Dienstag, 31 März, 2026 - 10:00

All The Rivers residency I: Pomegranate Collective

Abigail Akavia
Wael Toubaji
Danielle Schwartz
Franz Hanemann

★please note: the second residency period with a public sharing will follow July 2026

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the Pomegranate Collective project is concerned with the effect of ideology on the body—with how our bodies have been politically moulded through collective song, choreography, and repeated gestures of symbolic embodiment. We focus on anthems and the pomegranate. Songs, like the fruit, pass through our mouths and throats in an intimate ingestion of cultural meaning.

As individuals from Israel, Syria, and East Germany, our personal and collective biographies were, despite their differences, ideologically shaped in similar ways. In our youth, we all performed in ceremonies meant to cement and reproduce national-cultural identities—militaristic, patriarchal, heteronormative, supremacist. We now explicitly resist these formations, yet their musical and performative apparatuses still have a powerful grip on us; they taste like home. Our work investigates these practices, exposing their consequences on our bodies as well as on other bodies. 

Our collaboration creates a multilingual container in which shared patterns surface across contexts, revealing wider logics of nationalism, colonialism, and folkism.In light of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, and the ongoing expansion of state and colonial violence across the region, it feels urgent to trace affinities between Zionism and German cultural histories, with their own archives of banned songs, inherited shame, and fascist ceremonies.

Our goal is to develop a performance that is also a mode of witnessing: holding together grief with nostalgia, empathy with refusal, critique with the admission of complicity, disgust and anger with fascination and pleasure. We are interested in articulating this dissonance. How can we make sense of a reality in which we are activated by these symbols and practices, even as we recognize their immeasurable and ongoing traumatic effects?

Our process unfolds through somatic, vocal, and visual exploration. We work with existing songs, gestures, images, choreographies, slogans, actions, and memories, and reframe them through repetition, translation, and disruption, allowing them to resonate and deconstruct. We move forward through experimentation, collective composition, and consent-based practice, allowing the work to emerge collectively rather than from a single author. We aim for a process that can hold contradiction, vulnerability, humor, and refusal, where ethics and care are integral to the artistic method - acknowledging that patterns of domination, silencing, and submission may also appear within our collaboration.

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