The Language of Silence Workshop with Marah Haj Hussein

On the occasion of the show Language: no broblem, part of the festival FOG, the artist Marah Haj Hussein leads a workshop focused on exploring the methods and practices that characterize her creative process. The workshop begins with a focus on movement practice: participants will be guided through collective exercises in dance and physical composition, aimed at developing bodily connections in different spatial configurations and experimenting with forms of shared improvisation. From this physical experience, voice and text will subsequently emerge, integrated with movement according to an approach that emphasizes continuity, flow, and dynamics. Text will be treated as a mobile element, functional and complementary to the bodily dimension, with the goal of overcoming the distinction between gesture and word and exploring their combined expressive potential.

How can art give form to what is delicate, complex, or unspeakable without betraying it? The workshop series The Language of Silence, in collaboration with Fondazione Feltrinelli, emerges from this question. Silence is not absence or emptiness: it is a language that listens, receives, and prepares the ground for creation. The series of workshops invites participants to discover silence as a companion in research, exploring different yet deeply connected ways of approaching vulnerability, trauma, memory, and the unconscious. In a time marked by conflicts, media noise, and emergencies that seem to leave no room for listening, silence can become a political space and a practice of resistance. Not as an escape, but as a possibility that allows fragility, trauma, memory, and the unconscious to emerge and find a space for attention and care. In this direction, through dramaturgical writing and choreographic movement, the two workshops invite participants to discover silence as a grammar that unites body and word in order to generate a more essential and more truthful way of creating and telling stories.