They told us to wear masqs

30 minutes, collaborative multimedia performance

Set in the aftermath of a catastrophic apocalypse, two figures emerge from hiding and engage in a series of complex rituals in order to heal their bodies and revitalise their memories. The second performance within The Alif Series, They Told us to Wear Masqs was a starting point in a series of experiments that set the stage for much of how the rest of the series would unfold, including the use of various trans-religious traditions and beliefs in the afterlife, resurrection, witchcraft and most importantly futurist visions across cultural imaginaries.

Videos in this performance, much like in Alif is For Awakening serve as memory and dreamscapes, placing these two lonely characters within their context, a world which may or may not be our own and a time which may exist in the future or in another parallel dimension, while poetry serves as a form of surreal storytelling, narrating a series of events in no particular order.

An excerpt below:

As the earth crumbled, we realised it was our own doing.

Our revolution caused a complete shift in the planetary order .

Fighters, comrades, allies and friends who carried weapons in full bloom, sewed the seeds of the future and carried the burdens of our histories with them,

Boarding spaceships bedazzled in green fairy lights powered by the now liberated Ka’abah

and bodies built from minarets, ziggurats and temple spires.

Those of us that stayed behind needed a way to gestate.

Our enemies were still powerful and our world, dangerous.

We retreated into caves to build back our power.

They say, if you weep with genuine pain at a cave’s entrance, even the dead will come back to life.

The caves became wombs, the wombs of Kali and Durga, the rahm where we slept,

Cocooning ourselves in a war embrace of bat droppings, dust, nuclear fall our gas, static airwaves and failed internet wifi connection.

Then it was our time, for our re-emergence, our rebirth into an unknown world of our own creation.

Words by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as Faluda Islam