Artists in residence

Naya Abrin is a performer and director born in Guadeloupe in the city of Pointe-à-Pitre, and more precisely in the Boissard neighborhood. Since 2015, his practice has been rooted in performance and installation. Since 2020, he started focusing on a documentary project with his first short film Dyab ka mayé fi’ay dèyè légliz, shot in Guadeloupe on the sidelines of municipal elections. This project deals with the evocative image of childhood and politics as a backdrop to island phenomena. It summons a contemplative imagery that intertwines with the breathless and frenetic movement of testimony, carnival procession and local political claim.

Naya Abrin’s residency project, Bigidi pa ka tombé means “to be off balance without ever really falling” in Creole. The collaboration with performer and dancer Patricia Badin is one of the main components of this project which is dedicated to taking advantage of the Cité internationale des arts as a privileged place for collective research based on bodily practices and theoretical questioning.

Through Afro-descendant dances such as twerk and Gwo Ka, this collaboration will generate performances and spaces of reflection around decolonialism and cultural appropriation. This project shows Afro-descendants’ and Afro-Caribbean people’s state of resistance towards the traumatic effects of post-colonialism. It contributes to highlighting racialized bodies dancing, working on the fall as a form of expression that can give rise to empathetic reflexes. These reflexes could allow the spectator to apprehend the systemic violence that is often invisibilized.

Naya Abrin is planning then to write a documentary on spontaneous housing and the evolution of precarious areas in Guadeloupe. This project will highlight the memory of populations from precarious neighborhoods, caught in the disappearance of this resilient territory which was painfully cleaned up since the building of the colonial suburb until today.

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan is an artist, musician and recording engineer living in Beirut, Lebanon. His visual work takes the form of publications and print/drawing installations in which he uses found images and texts alongside his own writings and drawings to examine the strange ways that historical narrative is constructed.
His book A Life Like Mine, That’s Impossible was published by Samandal Comics in 2021.

His sound recordings and live performances are mainly focused on the use of drums, metal objects, bells, and cymbals augmented and amplified with surface transducers, microphones, pitch and modulation effects, cheap looping megaphones and other lo-tech electronics. He has also worked on sound design and music for performance and film.