In one continuous motion, my idea of myself and who I am turns inside out, like a pond that flips upside down in the spring, when the cold winter water slides under, and the earth-warmed bottom water rises. The underlife comes to the surface.
All those years I was no obedient asexual girl, but a restless lover searching for the lost garden, that place of male women and female men.
– Minnie Bruce Pratt¹

PROLOGUE
Bring yourself into a comfortable position. While reading this text, I would like to ask you to
enter the theatre inside your head,2 and conjure the images that I describe, as I describe them. I have prepared sounds for you. Put on headphones, open www.asoftdrone.online on your
computer, tablet or phone, and follow along as you read.

Tear bag
I am standing
in a lake
Clear as a tear
For a long time
it felt like I
Had lost my future
My skin
leaking
Contaminated
fluids Torn
Bags
porous walls
I’m still waiting
wasting
droplets of water
dripping leaving
traces

allah project — مشروع الله is a study of the use of Arabic religious terms and formula7ons in the Levant, and more specifically in Lebanon. I intend to show how the use of these terms differ and how their significa7on is altered by the speaker according to the social context. The project begins with a term or expression that is made part of a performance where it is wriCenconsecu7vely and repe77vely on various mediums. Live sounds envelop me in ac7on, giving a tempo to the performance. This is an explora7on of socie7es where religions and tradi7ons are prevalent, through the deconstruc7on of certain terms that are used daily. With these expressions shaCered, my aim is to uncover what lies behind them: communi7es that are organised around a highly controlling and patriarchal system.

Hell Chamber

In a whimsical attempt to save my own soul I will hereby recount, as well as I can, my
encounter with the beast which, with large glowing lights spelling “the future is here,”
gathered us around its ominous presence like rats around the Pied Piper. But we never
jumped off the cliff—instead we sat on uncomfortable classroom chairs in a large, dimly lit
and seemingly endless hall. We must have been many, because even considering the
large size of this “hell chamber” we were still brushing each other’s 1 sweaty shoulders. I
tried to adjust my chair but its legs were intertwined with my neighbour’s. After a few
awkward and noisy attempts to untangle, I gave in to the stern looks and coughs of my
fellow pilgrims, whom I was clearly disturbing in their anticipation of enlightenment, and
finally sat still. The doors shut, and we were each handed a VR-headset that was
connected to a central system with cables hanging from its front. As I put on the device,
like an omen, the image of a giant leech wrapping itself around my head entered my mind.
Left with an uneasy feeling and the quiet but constant whirring (a sign of operation) right in
front of my face, I felt alone in a room with hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies waiting
for the spectacle to begin.

-1. Intro: forever...

The evolution of an animal is a force in constant flux, guided by external and internal factors that actively
interact and revolve around, within and with it. Organisms are capable of infinite variability and have an
inherent tendency to change when environmental shifts occur. Including geological and meteorological
changes, environmental shift refers to and is caused by a number of things. For example, some of the most
important elements in an organism's environment are other organisms. Adapting to their environments, two
or more organisms can evolve together and shape each other's behavioural and physical frames and
patterns through direct or indirect processes, fuelled further with every generation.

Is it starting now?

Spotting concern in a stranger’s eye gifts me a brief sense of arrival. Not the burden
of a loved one, but the clean kind of worrying. Grieving as my emotions connect to the earth.
The feeling of a warm bath—the warmth of connectivity and interdependence.

I enter the hospital never to leave again. A pulling, vibrating umbilical cord. One cord going
to my doctor and another one to my health insurance company. I had never seen it before, but
it was always there. Now swollen, brittle and full of bulging blood vessels.

Desperately, grievously torn, I wonder why this is happening to me. Acid blood and a
previously unimaginable fight with reason. Facts of forever needing needles, forever being in
care. I try to shake it off, turn it around, look for other truths. But my body betrays me.