Unknown Sea - كيف سأخبر البحر أننا نغرق على اليابسة

Unknown Sea is a choreographic work that explores migration through the body, not only as a journey across borders, but as a physical and emotional state of departure, waiting, memory, and survival. Drawing from Ahmed’ experience as a Tunisian artist and from stories, gestures, and sounds connected to migration, the work asks: What does a body carry when it leaves? What remains when a place is left behind?

At the heart of the work is the narrative of “escaping the hole” the desire to escape a place of social, economic, and emotional pressure. The hole becomes both a physical and metaphorical space: a place the body wants to leave, but which has also shaped the way it moves, waits, adapts, and survives. Migration becomes an attempt to change one’s position, find another ground, and imagine a body beyond the limits of its circumstances.

The performance brings together dance, experimental sound, archival cassette recordings, video, and a DIY video-tracking system. Old songs from the 1990s and 2000s, carrying memories of migration and longing, become a sonic archive interacting with the dancer’s movements. Everyday gestures, including making Mlawi bread, transform into choreographic material, connecting the body to home, labor, memory, and survival.

Unknown Sea is a landscape between here and elsewhere, where the body becomes both a map and a vessel. The sea becomes a threshold, a distance, and an imagined possibility. Between the desire to leave and the impossibility of completely departing, the work searches for where memory, belonging, and the need to escape meet.