Latifa Laâbissi at Center for Performance Research

Self Portrait Camouflage: the paradox of the title is a double-edged strategic verb: at once revealing and covering up, like two halves of the same movement, capturing an impossible image – which has already been caught in other histories, other speeches, other performances. How do we see the difference? And how do we expose the creative framework which brought it onstage? Using this figure, accompanied by a crowd of others, Latifa Laâbissi shows and dismantles the very fabric of politics – its social, sexual and cultural borderlines. She draws up a chart including a flag, a face, a voice – a portrait of otherness in which the camouflage is used as a kind of decoding maneuver. We see a line of symbols taken from troubled waters, passed through a filtering of perversion, subversion, laughter and grimace. There are the murmurs of voices, from a time where the humming of a song threatened. Voices of the mute, the silenced, the patronized, the pointed-at-with-fingers.