Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 1:00 pm – Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 3:00 pm
The Vein, the Fingerprint Machine and the Automatic Speed Regulator
Catherine Charrett: A Politics in Drag Performance
Date: Wednesday 23rd January 2018
Time: 1pm – 3pm
Location: Geoffrey Manton, GM302
Tickets: Free – available on Eventbrite: catherine-charrett-the-vein.eventbrite.com
Catherine Charrett (Queen Mary University of London)
Early Career Research Fellow, Independent Social Research Foundation
c.charrett@qmul.ac.uk
What does it mean to call a weapon sophisticated, advanced and precise? This performance takes on the spectacle of technology and its role in the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. Helga Tawil-Souri describes technology as a “mechanism by which we learn to internalise values, beliefs and norms of (our) culture and as a material device in which are encoded the dominant beliefs and norms of society.” Technologies can act as reflections of the societies that develop and use them. They hold myths about national identities and encoded messages about hierarchies. But what if these technologies could talk? What if they could unveil their myths to you, share their secrets, and explain their encoded messages? What if they could reveal the distortion of intelligence embedded within them, the destruction of trust and community they promote and the melancholy and sadness behind their design? Would we still call them sophisticated?
By tracing the technologies that shape Europe’s involvement with the occupation of Palestine this performance tells a story of the global colonial structures that maintain the oppression of the Palestinian. This project is based on the performer’s ethnographic observations of the technologies of Occupation, as well as interviews with Israeli start-up firms who imagine the future through their technologies and interviews with Palestinian police who try to manoeuvre around the limitations imposed by these technologies. It presents weapons fairs in Europe and in Israel where new technologies are put on display and passed around. It discusses the restrictions Israel imposes on the equipment and movement of European police working in the West Bank. Technologies act as windows into the inconsistencies, but also trends that compose this international order of occupation.
Timothy Mitchell’s writings on the colonial exhibition reveal the coloniser’s attraction to its own spectacle of security. ‘Life as exhibition,’ he explains favours structure over reality, appearance over essence. This performance interrogates how Israel’s technologies of occupation reflect a plan that misses an essence of life and movement. From the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, to the segregation wall, to the provision of 3g in the West Bank, to the permit system imposed on Palestinian police, this performance tackles what it may mean to be the reality that circumnavigates a colonial spectacle of order.
This 60-minute performance uses the techniques of drag, melancholia and satire to directly challenge the structures that idealise technologies of war and segregation. By speaking from the position of the object and embodying its design, its circulation and its intervention into life this performance aims to dislocate the appearance of order that permits the waging and witnessing of the continued violence against the Palestinian.
Part of the Politics, International Relations and Public Services Research Seminar Series at Manchester Met. The Politics, International Relations and Public Services Research Seminar Series is a unique, cross-disciplinary seminar series that was launched in 2017 to bring together scholars working across several research centres whose work focuses on political questions. The series brings together scholars from the History Research Centre, the Centre for Creative Writing, English Literature and Linguistics, and the Research Centre for Applied Social Sciences. We are supported by the Politics, International Relations and Public Services section, and our members also have connections to the Critical Theory Network, Gothic Research Cluster and the Religious and Intellectual History Cluster. The series aims to bring together scholars from around the UK and Manchester Metropolitan to explore political research with a strong emphasis on knowledge exchange. We welcome the public, students, practitioners and researchers to attend, with a view to showcasing the variety of world-leading Politics, IR and Public Services research at Manchester Metropolitan University.