by Amina Seid Tahir and Adam Seid Tahir
Photo: Amina Seid Tahir. Visible dancer: Adam Seid Tahir
Shifting between labor and speculative proposals ”several attempts at braiding my way home” insists on fiction as a tool for quaking potential and finding opportunities for recovery and belonging. The performance swims with the Clymene dolphins who defy understandings of heritage. It listens to the walruses who trust their hair for navigation. ”several attempts at braiding my way home” is a collection of strategies for creating home in an afro-nordic landscape. Braiding hair, fusing bones, growing fins. It is a heatwave and a longing for home.
CREDITS
Choreographers Amina Seid Tahir & Adam Seid Tahir
Initiated and performed by Adam Seid Tahir
Dramaturg Lydia Östberg Diakité
Music Crystallmess
Hair-costume Malcolm Marquez
Costume Amina Seid Tahir
Light Jonatan Winbo
Tour producers Johnson & Bergsmark
Supported by Kulturrådet, Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse, MARC, Riksteaterns Produktionsresidens för dans 2021
About the artIsts
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Amina Seid Tahir (She/Her) is a Swedish-Eritrean artist and choreographer based in Stockholm/London. Her work is rooted in themes around resting and dreaming within the global majority community and grows through mediums such as sound, braiding, vibration, installation and performance. Braiding together her interests in ancestral knowledge with oral traditions and myths, she creates a universe between reality and fiction. Manifesting spaces where dreams can work like seeds to grow futures.
Currently she is studying fine art at Konstfack(SE) and Chelsea College of Art(UK). She has presented work in contexts including: Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2023 (BE), New Sh*t @ Dansehallerne 2022 (DK), Emergentia 2022 (CH), Batard 2022 (BE), Botkyrka Konsthall 2022 (SE) and My Wild Flag 2021 (SE). Amina’s work is grounded in community and would not be possible without the conversations or collaborations with her communities, including people as: Ailin Mirlashari, Are Karim, Rebecca Beyene, Lina Alarabi, Adam Seid Tahir, Nora Seid Tahir, Sara Rad, Dina Said and many many more.
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Adam Seid Tahir (they/them) is a choreographer and creative technologist. Their two roles involve crafting performative work and designing/developing websites. These practices also merge and expand into writing texts, making video installations, 3D animation and crafting sensor-based instruments.
Adam uses speculative imagination as a tool of resistance and centers their work around creating loud and immersive black queer fiction. They are interested in mythological figures, daydreaming and crafting affective machines. These interests often intersect through water, where they take the shape of sirens, waterfalls and submerged transatlantic communication cables.
In their latest works Adam keeps returning to the practice of braiding hair. Both its traditional meaning with its ancestral social traditions and through the expanded idea of braiding as a method for working together. In the latter notion Adam has recently collaborated with Amina Seid Tahir and the collective EMBRACE (consisting of Lydia Östberg Diakité, Meleat Fredriksson and themself).
They have presented their work in contexts including: Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2023 (BE), New Sh*t @ Dansehallerne 2022 (DK), Emergentia 2022 (CH), Batard 2022 (BE), My Wild Flag 2021 (SE) and Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2020 (HR). They have worked with other artists including: Bambam Frost, Pontus Pettersson, Frederic Gies, Theo Clinkard, Samlingen, Meleat Fredriksson, Lydia Östberg Diakité, Amina Seid Tahir, Paloma Madrid, Eleanor Bauer, Zoë Poluch and Michael Keegan-Dolan. They have studied courses and programs including: Decolonial strategies within art and activism @ Uniarts (SE), Aesthetics @ LTU (SE), Programming for Artists @ Konstfack (SE), Ballet Junior de Geneve (CH) and Royal Swedish Ballet School (SE).
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