Diversity Week
The Foreigner I Know - Performance
Monday 3rd August
6.00pm-7.00pm
Art Gallery
p s s for students, staff and general public
Performance by Mireille Astore
The Foreigner I Know is an exploration into foreignness through an autobiographical poetic and visual narrative. It signifies the potency of personal encounters and the efficacy of laying bare that which is not easily perceived, that which is unbearable, and perhaps… secret.
And so, it is predominantly through my eyes that I first encounter difference, otherness, foreignness. It is through my eyes I see the foreigner that does not know me and who is not able to recognise herself in me. But she is the one that lives within me and inhabits the impossible space of my non-being, of living within and of living without, of exiting to that which I cannot bear to see.
In her project Strangers to Ourselves Julia Kristeva asks: "Who is the foreigner? The one who does not belong to the group, who is not "one of them," the other?" The foreigner could be the one that comes from elsewhere, but distance alone is not what defines the foreigner. A fundamental difference such as a belief system or practice identified by rivalling groups within the nation, can trigger the birth of a new foreigner. "Henceforth the foreigner is neither a race or a nation…. Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided."(Kristeva, 1991:181). The image of the foreigner then is the opaque presence in a sea of illusionary sameness.
6.30pm-7.00pm REFRESHMENTS