Like Pots and Waves Break

2023 . HD Video . 1:09:10

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A group of queer folk from Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine meet for the first time inside the Fitzwilliam Museum’s “Near-East” collection in Cambridge. They engage their bodies and voices in proximity to artefacts from their own geographies. The work is built through music, sound, poetry, and touch.

 

The group handle domestic and funerary fragments and objects, many over three thousand years old. The moment of holding becomes a point of meeting between strangers encountering one another, and between bodies and the material traces of a shared past that continues. 

 

The film sets up a home within the museum. Voices echo and trouble one another, pages turn, dialogues extend and bodies move, tracing how material culture, dislocation, and queerness take, or refuse taking shape, within systems that attempt to contain, order and preserve.

 

Supported by Arts Council England and Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge.