity. These are the streams of story (…) and because stories are held here in a fluid form, they retain their ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join us with other stories, and so become yet other stories. Unlike a library of books, it is not dead but alive” – Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Lina Issa and I facilitated work sessions with different groups of participants that all have their own personal relationship with the sea. The participants become co-authors, and the stories are bound together to create a ‘shared’ narrative, without losing the individual strands, and without becoming rigid.

The output in the form of this interactive installation is the start of an open and ever-expanding living archive, at which the audience is invited to ‘perform this archive’, to receive, add to and then tell the stories Are we able to overcome our fear of the other and the illusion of a fixed identity? In the artistic research The Atlantis Project, artists Lina Issa and Mayar Alexan use the sea, literally and figuratively, as a metaphor and source of inspiration to look at the different ‘currents’ of people, identities and stories in our society.

This project is produced and presented at the Dancing on the edge festival 2017.

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Photos: Giath Taha

Dancing on the edge 2017

stills of the working session

stills of the installation hosted by Soula Notos in Podium Mozaiek in Amsterdam, Het Huis in Utrecht, Korzo in Den Haag, and the Schouwburg in Rotterdam.