Parvin Saljoughi
Feral Reverie
Feral Reverie poses the question: How might choreographies of evasion undo the logics of domination? Here, fugitivity, uncertainty and ungovernable movement are considered both as aesthetic strategies and tactics of refusal. Without resolve or explanation, Feral Reverie misbehaves, holding coherence at a distance. This creates space for non-institutional life, as choreography becomes a kind of soft sabotage. Gestures fragment, slide and blur rendering themselves unclean institutions and markets alike.
As an Iranian maker, I begin inside this contradiction where the invisibility of the blur produces the possibility for life. Surveillance, misrecognition, and the obligation to translate are not metaphor – they are daily coordinates. The research that emerges from this mess uses nonlinear movement, fractured narrative, 3D animation and the co-presence of live pigeons. Uncooperative, untrained, interruptive, the pigeon’s refusal to be choreographed becomes an unrelenting stereotype. What happens when performance ontologically refuses to perform? When it glitches, breaks rhythm, won’t hold a pose?
Theoretical frameworks hover, coloniality of being, untamed ontology and queer studies are ongoing practices of imagining and enacting freedom in the cracks of the current order. They are the results of choosing to live otherwise and anyways, what you do when freedom is unavailable.
Uncertainty becomes the working principle. Not a failure of clarity, but a refusal of resolution. Evading full capture or understanding. The method is fragmentation. Erratic images flow. Impulsive movement appears. Narrative as interference pattern. The flow itself is otherwise, or otherwise said ‘Fuck the flow’. The work doesn’t offer meaning, it creates the conditions where meaning might flicker. Or not. Every failure becomes part of the structure.
This research keeps asking: What happens when wildness is disciplined into content? What is left of the body after it has been formatted, by the nation state, the algorithm or by the art world? What is in excess of the fence? Is there still a pulse somewhere in there that hasn’t been smoothed out? Can we still tremble? Not from fear, but from no reason at all?
I come from a mix of visual arts (bachelor’s) and choreography (master’s). A body in transit. A body learning, unlearning, finding new ways to move. I make, I perform, I dance.
The body is a site. Of pressure, of memory, of failure. It moves, breaks down, glitches, reforms. I work with performance, text and video, not to represent, but to test. What a body can hold. What it refuses. What it leaks.
I’m drawn to the edges. Where movement falters. Where presence flickers. Where something rehearsed too many times suddenly collapses. Visibility, control, adaptation, who gets to move freely and who doesn’t?
Stages shift, geographies blur. I have performed in Belgium, France, Italy, Norway, Austria, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands and …
I started in Tehran, but now I’m in Brussels, living as an alien – in more ways than one.