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26/10/2010
Palestinian artist Valantina Abu Oqsa is working these
days on putting the final touches and completing the
writing of a one-part theatre text that highlights one
round through Israeli interrogation rooms. Valantina has
embarked one year ago on an in-depth research and
studies regarding the question of political prisoners,
particularly women, which she then took a step further
through field research and through interviews that
documented live stories and testimonies of several
liberated women prisoners. During these interviews, the
women spoke about their experiences and about the
experiences of other male and female prisoners, some of
whom remain behind closed bars. Abu Oqsa said: today I
shed light on a very specific angle. I shed light on an
angle that the Palestinian prisoners and prisoners'
movement has gone and continue to go through. Faced with
this tremendous amount of intricate and intertwined
facts, I can only raise my voice, and start to ring the
bells and call for joining me in doing so… No theater
piece, or documentary or series can do the long history
of struggle justice; a struggle with all its details,
its specificities, its success and failures, its
advancement and its retraction, as well as its
repercussions. I wrote this piece so that the voices of
those who still live behind bars and those who are
outside them, yet in a bigger prison for the sake of
freedom. What I wrote in terms of live testimonies to be
presented on theatre remains a drop in the sea.
Valantina adds: through my constant search and me
endless research, I invest the efforts I made throughout
a whole year and translate it into artistic projects
that reveal and document a reality that is very
difficult on the one hand, yet very defiant and
resistant on the other. Through my work I can start
translating it on the stage."
It is
worth mentioning, that the work that Abu Oqsa is
completing now was based on live testimonies. The artist
has added her own style and imprint on the work where
she brings the women prisoner facing the interrogator on
the stage, addressing the concepts, implications, and
dimensions of a very critical and crucial stage of the
detention and arrest experience. The text will be
reviewed and revised in the beginning of November |