Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, and educator born in Kabul, Afghanistan, raised in Peshawar, Pakistan, and based in Amsterdam for the last 25 years. In 2015, he received his Bachelor’s in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the UvA. In 2019, he graduated from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) with a Bachelor’s in Choreography.
The multiple displacements and (violent) processes of cultural assimilation have become sites through which the artist insists on an artistic practice and theoretical (be)wanderings that attempt to touch and be touched by incompleteness. His works play with the personal, social, and political peripheries as textures for the (un)making of the self and the collective. The ongoing negotiation of the individual and the collective bodymindsoul, interwoven with the urgencies of (geo)political (re)positioning, is of essence to the way he works and is worked by artistic and pedagogical inquiries. These inquiries find their (temporary) material manifestations through textile installations, experimental noise performances, and theoretical texts that attempt to poetically embody a discourse around his artistic practice of “the moan as an erotic liberatory mourning sound”. Most recently, he published a sonic essay in the Performance Philosophy Journal for their Volume 9, No 2, and an essay for the Belgian literature and philosophy magazine called nY. In these writings, he insists on a viscerally embodied approach to thinking and writing, one that refuses the Cartesian divide between the body and the mind, between thinking and sensorial feeling.
His recent artistic endeavours are collaborative projects that expand the limitations of the solo artist, projects that try to (re)configure collaborative movement of thinking-making-relating. He has performed at the exhibition space W139, Amsterdam; the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; the poetry and theatre venue Perdu, Amsterdam; and the performance festival Baltic Circle, Helsinki, amongst others. His most recent collaborative project is called Mad Ground, which is a conjoined effort between himself and educators, philosophers, and artists alex blum, Elioa Steffen, and Maryam Barbur. It centralises the interconnectedness of spirituality and theoretical praxis, with a specific focus on pedagogies that dare to be a thorn in the (educational) institution’s sight of comfort and stability. Together, they have participated in a two-week residency at HAUT, Copenhagen.
The research project at RCMC is called “How Grief, Collective Mourning Practices and Madness Can Teach Us about a Justice-to-Come.” This research emerges from six years of working with The Moan as a performative lament practice. Witnessing the genocide in Gaza, Palestine, and Western institutions’ insistence of depoliticisation of grief, have strengthened the artist’s commitment to “mourning as an erotic liberatory practice.” The proposed pedagogy insists that collective, embodied mourning practices are essential for imagining a justice beyond individualism and disassociation. Through theoretical study, facilitation of mourning gatherings, and poetic writing, the project aims to challenge institutional numbness by making institutions "weep" through somatic practices that embrace overwhelm, opacity, and collective unruliness.
