Petra Poelzl: The starting point of “Love is a Verb #2” is the text by the scholar Gargi Bhattacharyya “We, the Heartbroken”. She wrote it in response to a sense of political exhaustion among young activists who had stopped taking to the streets because they felt that protest and political engagement no longer made a difference—that the world was becoming so dark that, whatever we did, things would continue to spiral downward. At the same time, she argues that we need to speak about our heartbreak and vulnerability, because sharing that sense of heartbreak can become a starting point for new forms of community and solidarity. Does this idea of shared heartbreak resonate with your own work?

Kubra Khademi: I think it resonates with millions of people, especially in Afghanistan, where I come from. My generation, the generation of my mother and my grandmother, all the woman I know are all heartbroken. We have this expression that says: I keep my faith. And with a silly sign of happiness, we slap our cheeks. You know, you give pain to yourself in order to not show the enemies that you are sad, to show them that you are still strong. Because they want you to break down and disappear. For me, it is very poetic and also spiritual – first to admit the brokenness, to find others who are like us and then to talk about it in any art form. To paint of our sorrows, to paint of social political injustice we experience as a woman, as a queer person, as a refugee, as a human. 

For me personally, my life as a woman has been affected. From the very beginning, I was not wanted because I was a girl. For a family, it is always better to have a boy. Because this world is not meant for a girl. 

When I was a teenager, there were girls who wished to be a boy only because they wanted to be free. But that was never the case for me. I think it's important to embrace your own personal part in history, to recognize and respect it. To find a natural way of gaining back your dignity and to become part of a narration that should not have been told.
“We are all heartbroken” is a strong sentence, because it recognizes the sorrow of others. And it is not a passive way of dealing with it, it is very active.

PP: Jolie, how did you read the text?

JN: Yeah, it's as you say, Kubra, that many people are in that situation. I'm a black woman, which makes it even more complex – being a woman plus being black. As you know, they pay us less than men. In Congo, where I come from, they sometimes pay women with nothing. When I came to Europe, I thought I was okay. But the struggles are similar. You have to always fight for your life. 

“MBOK’ELENGI”, the piece that I will show in the festival in October, is about finding pleasure within a bad situation. The people in Congo are suffering; the economy is very bad. How can you find moments of pleasure, and also moments of sharing and moments of talking about the situation – because otherwise it's going to be really hard.

In the text, I also liked the idea that my pain is different than your pain. Talking about it is a solution to heartbreak. Sometimes, it is just a touch, just a smell, just a rhythm, and a belief in new things that brings peace to each other.

PP: At the end of “MBOK’ELENGI”, you invite the entire audience onto the stage to dance together, creating this intense and beautiful moment of collective movement. In fact, both of your practices begin with the body. Jolie, what do you think the body can express, communicate or make possible that language or words cannot?

JN: Yes, my body holds my memories, and it also holds all the emotions that I bring on stage that help my body to communicate and to believe in the future. When I start making a piece, I really try to let go. Letting go is really important, because we have this gaze around us all of the time, there is a lot of judgment. When I work with my dancers, I tell them: we don't judge our movement. If you start to judge or question yourself, you block yourself from creating. I express myself with all the emotions, that can be crying, anger, happiness. It can be all these things that bring my emotion to the stage, to help my body communicate.

PP: Kubra, the body plays a central role in your work, both in your performances and in your visual art. What does the body mean to you as an artistic medium? And how did you come to understand it as a place where personal and collective history, vulnerability and resistance come together?

KK: I was trained as a visual artist, and back in those days, I started exploring things in an academic environment. But somehow, I still ended up using my body, without any intention. I was exploring my body in front of a camera, and when I put the camera aside and looked around me, a lot of things were making sense to me. I realized how important the body itself is. Since then, I have used my body to perform or to intervene in public spaces. Through exploring I also realized how vulnerable the body is in social or political aspects.

In the first performance I did in a public space, I took objects from the room I was living in and installed them in a middle of a motorway. I chose a motorway because of the speed of the vehicles. This installation was very detailed, I had tea there, took naps. But it was dangerous. One car was passing me only with a 20-centimeter distance. In that moment, I was thinking: This is how it should be, because in this performance, I was the object and the subject at the same time. I was experiencing it by being part of it. This experience was like coming back to a collective memory, and also coming back to myself.

I was born in 1989, it was the end of Soviet war. My family had to flee because we have been persecuted in Afghanistan for being Hazaras [a Persian-speaking and predominantly Shia ethnic group living mainly in the central highlands of Afghanistan, ed.]. My mother said just going from Kabul to the west of Iran took them several months. But they managed. In the performance, it was me drinking my tea in a situation that I created and it has so much value to me. Because in a situation of war, it’s like this: in one minute you drink your tea and in the next you’re under the bomb and your life is over. When we do live performances, we revisit our own history, personal and also collective history. 

Coming back to the question of using the body. It has never been a choice, but it is so natural to use the body. I do remember when I started painting, I only painted women. I appreciate myself as a woman and I like my sisters. But it was naturally there. I paint a woman who is giving birth to a girl and that girl while being born is giving birth to another girl. As women, we live in a world which has not been meant for us. No one was waiting for a girl to be born, to appreciate her life as a human. Even my mother was never been thanked by my father that she made it for nine months. Because it is the work of a woman. She was even cursed after having girls. And my mother is not the only one. There are millions in this country. I think I'm lucky. I'm lucky that I'm painting these life-size women. They are standing there, in the front lines of that every-day war on women in my country. So yeah, the body is everything.

PP: Jolie, “MBOK’ELENGI” stands for pleasure and joie de vivre, but also for survival. You have described how deeply the political and social realities of Congo are embedded in the piece. How can dance become a political language for you – a way of speaking about violence, exploitation and injustice, while also creating a space in which people are willing to listen?

JN: It holds a lot of power. In Congo, there was a war taking place when I was younger. When I was seven years old and my mother asked me to go buy something, I saw dead bodies on my way. So I had a difficult time in Congo. I can say, I didn't leave my life once, I left it two or three times, I'm a survivor. Still, people are really poor there, sometimes from morning till evening, they have nothing to eat. And on top of all this, the land is being exploited. Mineral is being taken from the earth without money coming in, without taxes, without permissions. People from Europe and from the US just come and take, they feel like they have this power. Sometimes we start to believe in that power and let them take it. My arts is a way of saying: you took so much from my land, but it is enough now. That’s why my art is political. If I can say something, I will say it. Some years ago, I couldn't do a piece like that, saying: “Hey people, did you know the mineral in your Rolexes, in your phones and computers come from my country, where children have to work in the mines and sometimes a shaft collapses and children die?” It was really hard to visit the east of Congo, seeing that people there are being treated like slaves. People think that there is no slavery anymore, but it still exists, in East Congo.

This situation is created by the politicians. People there are hungry and poor, they don’t study or have a degree, they don’t have work and don’t question the political situation. Many people drink a lot, so they are covered by a veil and don't see anything. The younger generation doesn’t see where they are going. I also couldn’t see where I was going. That’s why I made “MBOK’ELENGI” – I was sick of the situation. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to say stop. Sometimes I was creating art with this anger. But when you start to scream or yell, people don't listen. And that's why in these moments, I’m holding on to my texts. And then I'm talking about the situation in Congo with a softness. And I think that many people when they saw the piece, they go outside, they talk a lot about these texts. They are touched and surprised because they thought I wanted to yell at them because they are white or because they are the problem. No, the problem is somewhere else. But let's talk about it. Let's just see things in another way. My father, who is a Christian pastor, asked me: Why do you want to be a dancer? I told him that actually, I didn’t just want to dance. I also wanted to talk. I want my body to talk about a situation and also to use my body in a political way. I can choose to be naked in a piece that cannot be shown in Congo and be a strong woman saying things. I was really fighting for my dream to be a dancer. He said: if we see you dancing again, we will break your legs. It was so hard. But later he started to understand the way I was creating, and he was like: Oh wow, it’s like watching a movie. My pieces are like movies, but you can also smell them or feel their energy. When entering the space, I want people to feel all the emotions.

PP: Kubra, the naked female body appears again and again in your performances, paintings and textile works, often with sensuality and eroticism. You have spoken of the female body in your work not simply as a naked body, but as a free body. What does this freedom mean to you, and where does this way of seeing the female body come from?

KK: After seeing my art for the first time, many people have this first quick impulse: Ah, you're from Afghanistan where the Taliban are forcing women to wear burqas and you want to liberate them. And I say: I don’t liberate women only by making art, that’s a long way. 

When I was five or six years old, my mom took my four sisters and me to meet her mother for the first time. I met lots of women and children in a hamam there. I was so overwhelmed, seeing all these bodies changing clothes or taking a bath in the house, behaving like sisters. Seeing naked female bodies didn’t have anything to do with pornography, there was no judgement from the male gaze. There was a divinity in that space. When I came back home, I took my sketchbook and I drew these women. And when I was finished, I hid the page under the carpet. Maybe I was thinking that I was keeping it safe. But later, my mother found it when she was cleaning the house. And then she beat me. 

PP: You also draw on your own family history in your work. In your series “Giving Birth”, you repeatedly depict women giving birth. 

KK: One day, when I was a little girl, I cried over something stupid, and my grandmother said to me: “Women don't cry, because they have to be ready for any situation. Sometimes you leave the house in the morning as one person and come back home in the evening as two persons.” I didn't understand it at all then. It took me many years and hearing a lot of stories. My mother is a very good narrator, and so is my grandmother. They both are illiterate, but they feel a strong necessity of telling stories. When my grandmother got married, she continued working in the field. When the time was coming and the cramps began, she took off her pants, squatting, started pressing and gave birth to her child in the field, cutting the umbilical cord with her scythe. She had prepared some cloths before, so she wrapped the child, put it aside and continued working. When she came home that evening, she was two persons. And she continued working, cleaning the house, making food, baking bread. She gave birth to all of her children like that, also my mother. 

In many of my drawings, there is a woman standing, giving birth. By showing the story of my grandmother and the way I was raised, I remember the faith from which I come. For me, it's a choice not to have children, but I want to make sure my body is devoted only to the arts. But I think I'm carrying the same necessity of speaking about my personal story. I am lucky I am not illiterate and that I even have a visual talent. As an international artist, I have the responsibility to speak about my ancestors, but also about sexual violence and violence inside the family, although there is so much shame. Girls are supposed to feel so ashamed. But shame has to change sides – I love Gisèle Pelicot for that!

PP: The ideas of the author Ece Temelkuran were also very important to the conception of the festival. In her book “Nation of Strangers”, she reflects on how authoritarianism, exile and the political situation we are living in can make people feel like strangers in places and communities they once called home – geographically, but also emotionally and politically. You have both lived and worked in different parts of the world. Do you think that art can become a place of belonging when you no longer feel at home in the place you come from, or when you become a stranger there? Jolie, what does home mean to you today?

JN: Well, home… I was 18 when I first came to Europe. After that, when I came back to Kinshasa, I started to feel a distance with my family and the people there. Because they start to see you as a white person somehow. I started to question myself: Is this still my place, my home? I didn’t feel safe there anymore. When I started to study in Parts in Brussels, I was the only black woman there, and I could not speak English. You have already that distance with people because you don't speak English. So I felt a huge distance to the people there, I couldn’t connect. 

But after school, when I was working in the studio, creating, I started to I feel at home again. That’s what my fist solo show “Nkisi” that I presented at HAU in 2024 is about: that strong woman and that witch in Congo that you cannot talk about. My great-grandmother was this witch called “Nkisi” who did many things for the king, taking care of him. Without her, the king would have been nothing. For such a long time I believed that women in Africa are nothing without a man. But then I started to see all these strong women in history – a history that wasn’t written down, it was only told. When I started my research, I sat with my uncle and he knew much about the history – because he’s a man. They don’t tell history to the young women because they fear that women become too confident or arrogant. So when I came to Congo to show that piece, I was a bit scared talking about these things on stage as a woman, breaking this taboo, but it was very powerful. People were shocked and they were really happy to see this show. 

The spaces I create start to feel like my home, also when I travel the world. But in Congo, I don’t feel at home anymore, because I live in Switzerland with my man, people in Congo see me as someone who is just visiting. And here, people also give me the feeling that as a black woman I don’t belong. So I have to create my own space. I bring my friends from Congo, we put music on, we talk and laugh and scream, and yes, I feel at home.

PP: Kubra, how about you? 

KK: I don’t really know what home is, because I have never lived somewhere safe. We have a sad expression that has become also a way of raising girls: Even when a girl is sleeping, she should be aware of what's happening around her. Imagine you are living in a house, but it never feels like home, because you never feel safe there in your skin.

I am a rescued artist. In Afghanistan, I was condemned to death and I am still being persecuted. Wherever I travel and there is an announcement of my exhibition or performance, there could always be someone from my country “who wants to go to heaven” by killing me. Only after psychotherapy, I realized that I live in a permanent fear of persecution. 11 years ago, when I had I just left my country, I was attacked in the metro by an Afghan man. Before, I grabbed the change of being rescued, I was saved, the police came with me to the plane, someone took my hand, and I was brought to Paris – but does your body really feel okay? I was in shock. 

My art makes me unsafe more and more. But I will continue. I had an exhibition in 2020 in Paris, that show focused on conversations between women in my culture. Many women in my culture have the habit of creating safe spaces for women where no man can hear what we are talking about. It's very subversive, very poetic and very it's very erotic. But also very direct. Many sexual fantasies and desires between women are being discussed. Many of these expressions were in my show. And I was receiving insults, even from French people, like a young white woman. And then my gallery was receiving threats that someone wants to burn it down. The gallery had never experienced this before, but for me, these things are normal. When my gallery called and asked me to come by, I was expecting that they wanted to end working with me. But they wanted to know if I was okay and asked me to go to the police. 

PP: It's dark times we are living in. This brings us back to the text from the beginning, “We, the heartbroken”. How do we resist the temptation to retreat. It is tempting in these times to withdraw into private life because of exhaustion or despair and hide at home. How are you imagining new worlds when this world feels so increasingly broken? What keeps you going?

KK:  What keeps me going? Continuing making art until I die.

JN: My answer to your question is just one word: Art. Keeping on dancing, keeping on moving.