Enad Marouf: Losers

With Losers, Enad Marouf combines text, dance and music through a cinematic look and invites the audience to trace a moment of political loss.

In his new performance, Enad Marouf picks up texts that write history from the perspective of the oppressed and defeated. The performance brings together Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History (1940) with Arwa Salihs The Stillborn (1996). Benjamin's “Angel of History” looks at the wreckage of the past, while the “storm we call progress” drives him backwards into the future. Salih writes about the aftermath of the Egyptian Marxist student movement of 1972 and examines the disillusionment of a revolutionary generation and the contradictions that did not let go of them even after that. Benjamin and Salih do not look at history as a straight story of progress, but instead turn to its failure, its losses and its unrealized opportunities.

In Losers, loss is not only understood as an end, but as a question of what has failed, what has been suppressed and what might still be possible. Thinking from the losers' position means less finding concrete answers than asking how defeat can be rethought of as a space of reflection and community.