I consider myself an interdisciplinary poet, working with language in performance, installation, and video projects, often in site-specific ways in art and public spaces, sometimes using social practice and other relational methods. For more than a decade, I've returned to themes of nature, modernity, identity, and belonging through the site of the Great Lakes region. As a child immigrant from Egypt to the Midwest who’s lived on both sides of the border, issues of place, home, and otherness have been deep preoccupations for me. My work takes up the concept of the non-human living word both as an intimate axis for identity like race or gender, yet also as a "supreme other" for which we're always reaching and projecting onto. It takes up in critical and creative ways the nature/culture dichotomy and the tensions of environmentalism and identity politics in shaping contemporary life. The Great Lakes are an unparalleled site for exploring the above as hyper-industrialized yet sublimely wild; brutally colonized but incredibly diverse; the world’s largest watershed, and also borderland. My projects engage these issues through an insider-outsider experience, shared by many around the region and beyond.
This is a performance art project, and an existential one. A deculturization project; a naturalization project beyond nation-state terms. This is symbolic, speculative, sublime (scientific sense).
I will go to Rabbit Island and return as the artist formerly known as Arab American. I desire to shed this troubled identity on behalf of all who find race, if reclamatory and celebratory, also limiting and poor. It’s too much all these years, tossed between spectral ends of mass prejudice and peer pressure, vigilance and burden. We need an out. Both raced bodies and a post-racial world are problematic—let me guinea-pig the latter, settle new space in-between.
Through daily protocols of embodiment, poetry, audio and video, and other site-specific methods, I aspire to re-orient to the trans-human living sphere. To cease being marginal, foreign species, transplant, and become an American; or no, a North American; no—GREAT-LAKESAN—a whole bioregional being, non-native yet non-invasive non-taxonomized member of a heterogeneous place-based community.
Somewhere between Donna Haraway’s cyborg ecofeminism, Joseph Beuy’s performance I Like America and America Likes Me, and the fathoming pangs of Egyptian singer Umm Kalthum, I will make brief life and art shucking this body and inhabiting the creaturely. I don’t know what I’ll become; I know what I seek to transcend. I feel others like and unlike me will find the process equally illuminating, challenging, liberating, impossible.
