Gesturing toward Resistance: Farah Saleh's Archive of Gestures Available to Purchase

Engaging with the work of Palestinian dancer, choreographer, performer, and self-identified “archivist-activist” Farah Saleh, this chapter explores the potential of bodily experiences and performative gestures as a model for creating affective archives. Drawing attention to the productive space opened between the archive (as a source of documentation of the past) and the body that interacts with the archive, Saleh’s work underlines the importance of speculative performativity in opening the otherwise sealed archive to make it an immanent (and relevant) part of the present. Saleh’s “archive of gestures” in works such as c.i.e. are performed in relation to preexisting archives and historical documents but always in departure: returning to these historical sources and moments to unplug a potentiality lost to them; lost in them and reviving them not as a glorification of the past or a commitment to (national?) memory but as a promise of yet-to-come, unknown, “not yet.”