Raeda Saadeh
Wishes Tree

(Palestine)

Rooted in the turmoil of the world, a woman stands still, silent, unmoving. Around her unfolds an immense dress, a sixty-metre-long dervish spiral of dazzling white. Fragments of fabric begin to move from hand to hand, gathering wishes, hopes, and confidences. Folded into secrets, they are thrown one by one by the audience onto this offered surface, and the immaculate expanse becomes a constellation, a field of colourful flowers, a fragile mosaic of anonymous desires and impulses. Raeda Saadeh becomes tree, matrix, at once source of life and receptacle for a collective, intimate, and political memory. Presented for over a decade in numerous countries, the performance leaves behind surfaces inhabited by traces, without ever revealing their contents — as if something of reality itself remained suspended there.

A major artist of the contemporary Middle East, based in Jerusalem, Raeda Saadeh has inscribed resistance into her body for thirty years. Photography, performance, video: she moves shapes to speak about occupation, violence, the expectations imposed on women, and political and social constraints. A vacuum cleaner. A walk. A forced smile. Ordinary gestures displaced. Her work rests on one certainty: staying visible, despite everything.