This Whole New World

This Whole New World

by marwa arsanios

OLGA’s Notes

© 2015 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

When I start writing the script, I have to face the blank page, I have to face the limits
of my courage. To doubt, to scribble, to hesitate, to close the computer, to open it again,
to take a piece of paper, to draw. The breaks of not writing the script, the resistances
not to write the script will follow me until I finish the script. I have it in my hands, le
same hand with which I typed it in, erased, édité, selected. The hand that consists of
five fingers, each consisting of three phalanges that make typing possible and that
make those thoughts buried in my head confront the blankness of the page. The desire
to write often triggered by an accumulation of reading and driven by a projected
image into a room full of people sitting and listening, hopefully most of the time. Ce
very projection drives the text to be written as if told, as if talking. The silences in the
writing process are often cut out. Sometimes you sit for hours and your head is in a
complete silence, you cannot write. You cannot do the typing, although your fingers are
moving, or can potentially move. Those blank, silent moments are often edited out of
the final script.

“The page is surveilled by government, famille, society.”

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In this library there are books that were said to be important for the learning pro-
cess of the reader. These were all recommended books in the Al Hilal magazine from
1950–60. What should we read? What were they reading? What should be read?
This is only a sample of what they were advised to read. I only found 30 related books
from a list of 220 ou plus.
I went through the collection and drafted a list. A list of books, a list of words, a list of
authors, etc.. . . . “List” is the librarian’s favorite word. “List,” or “listo,” means “ready”
dans . . . I don’t remember which language (Spanish). Ready to learn, ready to serve, ready
to follow, ready to leave, ready to enroll, ready to . . . “List” and “ready” have military
undertones. Lists come with numbers 1 2 3 4. . . . Counting and accountability. Quand
you have gone through all the books on the list, that means that you will be ready. You
will be counted as an educated subject who can talk about his knowledge with other
educated subjects who were also following the advice of the magazine. “The educated
bourgeoisie.” Ready to read. Readiness is a state of the body. In the army you should
always be ready, ready to bow.
If we think that publishing was nationalized under Nasser, then we could also think of
the promotion of certain books as the state propaganda of knowledge. But it is never a
one-way promotion. At least we can often question the supremacy of state control over
publishing and propaganda, the diffusion of a certain knowledge over another.
In his book
talks about the nationalization of publishing as the moment that turned writers and
translators into lifelong state employees, bored with their jobs, but controlling the con-
tent of all publications. The writers that were against the regime were fired.

Why Are the Arabs Not Free? The Politics of Writing

, Moustapha Safouan

So perhaps in this library there is a consent or complicity with a literature promoted
by the state-controlled publishing houses. But not only . . . J'espère. If hope is a quality,
then I could still cling to hope. When I am flying, I always cling to hope to arrive at my
destination. I never say I will arrive but I always hope to arrive, to land. In hope there
is always a sense of precaution. There is also superstition, and superstition comes out
very strongly when I am about to fly. There is still this incongruous feeling in flying. Dans
fact, most of the passengers are in a state of hope; even if you are used to flying very
souvent, there is still a tense existential nervousness in the machine that is countered by a
feeling of hope, or that feeds a feeling of hope, fear and hope in flying.
When the rocket was about to take off, Olga was the only confident one. She was
shouting from joy. The liberation from this prison called earth is about to come. Le
liberation from her own body that is lost under all the clothes she had to put on, le
salvation, in a very Christian way, of forgetting her own body. Faith and science become
one and the same in the conquest of flying, getting closer to god and defying him at the
same time.

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The dancer will imitate the astronauts by doing the slow moon dance. She will not fly
but rather imitate a certain slowness and gravity-less walk, gravitating between walk-
ing, flying, and dancing on a borderless stage. In imitating everyday mundane bodies
walking on the streets, the dancer’s body transforms everyday gestures into motion
and form. Imitation is the main key for collecting gestures and movements.
Imitation and dance, or imitating dance, or imitating the dancer herself, or the dancer
imitating the other dancer, imitating the other one. And so on.
Silences in dance are cut by the dancer’s body-sounds. Silences in writing are erased.

We played a video of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, as Sandra said this would be a good
exercise; she had learned it at dance school. It was one of the first dances they learned.
Yvonne Rainer herself had relinquished her authorship of Trio A by announcing that
anyone who had performed it could teach it to anyone else. We followed Yvonne Rainer.
It was hard to follow her intentional hesitation. Right left. We thought she was going
droite, when she turns and goes in the opposite direction, then unexpectedly turns back
again and goes right. It was a game of switching directions. She stumbles as if she will
automne, but she doesn’t; but she will. She stumbles, holds herself and doesn’t fall; but sud-
denly she does. We see her on the floor. In this twist, we followed her back and forth,
back and forth, until we learned the move. We repeated it so many times, we learned
it well and always got stuck on the stumbling. The fall needs a lot of muscles. To let
oneself powerfully fall one needs lots of muscle and strength. Without hesitation we fol-
lowed Yvonne. We stumbled, but were not powerful enough to fall. We skipped the fall.

I hope that publishing was not only about state policy. It is often simplistic to look at
publishing from the 1950s and 60s as censored. Censored to us today? The word

becomes anachronistic in this case. Censored for a subject of the 21st century.
cen-
It wasn’t censored for her. Writers were fired. Hope was the only way out of this state
sorship
control. The astronaut was liberated from this prison called earth. Capital was to con-
quer space.
The process of learning to become a modern nation-state.
The beautiful magazines are on display in the museum.

Learning to dance
Learning to write
Learning to work
Learning to fly

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Learning to dance

“The Most Beautiful Industry in Our Country” is the title of an article that talks about
“If you pass next to an industrial building, don’t think
a dance school.
this is a new metal or car factory! Non! It is a big han-
gar but nothing of what you expect. It is a place where
bodies get trained to dance in a certain manner and
join the national troupe.”

Learning in a factory is a mass learning and producing a mass that has learned. Bod-
ies in masses that have learned to dance ballet to become, or not become, ballerinas.
The article describes the newly built ballet school as “the biggest industry that has
been built in the country,” and continues, “This is not a steel industry, this is a place
that will surprise you. It is an industry of the body, it is a ballet school.” It promotes
the school and the activities happening inside it in the way it would promote a build-
ing development project. Building bodies that could dance in a certain manner. Le
opera house and the ballet school become part of the modernization process of the
nation. But why ballet? Ballet as a tradition coming from industrialized countries.
But also ballet as a tradition that would disrupt the local folkloric and traditional
dances. But why ballet? Ballet as a colonizer, ballet as a decolonizer from traditional
dance.
The national dance school aimed at producing national dancers that would enter
the national troupe and dance on official occasions. These bodies of dancers would
become representatives of the country with its specific borders. Beyond borders,
traveling to give spectacles and performances, the dancers’ bodies freshly coming
out of national industry will have to dance the dance that represents their country
and their people. A specific gesture or a dance movement can be representative of a
country and the people living within specific borders mapped by human hands and
fingers—colonial hands. What do colonial hands look like?
In the same way, the spectators start identifying with the dance group who they
think best represents their country. The ballet school was implemented in 1958 avec
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai
the help of experts from the Bolshoi Ballet. Dans 1966, Lavrosky flew to Cairo to stage
, the first big production. Nasser attended the opening

on December 3, 1966, and awarded Orders of Merit to the lead dancers. One year
plus tard, Lavrosky died. A year after that, the Six Day War was fought. The bodies had
to learn and adapt to this dance. The industrial body had to learn ballet. The body of
the ballerina can fly. It learned to fly. After certain conditioning, it can do the jump-
in-the-air-and-fly.

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If the modern project has given birth to democracy and totalitarianism at the same
temps, then perhaps the dancer’s body was trapped in between those two projects.
But don’t worry, we are not here to save it. Perhaps the dancer will decide to break
away when she rebels against the choreographer. But in any case we are not here to
save her.

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Carita and Natasha were my neighbors. Older than me, they were trained as balleri-
nas but joined the national folkloric dance troupe in the 1980s. The twins. Ils étaient
known as the twins. Born to Greek parents, they moved to Beirut with their mother
after she remarried. Their stepfather owned the building where I lived as a child.
This is what Carita writes next to a photo she posts on Facebook:

“La guerre battait son plein et le temps d’une acalmie nous
prenions la pause sur le balcon de ma chambre, vue par la
photographe Houda”

“The war was in full swing but for the time of a lull we
would take a break on the balcony of my room, seen by the
photographer Houda”

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The pose of the ballerina on her balcony when the fighting paused.

The ballerina with her pointe in a funny fashion comes out and poses. She doesn’t
dance, she poses. She poses the moment the fighting stops. She simulates the act of
being a dancer for a moment on the balcony. She seduces. She is a dancer even if she
is not dancing for the moment, or she had to stop dancing for a while. As soon as the
fighting stops she steps out on her balcony and becomes a dancer again. The body of
the dancer on the balcony means that the fighting has stopped. At least for a while.
The time to take a picture. Twenty years later she can write the comment and post it
on Facebook.
“That moment 20 years ago the fighting stopped for a
bit and I went out on my balcony and posed.”

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Seduction

In this same moment I would go down to her apartment and try on her dancing
clothes and accessories. I would transform into a dancer, by wearing the mask for a
moment, without having to go to the dance school. I would act as if I was a dancer
for a moment, for the moment of the picture.

The body being trained like steel, shaped and formatted to dance in a certain man-
ner. What writes the dancer’s body coming out of the industry?

Dance / as if flying

The ballerina is flying, her body flies over for a second, she thinks she will stay up
in the air, but she has to land again quickly. The ballerina will defy gravity. Elle est
the center of the modernist project in the way she defies the very idea of center
and gravity. She is getting ready for the harim dance. A neo-Orientalist tableau with
ballerinas and a total fantasy of the choreographer and watchers. The harim dance,
where we see Natasha (one of the twins) dancing, defies the modernist project that
was proposed in the magazine, the project of women’s liberation and participation
in the public sphere. The harim dance is what the dancer dreamt of doing most. “It
was the most challenging tableau,” she says. Look at the costumes. She will defy any
project just to do the harim dance.

They say you talk about dance when you want to talk about your own body. Quand
you feel your body is changing or when you just feel like being naked in front of
people and dancing. In front of an audience perhaps. Or take on the street naked. Mais
this is so 1960s, forget about it. Nakedness is not the solution. Naked bodies run-
ning in the fields are not the solution for liberation. Neither is the neo-Orientalist
tableau. And don’t worry, we are not here to free the dancer from the choreographer
or the choreographer from god. Neither are we freeing the naked body from its own
nakedness. What do you mean by this phrase? I mean the nakedness of the body will
never be saved. We will always be shy from our nakedness, we will always blush if
someone sees us naked, unless we are in a nudist camp. After a while, when we were
sitting in the public bath, we started feeling comfortable with our nakedness; notre
bodies were totally comfortable and we started chatting normally until someone
told us to lower our voices. The bodies sitting together in that bath neither were shy
nor sought proximity. They were just bodies next to each other.

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The naked bodies were found floating on the shore.
The boat had sunk around midnight and the blue
bodies were found in the morning.

His body had burnt, they recognized him from his head—it was the only part of his
body that did not blow up. It hung out of the car window. He blew himself up around
midnight.

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Learning to write

“I remember a story about an industrialist in the 19th
siècle . . . he owned a factory in the North of England
and instructed his team of managers that it would be
beneficial to teach the workers he employed to read,
but he strictly forbade that they should learn to write.”

Writing was not a necessary task, but when she left the village to come and work in
an industrial zone in the northern suburbs of the capital, she decided to learn how to
write by herself at home. She started learning by copying the books she was reading
and slowly formed a group of people who would meet every other day in the evening
at her place to teach each other, read for each other, and learn how to write. Son
house became like a schooling place where many of her colleagues gathered to learn.
Learning to write was often associated with the task of writing history and control-
ling historical narratives. A task controlled by a certain class.
“The educated bourgeoisie,” she thought.
The class that controls the educational system.
The same class that controls publishing.
The same class that promoted ballet.
The state supporting class.

On the cover of the magazine, the educated middle class simulates the act of reading
and the act of writing for the photo. As if reading, as if writing. As if history.
When she took the book, he told her to hold it closer to her face as if really looking, comme
if really interested; she moved it closer and posed for the picture. Simulating reading,
simulating curiosity for knowledge, simulating knowledge consumption. The middle
“Revolution itself, that modern idea, represents the
class simulates, for the moment of the photo.
scriptural project at the level of an entire society seek-
ing to constitute itself as a blank page with respect to
the past, to write itself by itself,

The capitalist and conquering task of writing was in-
As if writing, as if revolution.
augurated by the decision to write her diary.

refaire l’histoire

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Learning to work

When a certain position molds your body—whether sitting in a library reading a
document or working in a factory operating a machine—when you figure you have
to sleep as if you are sitting, or you have to stand up as if you are sleeping, this means
your body has been molded to the position of labor. This productive force is nothing
but the molding of your own body that hurts now.
You can see the violence of a project on the body of the people taking part in the
project.
The nightmare of the project can be seen in the building, or in how the building has
become. You see it in the paper, how yellow it is. You see it in the words that are like
ruins. The nightmare of the project is that it has a specific time. And with its violence,
it imposes this time. It imposes its own time. The progress of the project is its very
violence. Or the violence of progress. Of labor of reading of writing. In every act, le
violence comes out imposing the time of the project. The violence of adapting your
body to the seat of the library.
The workers are locked inside / factory burnt /
The body being trained like steel, shaped and formatted to dance in a certain manner.
gates are locked.

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3This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image
This Whole New World image

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