Roll, Jordan, Roll (performance)

Roll, Jordan, Roll (performance) Tintera, Cairo, and Agit, Berlin, 2025

Before Balfour, before Herzl, the Jordan River was a site of Christian devotion, baptism, and immersion, its banks farmed by Palestinians. At the turn of the twentieth century, British surveyors and Zionist settlement planners mapped the valley for irrigation and colonization, and cameras followed them into the field. Stereographs, twin images fused into one three-dimensional illusion, offered distant audiences a painless possession of the river and its land. For the performance Roll, Jordan, Roll, I wrote a script reading against an archive of Jordan River photographs and colonial-era writing.

Onstage, two readers sat side by side, performing it: one voice did a close reading of a 1913 stereograph of women pilgrims wading through the Jordan's mud toward the baptismal site, the work of the American Colony's Matson Photo Service, which began as a Christian settlement and later photographed Zionist infrastructure including the Naharayim dam; the other carried Herzl's 1902 description of Palestine as empty before Jewish settlement, reworked lines from Yehoshua's "Facing the Forests," and poems from my artist publication Blue-Black Liver: "A Funeral at the Edge of Drought," "Deluge," and "A Practical Guide to Caring for Your Dust."

For one ritual instruction on burning St. John's Wort, the two voices merged into one, the readers themselves becoming a stereograph, fusing two exposures of the river into a single dissonant image. Slides of the photographs, and of a 1971 counter-image from the Palestinian Museum's archive showing a teacher and students swimming at Ein Sultan spring, played throughout, alongside excerpts from songs that mention the Jordan River, among them the African-American spiritual "Wade in the Water" and Fairouz's "Zahrat Al-Mada'en" ("Flower of the Cities"), while printed copies of Blue-Black Liver served as props. The reading set the river's two histories side by side, unresolved: pilgrimage and baptism against minefields, military zones, and water diverted since 1964 by Israel's National Water Carrier from a valley once called Jordan's food basket, its only Palestinian crossing now a single checkpoint bridge.

Performed in Arabic at Tintera, Cairo, with a reading by translator and writer Mohammed Al Dakhakhny and a conversation with curator Farida Youssef, and in English at Agit, Berlin, with curator Lama el Khatib as the second reader, co-organized with Hopscotch. Both performances, in June 2025, extended the public program of my exhibition Blue Black at Künstlerhaus Bethanien beyond the exhibition space itself. Photos by Omnia Sabry, Amira Ahmed, Zain Khalifa, and Julia Fabricius.