Dalia Maini ~ I pass it to you, you pass it to me
Dalia Maini's "I pass it to you, you pass it to me" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 4, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Dalia Maini's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
I pass it to you, you pass it to me
Dalia Maini's question: Will you share it?
Dalia's introduction: To plot is to complot—I can’t tell you what to expect, because every time we are together is messy. Every time we are together we learn to gather emotions to organize language, to bridge the gap between the introvert and the extrovert child nested in our body. We organize so Power cannot tell us how to do so, so Power cannot confuse us with the promise of clarity, so Power cannot block our protest project of deviation, love, and incarnation. We do not need to ask for permission when the language is a mark on the flesh and out loud we overflow. Our mission is to speak to our intimate enemies about forgiveness and compensation, revelation and rebellion. Be our witness, be our accomplice, be our emissary, while we create a story of multiple incompleteness. I pass it to you, you pass it to me is a written-and-spoken word reverberance of encounters between not-yet accomplices.
Bethany's report: The performance begins with a single performer seated on a stool at the center of the stage. They are surrounded by an array of objects, items that gradually reveal themselves to be remnants from previous performances by their fellow students. A wheelbarrow, a flute, a small oyster purse, a radio, and other artifacts encircle the performer, forming a tapestry of past narratives and shared experiences.
The performer reads aloud from a text, a declaration that resonates with purpose and defiance:
"We used to put an intention into living so that our memories would keep teaching us of the mysteries and delights of being so that nobody could appropriate and deform what was meaningful to us.”
As they speak, the performer’s words weave a collective call to action, challenging the promises of clarity and the constraints of power. They describe a process of organizing beyond permission, where language becomes embodied—a mark on the flesh, spilling over into the shared space. The atmosphere is charged with the weight of the objects around them, each carrying the echoes of their student comrades, their experiences and their voices. The performer invites the audience into this communal world, asking them to bear witness, to become accomplices and emissaries in this shared act of storytelling.
"Whom am I speaking to? Who are my witnesses? Who are my accomplices?”
The performance unfolds as a reflection on collective memory, the intertwining of individual and shared histories, the porous boundaries of bodies in space. Each word, each gesture, reverberates with encounters yet to come, creating a space where the unfinished and the incomplete are celebrated as sites of possibility.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia began her response by expressing how deeply meaningful the work was to her, remarking on its freshness and immediacy. She noted that the piece seemed to be written recently, perhaps even on the train to the event, giving it a raw and branded quality. She described it as a fragmentary synthesis, something that had been accumulating within the performer for a long time and now was shared in this space.
She highlighted specific lines from the text that stood out to her, such as “Our words were dangerous with kindness,” and reflected on their power. For her, these lines encapsulated the essence of the work—its ability to balance intimacy and political urgency. Antonia observed that the piece carried a sense of Promethean defiance, drawing a connection to the myth of Prometheus who brought fire to humanity. However, she noted that the work also explored the fear and unease of being unprepared for the challenges of the future, particularly the wars and hegemonies that continue to shape our present.
Antonia identified a deep political anger within the work, which she found to be one of the most intimate and political pieces she had encountered. She saw it as a response to the normalized hegemonies of our time, a reflection of the performer’s personal suffering in the face of systemic power structures. She drew connections between the piece and broader political movements, such as the Occupy movement, and its engagement with prefigurative politics—the politics of envisioning and practicing alternative futures. Antonia referenced thinkers like Jodi Dean and David Graeber, noting their debates on the failures and successes of movements like Occupy. She argued that while some may see these movements as failures, they did, in fact, succeed in creating new forms of political imagination and possibility.
She then shifted her focus to the role of love in revolutionary processes. Antonia reflected on how love, often romanticized in revolutionary discourse, is also a form of labor—specifically, reproductive labor that sustains and supports revolutions. She emphasized the importance of acknowledging the unseen labor of women, children, and support systems that uphold revolutionary movements. Drawing from feminist Marxist traditions, she argued that love is both a powerful force and a site of exploitation, and that this duality needs to be given more stage presence in revolutionary narratives.
Antonia returned to the idea of tools, referencing Audre Lorde’s famous statement about the master’s tools. She argued that feminists have never been precious about their tools and have consistently used whatever means necessary to sustain revolutionary processes. She also noted the importance of recognizing that there is no singular revolutionary subject or center; rather, the core is empty, and we must move beyond leftist melancholia to embrace this emptiness as a generative space.
Concluding her response, Antonia touched on the ecological and familial aspects of revolution, inspired by the Promethean theme and her recent encounter with mud. She recounted a little-known story of Karl Marx in his later years, revisiting earlier writings and turning his attention to agriculture, the earth, and the structure of the family outside capitalist paradigms. She saw this return to the mud and the earth as a potential seed for revolutionary rebirth. For Antonia, the work invited its audience to think deeply about these intersections—love, labor, ecology, and revolution—and to seek new forms of being and belonging in the mud of our shared struggles.
Inti Guerrero: Inti began his response by sharing how he interpreted the work as a series of love letters to colleagues, noting the deeply philosophical and poetic nature of the piece. He reflected on the repeated use of affectionate openings, such as "Sweetness" and "Cherie," which imbued the text with a sense of care and connection. For Inti, this lent the work an intimacy that felt both personal and expansive, like an archaeological site preserving the remnants of past works and performances they had witnessed together.
He described the autonomy of the writing, highlighting its experimental nature as a creative text. While it felt deeply rooted in the site and context of the performance, it also stood alone as a piece of philosophical exploration, weaving language, ideas, and imagery into something both reflective and transformative.. The text, he remarked, carried an open quality that allowed for multiple interpretations and projections, creating a rich space for individual readings.
Inti expanded his reflection by introducing the anthropologist Eric Michaels, whose work explored the relationship between technology and Indigenous communities in Australia. He recounted Michaels’ fieldwork on how Aboriginal communities used television as a tool for preserving language and culture. Inti connected this to Michaels’ later writings as he was dying of AIDS, particularly his reflections on Western constructs of ownership and legacy, such as the making of wills. Michaels had contrasted this with Aboriginal practices, where the belongings of the deceased were burned, and names or images of the dead were avoided to honor cultural beliefs about memory and the afterlife.
Relating this to the performance, Inti considered how the works they had witnessed over the past days—essays, enactments, and rehearsals—could be seen as forms of dying. He suggested that these acts of performative death also gave way to rebirth, offering new possibilities and perspectives. The layering of these “deaths” across the days, culminating in this final work, created an archaeology of shared experiences, imbued with love and loss.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon began by acknowledging the greatness of the text and the performance, emphasizing how it existed among fragments of all the works they had witnessed so far. He shared how people had asked him and others working to make everything happen, "How do you keep going? You’re not robots." His response had been that DAI (the setting for the interventions) is a generative environment. Each intervention doesn’t extract but instead combines and adds, creating a shared flow of energy. This shared energy, he reflected, is what keeps everyone awake and engaged—an experience that is anything but individualistic.
Ramon described how thinking, for him, is a creative exercise, no more laborious than painting or sculpting. It is a process of constant iteration that never truly ends but is fine-tuned over time. He spoke about becoming his own nonjudgmental critic, a practice that keeps him open to the world by allowing his own position to float and land in the context of the moment. For Ramon, truth is never fixed; it is always contextual. This openness, he suggested, allows him to engage deeply with interventions like the one they had just witnessed.
Ramon shared how his inner critic engaged with the text and performance, leading him to reflect on the relationship between rage, anger, and proximity to corporal harm. He posed a critical question: “Why is everyone so damn angry?” Drawing on his own history as a descendant of enslaved people, he traced the lineage of anger from his great-grandmother’s great-grandmother—who lived as an enslaved person—through his grandmother, who lived through segregation, to himself. He noted the tangible reasons for their anger: being whipped, denied water, and segregated. By contrast, he questioned his own abstract anger in the present, where he enjoys material security but still feels the weight of inherited rage.
Returning to the text’s line about the mark on the flesh, Ramon reflected on the idea of permission and ownership, connecting it to historical systems of violence. He referenced Hortense Spillers’ concept of the "hieroglyphics of the flesh," where the scars of slavery became inscriptions of trauma transmitted across generations. He reflected on how anger today might seem like a failure of past generations’ resistance, but he suggested it is actually a sign of the oppressive system’s success. He argued that this historical violence had left them in a collage of transmitted trauma, some of it embodied and some abstract.
Ramon considered how the performance and text illuminated these complexities. What seemed like anger on the surface revealed a deeper inclusion of past, present, and future struggles. He likened the performance to a scream that encompassed the generations, inviting others to participate rather than excluding them. Citing a car advertisement—"lead, follow, or get out of the way"—he proposed that the intervention was an urgent call to action, a demand to engage with the momentum it generated. He concluded by expressing gratitude for the performance and the profound reflection it inspired, acknowledging how it had helped him think through these intricate and deeply personal ideas.
AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 ~ Chameleon Orbit
About Dalia Maini