WAYS OF SEEING

Presented by Pia Maria Roll, Hanan Benammar, Sara Baban

Ways of Seeing premiered 21st of November 2018 at Black Box teater in Oslo and has been touring in Norway and Europe since 2019.

 

“An extremely important play” Chris Erichsen, scenekunst.no 

“Ways of Seeing is a poetic and beautiful work of art, a fragmented story told in many voices. It is no wonder that people in positions of power are unsettled: this is a play that clearly shows the need for radical changes in society.” Mariann Enge, Kunstkritikk.no

 

 

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«Racism is the exposure of a certain part of the population to premature death»

Prof. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Direktør ved Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, The City University of New York.

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Sara and Hanan:

«We wait in the garden. We wait like the gravel waits, like the wood pigeon and the blackbird and the ice and the clear water. We wait, like a two-headed gnome: dirty, coarse, unreliable. Sometimes we look through your bedroom windows: you pig-faced evil bedbugs who feast upon the root systems of hope. Slowly the heart stops running. We light black lanterns. The horror loses its grip. Europe disappears. Then we turn toward paradises lost for you and your kin.»

The artistic team behind Ways of Seeing has mapped the networks that have an interest in making Norway a more racist society. Who are their protagonists and what are their motivations? What is the connection between these networks and an ever-increasing cry for more surveillance?

In Ways of Seeing, the artists venture into the gray zone between what can be right and wrong, what is legitimate and illegitimate, and what is legal and illegal; both for the state and for the individual. Joining them is the former Supreme Court Judge Ketil Lund, who led the historical investigation into the Norwegian state's illegal surveillance of the left.

Hanan B leaves France in 2011. The following year, the National Front does its most successful election ever. Jean-Marie Le Pen had been an intelligence officer and torturer in the French colonial war in Algeria, where Hanan’s father, Halim, fought on the side of the revolution. Now, after years of determined political work, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen, have managed to convince the French public that the colonial “war of civilization” has moved on to European soil. Hanan moves to Norway, just to realize that Le Pen’s agenda has hit deep roots there too. 

 

In Oslo she meets Sara B, who fled from Saddam Hussein’s US-backed war against the Kurds in the 80’s, and who knows a lot about the connections between surveillance, racism and horror.

Together with former Supreme Court judge Ketil Lund and a deeply beloved ghost, they embark on a journey through the root systems of power. At the same time NATO is planning that their largest military exercise ever is to be carried-out on Norwegian soil.