Nothing Will Remain Other Than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of This World
is the title of Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian’s performance, to be presented on 3 October 2026 in Porto, as part of Contemporânea’s Performance Programme. On the occasion of their first presentation in Portugal, we spoke to the artists/performers not only about the performance itself but also about their work together, the ideas they explore, and their views on the crisis of violence to which their countries have been, and continue to be, subjected. Coming from Palestine and Lebanon respectively, Noor and Haig have been exploring themes of light and darkness, death and life, body and territory, sociality and togetherness, all deeply interwoven with the ongoing genocidal and colonising violence that is ravaging their homelands, with no end in sight.
Marta Espiridião (ME): As I have not yet seen Nothing Will Remain Other Than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of This World, which will take place in Porto after this interview is out, could you start by elaborating on the performance? Could you talk a bit about the actions, the symbolism, the sounds, the stories?
Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian (NA+HA): To describe the set-up simply, the piece is an hour-long performance in a darkened room, anchored by a T-shaped light formation on the floor. Each side of the crossbar of the T has a microphone stand, and the bottom of the T has two stands side by side. The audience sits on all sides of the T-shape in close proximity. We move around between them, going back and forth between the three microphones, talking to one another while reading from a script, and emitting various kinds of guttural and nasal sounds.
The performance is structured around five of these sounds, each introducing and sculpting a series of political and affective spaces. Those spaces are composed of various registers, from personal anecdotes to literary and audiovisual references, allusions to pop culture, memes, and songs. The five sounds are first and foremost a meditation on the qualities of sound, on its inherently transitory and uncontainable nature, with a focus on the complex interrelationships between collective bodies and individuals. The text of the performance explores this complexity as a way to reflect and embody how far the reverberations of collective punishment travel beyond the immediate scene of the crime, as well as how broad a coalition to fight genocide necessarily has to be.
The title derives from the words of Wadih Sanbar to his son, the Palestinian diplomat, historian, and poet Elias Sanbar: "No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world's throat. No one will manage to swallow it."
We took this metaphor quite literally, in a way, working from the throat, starting with words, then exhausting them and moving beyond language, laying it bare, teasing its limits at times, and staying within it at others, intensifying its materialisation and its uses in the genocidal present we inhabit. Our throats, noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheas, and lungs are instruments to break down words and vocalisations into their raw physical mechanics, to manifest what it might sound like to have something caught in one’s throat as a way of life, to express what it may be like to live asphyxiated. Each of our instruments introduces a different layer of what it means to inhabit a moment of heightened genocide and is a call for the kinds of practices and cultures we must build to be able to survive and fight erasure.
ME: How and when did your collaboration start? How do you both feel it is imbricated in, and where might it diverge from, your individual practices?
NA+HA: Mophradat paired us together in 2024 for a newly commissioned piece for Read the Room, the festival they organise biennially with and at Kaai Theatre in Brussels—a blind date of some sort, which we both accepted, without knowing or asking for much clarification. We recognised our common interests and artistic overlaps rather quickly, and were both excited and somehow ready to experiment with things that we hadn't necessarily teased out enough in our individual works. The main anchors that were evident from the beginning of our conversations and correspondences were our relation to sound in our individual works, and the necessity to create a collective political imagination through what we do, in its making and sharing, in a manner that moves beyond a representational logic.
We also recognised that our positions in living the catastrophe were similar; and with time, it became clear that we had similar thoughts about the role that culture must play in this moment: that we needed to think and put into practice a culture that enabled us to be together, to be in the moment and to process… not be distracted away from the impossibility of our realities. The ambition remains that this piece offers a thesis for culture and puts it into practice at the same time.
At a time of such an existential scale of systemic erasure of our countries, of our cultures, of our societies, working together and making art in collaboration felt very important—being companions, finding ways to share, finding the energy to stay close, to survive and look for meaning in the quotidian. Our correspondences throughout the process included daily anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs, and recitations. We truly didn't know what shape the work would take until the last couple of weeks before the premiere. It was important to live the process fully, to remain close to the ground and to reality… Even if that meant delays, distractions, inability to work, etc. The act of continuously writing, listening, sharing, and responding to one another, in the heart of catastrophe, shaped the final script and form. When we were able to meet, we looked back and delved into that material to try and give it some kind of form, some kind of space, some kind of arc. It was a process that we were not familiar with or did not necessarily understand at the time, and we are not sure we understand it today.
ME: There is, I think, an interesting and deep relation with darkness and death in your works—and not one that falls into despair or nihilist tropes, but one that allows us to see them as a part of life itself, and especially as an important part of spirituality and the non-material ways we relate to the world. Do you think this performance also speaks to those matters, even if what we witness are bodies, alive and breathing?
NA+HA: Yes, and it suggests a further relation to the underground perhaps, both metaphorically and literally, to darkness and the dead, and, in a sense, to the architecture of resistance—gesturing towards the unseen, the not easily grasped, and the untranslatable in another sense, where darkness becomes a field of hidden relations, a political condition of collective identity and anonymity. There are moments when stepping outside language in the performance meant, for us, becoming akin to stepping underground, or into darkness. It is a form of agency in cultivating forms of opacity—sounds, words, and relations that remain partially inaccessible to power, and unseen in the daylight.
For us, the performance is a homage to the dead, to resistance, and to friendships—created and continuously re-performed, re-edited, re-assembled while holding our dead close, listening to them, carrying them. It is a very particular knowledge, from the ground, that exceeds language; remaining with what is barely audible, the invisible… and not succumbing to age-old liberal hoaxes of “making our voices heard” or “lending visibility” as absolutely positive values. The question for us becomes whether we are capable of listening to the lessons of our dead, whether we are attentive enough to hear them—how to remain attentive and continue performing the tasks entrusted to us, and to move them forward.
Culturally, for us, darkness and death have always been very present as sites of encounter, passages, and transformation. What comes to mind here is the way that, in Palestine and Lebanon, the root of unjust death and martyrdom is not understood as an absence of/from life, but an eternal presence. It is not a fall, but an ascent. A transformation. A rebirth. In martyrs' processions, for example, the community gathers around and celebrates the martyr with immense pride, where the sacrifice is believed to be a rebirth and a spiritual union with the land itself, consecrated with blood. Many of the songs collectively sung at martyrs' funerals speak from the perspective of the martyr. It is a kind of confirmation that the martyr is alive in another dimension, somewhere beyond our immediate sight, asking us directly to continue their path of resistance. That moment when everyone’s voice becomes the martyr’s voice is where the breath resides.
ME: What do you hope to bring the audience in each iteration of this performance? How have you seen other bodies react to it, to its physical intensity? Do you feel it is possible, in this case, to draw empathy between breathing bodies?
NA+HA: We do not want to be cynical and foreclose the notion of empathy altogether. We also do not want to be naive and think that making people feel something in the framework of a performance can stand in for the complexity of a practice of empathy. There is also the broader question of what that empathy, should it occur, might generate.
The more palpable and verifiable audience reaction that we have observed is one of tension and attention. We also know that different bodies, carrying different experiences, react to the sounds differently. So we are trying to hold a space without assuming that everyone present is an ally, and in the hopes that not everyone present is an enemy, and to see what modes of address can withstand these divisions. What can we do? What can we share?—without falling into assumptions about the audience.
This is in large part why we spend much of the time addressing one another. We are concerned with one another and those we convene and conjure up. We know that those who know to join the huddle do so without the need for an invitation, and we hope that the huddle is strong enough to hold a defensive stance for those who do not wish to join it or hope to break it apart.
ME: In what ways does this work relate to the ongoing genocide in your homelands, both continuously subjected to discriminatory colonial violence and erasure? And how have your practices transformed after, and throughout, the recent aggravation of these horrific crimes?
NA+HA: The transformation is too complex to get into here, and it is not necessarily linear, quantifiable or qualifiable… But it is very real for each of us in our own way. One of the things we talk about a lot is how not to be consumed by colonial violence: not in the individual sense of self-preservation, but in the collective sense of preserving our culture—preservation here not in the historical sense of reinstating what was… What does it mean when a culture is in continuity with our cultures, but can also push them forward, without always accounting for the coloniser? What do we do when we are amongst ourselves, in our lands, with our dead? How much space can we create, how much language can we share without uttering the name of the enemy?
ME: Returning to the idea of breathing and vocalising together—of breath as a testimony of life, of presence, of memory—I truly believe breathing in togetherness is a conscious act of becoming-in-synchronicity, of attuning to a shared rhythm that has to be both found and negotiated. I am curious to know how each of you feels this. What does this act of vocalising, of somehow reflecting and diffracting each other, weave between the two of you? What does it conjure?
NA+HA: We always speak to each other about how this performance is not an easy one, both physically and psychologically. It leaves us breathless at the end, and to this day, we remain speechless for some time after. In a quite literal sense, we end the performance when we can no longer breathe. The last part of it goes into a rhythm of heavy breathing—each of us does it at a different pace, yet we synchronise in the gaps. The lights go off after our last breath, and a song plays in the dark.
It's truly amazing how a rhythm is negotiated until it takes hold and paves a way. And for us, the performance and its breaths are a continuous act of tweaking, reassembling, trying differently, and taking the risk. Time plays a role here, of course; through time, our friendship became naturally closer, and therefore, it affects the rhythm we perform through on stage—more naturally, improvising with trust, feeling each other for one to take over if the other is tired.
There is a structure of feeling that is touched for each of us in this piece, and layers of emotions and thoughts that won't be accessible otherwise perhaps. There is something in the repetitive act of listening, rehearsing, and physically performing that brings all that was shared and written into another dimension, and therefore another feeling. But also sometimes it feels like we are studying together, or thinking through one short video of people in Gaza sharing their food with cats, or sending each other audios of siren sounds from Palestine and videos of pamphlets thrown over Beirut, or… This accumulation of such daily details from our localities, friends, and family, along with historical and other material, gathered over a period of time, puts us in the presence of the long breath of fighting colonialism and its ills, and in the longed-for presence of all the precious, dear ones who have left us.
The performance never gives us, as performers, the same feeling. It enters our physical bodies and the space between us in a different way, every time. Practising—vocals and structured breathing—slaps us in the face sometimes unexpectedly, like touching a wound that is wide open, while tending to it at the same time. We are always surprised by how voice and rhythm take hold of us. For example, one of the sounds we focus on is the "gasp"—an involuntary, sudden intake of breath that sits in a particular place between voice, breathing, and affect: a sound that could summarise, to a large extent, a shared intuitive reaction when seeing, hearing, experiencing something that shocks, brings fear… For us, it is the daily sound that we've been intensively hearing for the past three years.
The gasp happens before language, and it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to convey in writing. It is like a tiny interval where something is held tight. It is also relational: it happens because of something—heard, seen, remembered, etc.—and it naturally calls for an action, just as when another person hears a gasp, their body registers it and calls for a reaction. Between the two of us, when we are working on the gasps—which is almost the opposite of synchronisation, but rather a kind of arrhythmia—we are basically organising the disruption of ordinary breathing, somewhat unconsciously. Whether we like it or not, every time we practise it, it carries with it layers of events, memories, death, and anger—the intention is not to remain there, but to conjure all that to transform it into a stronger force, a longer breath, a rhythm of organised ruptures and disruptions that will ripple out to include as many of us as possible.
And sometimes we like to think of it as a rehearsal, to test a simple question: what happens when people coordinate their bodies in time? If we think of the phenomenon whereby individual movements become synchronised with the movements of others—and let’s think of breath here—then what is it exactly that transforms a group into something more than a collection of individuals? We don’t aim to necessarily exercise that with every audience, but sometimes it happens naturally when the audience starts humming or singing with us. There is a sense of belonging there that creates another rhythm beyond the two of us.
ME: Something you said really struck a chord: the idea that death reinforces the union with the land, as it is, in the end, a return to it. I do believe that, as both a society and a conceptual project, the West does not deal well with death, and I think this might have to do with many things, most of which are related to a total absence of a more rooted spirituality, and to a brutal disidentification with the idea of belonging to the land, of the body as a natural continuity of the earth. As you both live and perform in Europe, how do you navigate this opposition, this clash of cosmovisions, and the ways it might affect the comprehension of your works? Do you feel there is a need to “translate,” up to a certain point, or do you think the territory of the antithesis can be more constructive?
NA+HA: There is a reason why “Israel” is obsessed with destroying our cemeteries. They have done so historically in Jerusalem, they did so in Gaza during the genocide, and have done so in South Lebanon. “Israel” attempts to destroy and de-naturalise all of our ties to the land. They destroy our millenary olive trees, the rain collection tanks in the Golan; they prevent the construction of solar panels… Everything they do in the region is aimed at dismantling our biosphere and creating in its stead their technosphere, through which they can monitor, surveil, control, and kill us. In order for “Israel” to exist, the project has to commit genocide and ethnically cleanse. In order for European Jews to be naturalised in Palestine, they must de-naturalise us. Burial is one site of that de-naturalising, which, in addition to many other reasons, includes creating the sense that there is no escaping their control even after death, or that there is no resting in peace if you fight colonisation.
We are reticent to get into a comparative anthropology when it comes to rituals around death. Perhaps one part has to do with notions of spirituality, but it also likely has to do with notions of property and land ownership, which take on a very different set of politics in Palestine than they would in broader leftist discourse.
We perform the piece in English—which came out of the conditions of the initial commission and because it felt that doing it in Arabic had a kind of performativity that we do not assign to it—but there is little to no translation somehow. We do not want to translate, we do not want to explain, we do not want to convince… Partly because we have little energy, and talking to those who already know is a better expenditure of the little energy we have left; but also for a deeper political reason, which is that if we did not know it before, Gaza has made it crystal clear that witnessing, testifying, calling out, accusing, and other notions based on ideals of justice do not constitute a call to action. Decades of practices which, in essence, were predicated on convincing the West that we are human evaporated in a flash. So no. We do not seek to translate; we seek invisibility, opacity, darkness… Those of us who live in darkness can find each other with our eyes closed, and those who need translation are not ready to be in the huddle with us.
Cover Image
Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian. Performance at If I Can’t Dance, Sonic Acts Biennial, Amsterdam, February 2026. Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva.