Uresa Ahmeti at Summer School as School 2022
Ho-me is where the breath is / (Be)longing,
Performance by Uresa Ahmeti

Belonging, or longing. Missing home. A human. An alien. Humalien.
A new neighborhood. A new city. A new country. Looking outwards,
distrusting.
In this performance I look inward. I depend on my breath as a regulating
and decisive form and site of self-control, stabilization and power. I have
danced around my room in the ways that my body craves to move. I have
not thought about aesthetics or what would look like a “good” dance move. I
have been solely focusing on what it is that my body wants to say at the
moment. I give voice to my toes, and fingers, lashes, and hair, knees, and
pelvis, and damn it is beautiful.
A fetus, a child self, a reaching in and reaching out, a collapse and a getting
up, a (be)longing. What is it that needs to s(t)ay? Sustainable
Ho Me.
Ho is the sound of exhaling a breath. An extended hhhh - Followed by a
breathy ooo if the mouth is opened a little more.
When living is suspended, postponed, or unavailable, what are the ways we
can get to the breath?
Breath is a signifier and symbolizer of the shifting positionality every subject
has, the underlying universal condition of the human; breath as grounding
and presence, but also as little death and letting go. I am closer to ho-me as
I embrace and attend to the ho.
Organic poetic movement. Not improvisation.
You cannot learn this dance, you can only think about it,
In bodily terms.
What kind of walks are there in life?

Biography:
Uresa is a free spirit, activist, artist, and especially, a feminist killjoy. She finished her high school studies at United World College Maastricht in the Netherlands, after she won a national scholarship, and is currently in her last year of studying both Sociology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, CT, USA. Writing is one of her specialties. As a writer, activist, and conceptual performance artist, she has always seen art and activism as inextricable from one another. From shouting slam poetry in anti-deportation protests in the Netherlands to performing original pieces in the FemART festival in South-Eastern Europe, this combination of art and activism has shaped the course of her life. Interrogating, shifting, and expanding social binaries is her passion. Her work addresses and challenges capitalist, hetero-normative and patriarchal social structures. Her performances “From ‘other’ to Self’” and “Interrogating Power” as well as the podcasts she’s produced, and her recently published poetry book “How the Hell Do I Abort a Demon” among other works, call for self-agency, situated knowledge production from the self, social awareness, recognition and opposition of the ways in which systems of oppression co-exist and subjugate bodies. In turn, she calls for the abolition of these systems altogether through queering norms, binaries, and ways of carrying oneself through the world.