Dr Farah Saleh
Postdoctoral Fellow, September - December 2023
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dance artist and scholar active in Palestine, Europe and the US. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. Since 2010 she took part in local and international projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/Christophersen (Norway) and Candoco Dance Company (UK). She has also been teaching dance, organisingand curating artistic projects. In 2016 she co-founded and ran Sareyyet Ramallah Summer Dance School for four years. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) organised by A.M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 she won the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. Between 2017-2021 she was an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh and in 2023 she earned her practice-based PhD from Edinburgh College of Art.
Project title: Embodied Decolonial Practices at the University
This practice-based research builds on my PhD research The Archive of Gestures at Edinburgh College of Art, through which I unearthed gestures and alternative Palestinian narratives left out of the Israeli colonial accounts. In my PhD, I dealt with the body as the main form and source of the embodied decolonial archives I have constructed through live performances. Building on this work, in my postdoctoral research I will take my explorations to a new direction, investigating various levels of decolonisation through bodily archival practices. Firstly, I will engage with students at the University of Edinburgh who identify as colonised subjects, initiating a practice of return to oneself and one’s own gestures through conversations, workshops and actions that focus on decolonial embodied processes of self-discovery. This practice of return is aimed at connecting hidden past narratives with present university life and contributing to the shaping of future decolonised imaginaries at the university. Secondly, in collaboration with the students, I will engage with the university archives and monuments of colonial/slavery significance, exploring participatory and creative ways of responding to the archives ongoing presence at the university, by transforming, transfiguring and deforming them. Thirdly, I will share the reappropriated hidden narratives and response to the university colonial archives with an audience through participatory artistic interventions. Audience members will be asked to join the process of decolonisation, by reconnecting with their own gestures and embodied knowledge through participatory actions, delinking from Eurocentric mind-centered practices of knowledge creation and dissemination.