DAI invited Giulia Crispiani to contribute to our “Meditations” on the occasion of the Roaming Assembly#32 ~ Ever Given which took place on 26 March, 2025 in Nicosia, Cyprus.

No Past Tense: Evidence of Solidarity

What is a space of solidarity? What sort of lucubrations are worth our attention—such blatantly violent times hold our breath, in the sense that they keep it, that we are not really left to control it amidst the waves of fear and frustration; our collective stance can demand to get its breath back, in sighs, howls of joy, and chants. And if History is filed, full of holes and partings, our bodies stand as evidence, there to mend and remember. 

[As I attempt to walk back the memory of the event, of what has been shown and said, I realize I could not even take notes for I was drawn too deep into the formulations, into the movements, into the gasps and the details to note it all down—somehow I felt that could distract me.]

It is said we are invited into a space of friendship, in different scales, from the archipelago to the sand grains. I don’t know what could be more constituent of the collectivity that has shaped, it feels one hand reached out to another, the latter to another, and so on and so forth. Some of the hands were already tied, so the gathering hosted friends among friends in groups that did not know each other yet. 

I wonder now whether I shall start from the beginning or from the end—as I remember the image that inspired the title of the assembly but also the gasping that wrapped it up. As if the pretext to trigger the questions and matters may linger until and beyond our last breath, beneath and within each of our vocalizations—“when ‘mere’ strong winds resulted in a giant container ship named the Ever Given blocking the (Suez) canal and causing a global trade disruption.” What can be the scale of this disruption, how do we (re)organize while we hold tight to our breath, and to each other’s hands?

To imitate some form of retrieval, I might proceed backwards, to start from the gasping, as a way to give priority to what happens in our chest as we feel it fail and escape us, in the grip of violence, genocide, destruction, oppression, fascism, censorship, deportation, exploitation, erasure and silence in the face of this all. For the last intervention of the day, Haig and Noor [Aivazian & Abed] become occupied with breathing, both as a record of what they have seen and felt, and a means of reproducing affect. The detailing is very generous, the vocal training is invested in delivering all of these details, images and feelings—freedom and fear in the same image, anguish and steadfastness, grievance and friendship all come down to presence. What does it mean to be present, to exercise our diaphragm, to feel for a moment a bullet that goes through a body, the vibration of the cat’s purr, a glass window shatters in an explosion, a motorbike riding in the South of Lebanon without fearing the bombs, the last gasps, the martyrs, the evidence. I try to keep a hold of the particulars, they all come from their throat to our bodies, as vivid descriptions. If I concentrate I can still sense them. I return to ask what is solidarity, if not the synchronization of our breath? 

When confronted with erasure, solidarity can extend to other-than-human agencies, such as trees and ruins; when a site has been torn down and memories demolished, leftover landmarks can be useful to reconstruct back the relationship between the land and her people. Even if they have been forcibly separated, a tree or a stone can help someone who has returned to orient themselves and retrieve memories from before the catastrophe, be it genocide or earthquake, where the indigenous population has been left alone in dealing with the aftermath or forced to leave. Yael [Navaro] walks us through “sites of mass political violence,” searching for the cues that prove the bond between land and people can’t be severed that easily, and crimes will neither be forgotten nor disappear beneath a new settlement. What is solidarity, if not the memory that is rooted in (that is, insists on and belongs to) the soil? 

Despite how we were told that the body is also a site of memory, and Stavros’ stage was prepared by Ilaeira’s research, we weren’t prepared for Stavros [Karayanni] taking the stage. The memory that runs through Stavros body is of the collective kind, in belly dance it affirms itself through time, and collects the residues of a geographical space. We (the audience) join the joyful irresistible experience of radiance; for a moment time has collapsed in a celebration of porosity. A locality that inhabits a body can travel with it, and can be offered to others, exported if we might, in all its enthusiasm—“exuberance,” to use Stavros’ term. There is a contagion of sorts, if freedom is the currency that is being transmitted, we join the dance, although not all our bodies are fit, we are present and engaged—even if we simply guard the dancefloor, or keep the tempo with our claps. Isn’t this per se solidarity?

It is through bodies that solidarity builds memory, by physical means of archival material of movements, and traces of the way solidarity moves across borders and seas. What shapes can it take to be distributed and reproduced, and how can personal stories and struggles sustain a whole momentum through time and geographies? Solidarity has eyes, muscles and limbs, it is embodied by selfless selves whose lives are invested in fighting oppressive systems. Ali and Haytham [Hussein Al-Adawy & el-Wardany] present a phase of research that is all about transnational solidarity, decolonization and liberation movements through four characters (Youssef El Sebai, Ghalib Halasa, Arwa Saleh, and Leila Khaled) in four different cities (Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, and Tunis), and I think it is worth repeating their question, so as to carry it forward: “How did the Left's political and cultural-artistic project shift from an internationalist liberation project to just symbolic gestures within a globalized political economy of solidarity?” As a placeholder for today’s solidarity, if our future was yesterday, who will we be tomorrow, and what are we doing today? 

With Ilaeira [Leto Agrotou Georgiou] we anticipate (or return to) Yael and Stavros, in an almost forensic report on the trajectory of Cypriot traditional dance, in the way separation (and erasure) has been forced upon bodies and movement, whilst nationalistic fictional taxonomy is set in motion to substitute entanglements, contaminations, and currents with straight lines, borders, and rules. Intergenerational solidarity then means to descend the spiral of time to witness what bodies could carry and do, in the ways they would move all together choreographically, what kind of knowledge was held therein and how it moved down the line across genders, influences, grammars, and rhythms. Again, after erasure, the evidence is in the direction of the gaze, in the pace of the beat, and the insistence of each step on the land—arms tied on each other’s shoulders, in continuity with land and sea, against any imposed representation, code or standard.

If solidarity moves through bodies and time, what are the implications of today’s struggles? Again solidarity is called to manifest across regions; the fights are diverse but all strongly intertwined. Natascha [Sadr Haghighian] holds up a mirror, takes us to Europe, Germany, Berlin—and to us practitioners in a (art) world where business as usual must go on at all costs. Could there be more meaningful practices and strategies, beyond symbolic gestures (to anticipate and return to Ali and Haytham)—the political that is at once beyond and intrinsic to the personal. Again, separation is usually imposed by oppressive power structures and infrastructure. Natascha thinks of friends and with friends, of their work and collective intelligence, to find inspiration in how to bear, stand, and insist on breaking the spell. Here the body multiplies, expands beyond the self, the selfless selves forcibly enter history from the right side, and contagion happens via hope; enthusiasm is in the sense of pride to see others fight on behalf of us all. 

Oraib [Toukan] carves a poem in stones to be used to fight the empire. I noted it live and copy it here unedited:

Throw stones at tanks as well
Clinging to life, run for it
staying put and holding ground onto 
and through love 
The dissemination of a still
What after and before 
we have left but stones
Massive disproportionate
Unseen
in its own soil suddenly visible
Destruction 
Destruction 
Destruction 
in each frame a whole world rises
Eastern Mediterranean from now on
Life itself at stake from the maths and methods
converse with deaf hears
Flatten tongues—the word thinks bigger of what can be seen
when dry soil moves if the wind blows
To walk on a terrain that is disappearing 
being grounded by the support of ground 
Settlements resembling each other nostalgically 
From home 
one with the soil
Emerged from the rocks sang songs
the issue in the image 
Palestine as spirit 
One with the soil

In solidarity, Peter and Stelios are friends who have convened friends and comrades to mend hypotheses of solidarity together; to show that when we speak of disruption, there’s no past tense.

About the author 

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