In his new performance, Marouf draws on texts that write history from the perspective of the oppressed and the defeated. The performance brings toether Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) and Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn (1996). Benjamin’s "Angel of History" gazes at the wreckage of the past while the "storm we call progress" propels him backward into the future. Salih writes about the aftermath of the Egyptian Marxist student movement of 1972, examining the disillusionment of a revolutionary generation and the contradictions that continued to haunt them. Neither Benjamin nor Salih views history as a smooth narrative of progress; instead, they turn their attention to its failures, losses, and unrealized possibilities.
In Losers, loss is understood not merely as an end, but as a question regarding what failed, what was repressed, and what might still be possible. Thinking from the position of the losers is less about finding concrete answers than about asking how defeat can be reimagined as a space for reflection and community.
Previously announced under the title Athar; the title was subsequently changed.
In English and Arabic.
More information here.