« Let an angel tap you on the shoulder »

It is a cold, grey and rainy day in October when I finally get to see Samkome, presented as part of                    the CODA festival 2024 in Oslo. I am not about to simply witness the performance                      of Samkome, but like every audience member I will participate in it. Because Samkome is not a simple performance, but something more in-between performance, social gathering and ritual. Not many things are straightforward with Samkome, or my encounter with it. The project itself has changed since its inception and not only due to the inherent and unforeseen changes that linger in every artistic process, but also due to the extreme events in the Middle East (West Asia) we all had to bear witness to in the past year. On the day that I see Samkome, it is called an invitation to grief.

In the following, I want to share my experience and thoughts on Samkome both as an audience member, an artist in conversation and as an artistic researcher. I do not want to offer anything conclusive here, as I think Samkome is first and foremost a personal as well as collective experience before it is an artwork that stands to be analysed. Instead, I want to describe and share what Samkome made me think, feel and sense, to spark conversation about the kind of spaces that art can create; its potential to touch us sensorially and physically in social and political ways.

Some Background

I met Mia Habib for the first time in the summer of 2023 during the Agder Teaterlaboratorium. Afterwards Mia invited me to collaborate with her on the continuation of her project Samkome. An initial version had already been performed in Lund in Sweden where it explored public space as a site for gathering and protesting. Mia had been invited to bring Samkome to Trondheim and Oslo and wanted to develop the project according to local histories of resistance. Some forgotten, some still very present. I was intrigued and excited to be onboard for the project, as my own research as a PhD fellow at KHiO investigates the relationship between dance and protest. But shortly after we began talking about the different possibilities for each of Samkome’s local iterations the 7^th of October happened and changed all urgencies.

I cannot speak for what must have gone on for Mia but what I witnessed was that she plunged herself headfirst into reaching out, organising and protesting with the group Jødiske stemmer for rettferdig fred (Jewish Voices for Just Peace). The events moved so fast that our conversations about Samkome could not quite keep up. While Mia invited me to many of the events and protests that she organised along the way, Samkome itself would soon develop alongside collaborators other than me. To me it looked like Mia needed to do something with Samkome, in the face of the atrocities, even when she did not quite know how to make art in such desperate times.

Samkome takes place in the park just outside of Kulturkirken Jakob close to the pedestrian bridge of Torggata that crosses Akerselva. I immediately spot the statue of an angel, standing tall with its wings outstretched. This figure will become part of our gathering as it stands within the large circle that we are asked to form around a small fire at its centre. The circle is a strong communal shape, allowing everyone to see each other. And while it can also create a separation, an inside and outside, in the case of Samkome the circle never becomes private. By taking place in a public location everything that happens in the circle will be visible and audible to those outside. Throughout, pedestrians will stop and listen, trying to understand what is transpiring.

In Samkome the circle functions as a container, a space to hold the experiences of all its participants. To me, the elements that shape the experiences could be grouped into two categories. For one there is the grieving ritual itself, but first there are those using language to guide. The welcome speech but also the songs and poetry belong to this. Consequently, Mia opens Samkome with an introduction; a written text that is an invitation to the audience, to consider and reflect on grief that we might hold, private or collective, and that we might want to share with the circle. Perhaps something that is urgent for us now, or something that we have never shared before. The text is composed meticulously, not in order to direct but to invite, and it is endowed with questions rather than statements:

«What does it entail to grieve?»

«What does it mean to hold someone else’s grief?»

Language and Community-making

How this welcome speech is composed, to invite rather than to direct, to ask rather than answer, touches upon important issues of language and sociality. It makes me wonder; what kind of language brings us together? And, how do we listen to difference? The welcome speech is setting up a frame for our ad-hoc community, an agreement and a reason to be together. It does so with an open gesture, a hand reaching out to welcome as many people as possible. This is language composed to create a space where people might encounter each other. It is spoken in Norwegian but an English translation is being passed around. A possible answer to my question about how to listen to difference might reside in Samkome’s songs and poems. The project brings onboard collaborators from Bosnian, Kurdish, Greek, Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish and Norwegian backgrounds of which most have personal experiences of forced migration. These collaborators share songs and poems of grief with us. They do so often in their own languages, without any form of translation. Whereas the welcome speech needs to be understood to set the premise for the ritual, here understanding is allowed to elude us. When are things not in need of translation and comprehension? When is hearing someone’s pain more than words, and more than language? Language is both theme and tool in Samkome. It introduces us to the grief ritual, frames and holds it. It is how we communicate with and for each other throughout Samkome, but language is also open to more than understanding. Through its songs and poems Samkome asks, how do I come to understand that understanding is not a prerequisite for coming together, when can understanding recede and give way to something else?

Language and Art-making

While working together with Mia during the early stages of Samkome we would talk a lot about what the work could be in its respective local contexts but we would also get lost talking more broadly about what was happening around us at the time. In our conversations the shape of Samkome would continuously change. This reminds me of questions on art making that have been with me for some time now. How, where and when does art actually happen? For a long time I had a sense that in fact it is something that happens in conversation with people, that the thing that we later create on stage is something that can only happen because of the particular social fabric and the relations between the people that are in the room together and the conversations that are consequently possible. What lived experiences do people bring to the table and how can those not become material, but rather inform, direct and shape the material that will become the work later on through conversation?

Samkome began (and continues) as a series of conversations. These conversations initially included Mia and me, and then the artist Ariel Efraim Ashbel and the local artistic collaborators[1] of Samkome. But the work is also strongly influenced by Mia’s activism at the time. How do all these conversations, inside and outside of the work itself, weave together into the understanding and expressions of a work? How do conversations become art? And perhaps more importantly then, who do we choose to talk to? And consequently, how can we be open to unplanned, accidental conversations along the way? Or, to put it differently and shift the agency, who do we listen to? Put this way, I think, we can point at something that is at the political core of both Samkome and perhaps Mia’s artistic practice as a whole; listening as a political and creative act.

The ritual of Samkome itself follows simple steps. We are asked to think of a grief we hold and write it down on a piece of paper. These will be collected and then randomly re-distributed amongst us. Thus everyone receives the grief of another person. We will be asked to read out loud that person’s grief, share it with the circle, before walking to the centre and giving the piece of paper, the grief, to the fire. Crucially, we are not told how to read that final gesture. Are we releasing the grief, are we getting rid of it? Or are we giving away the burden of holding the grief for another person? I wonder, who is that final step for? For the one who wrote on the paper, or for the one who is reading it out loud?

Personally, it is the latter that affected me the most as a participant. Writing down my grief was an abstract exercise. I, like many in the circle, share in the grief one might feel at the current political, social and ecological situation. And I experience a sort of recognition when people read out sorrows similar to mine. It feels as if we form a communion of shared grief. But it is the personal confessions of private grief that cut the deepest for me. Listening to someone share a deep and hurtful moment in their life through the voice of another sits sharply and distinctly between our general concern for the world. How do the individual and collective experiences speak to each other? How do we listen both to collective and singular mourning? How are we there for each other?

Bodies in Politics

Some of the questions that guide my artistic research into dance and protest are echoed in Samkome. What brings us together and what moves us as physical bodies? But Samkome is not a demonstration. It does not stand for a political demand or position. It does not claim an explicitly political space with its bodies. But what it does claim is neither non-political. Perhaps, it could be better described as a proto-political space. A space that sets the pre-conditions for political discourse or action to occur; a space in which bodies have a reason to come together. Samkome affirms a social, even sensorial space that insists on physical presence. Not unlike a demonstration, but without the need for explicit discourse. Its proto-political nature allows it to hold disagreement. Differences are not given to the space to be discussed, contested or resolved. They merely stand there, next to each other. Your grief might not be mine and it might actually oppose it. What Samkome offers is a space, where we have to commit to listening to each other, our similarities and differences. It prepares the ground, potentiates the emergence of a more explicitly political arena that needs us to be present. Samkome asks and attempts to practically answer; how can we come together without having to agree with each other? How do we come together to listen to each other? Samkome reminds us of the simple fact that listening comes before any kind of understanding is possible (be it in agreement or disagreement).

When it is my turn to read out that other person’s grief, to share their sorrow with the circle, I feel a strong sense of responsibility overtaking me. I am genuinely nervous to fail the person who had, randomly by nature of the ritual, decided to share their burden with me. I want to do justice to their words, their mourning, but I feel like I am stumbling over my words when I receive the microphone that amplifies my voice enough to be heard across the circle. And it feels like this stumbling continues when I have to walk up to the fire to give away again this piece of mourning. I want to know, did I do enough for the person who entrusted me with it?

I have to think of that statue in our circle again. Standing there amongst us the angel evokes in me Walter Benjamin’s essay On the Concept of History[2], where Benjamin contemplates a monoprint by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus as an illustration for what he calls the angel of history. A figure that according to Benjamin can do nothing but to witness all the unfolding catastrophes of history piling up on themselves, while a strong wind caught in its open wings is blowing it further and further away. This seems an apt analogy to what I experience during Samkome, this ritual of grief, while listening to the personal and collective pain held in the circle. But it is at the end that I realise that what I considered from my vantage point to be one figure to be actually two. What I thought was an angel with spread wings is, in fact, two figures. One standing behind the other, wrapping a blanket over the one in the front. Two people taking care of each other.

Samkome gives structure and place to the act of being there for another, by listening, attending to the other’s feelings. For me, Samkome raises questions about how we can meet each other, how we might be able to listen to each other, but also how we make art together in the first place and what art can be as a social space. It makes me wonder about what happens before we enter a space politically and how we can do so with opposing views. Ultimately, Samkome is, to me, an invitation to take care of others. I have to ask myself, are we not like angels for each other in this moment that we are there to hold each other in a time of need? Is taking care of each other, regardless of whether we know or understand each other, a way of being each other’s angels? And like the angel who is actually two, like the act of being there for each other, I wonder if Samkome does not in a very matter-of-fact way bring these angels back down to earth.

written October 2025 by Benjamin Pohlig

Editing by Janne-Camilla Lyster

Commissioned by Mia Habib Productions

[1]       The local collaborators of Samkome in Oslo were Sara Baban, Lynn Claire Feinberg, Jassem Hindi, Beate Esthersdatter Myrvold, Mariama Ndure, Marina Popovic, Marianna Sangita A. Røe, Rola Srour

[2]       Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of History. 1940.