michael(a) Daoud

The Insisting Body is a durational performance and publication developed over 30 consecutive days across Berlin, following one moon cycle, from 23 August to 21 September 2025.

The work begins from the understanding that violence is not only an event, but a residue, something that alters rhythm, language, and the way time is lived. Memory loops. Time folds. The body carries what history does not resolve.

Raised in Egypt, shaped by Syria, and living in Germany, I came to understand space as something temporal, marked by crossings, exile, and uneven velocities of becoming. This project emerged from that lived geography.

For thirty days, I lay still in public spaces across Berlin. Each day, a different white suit, numbered like evidence, formed a fragile membrane between body and ground. The gesture was minimal: to remain. To stay inside the hour. To allow the city to look back.

Between the sound of a tuning fork marking the beginning and the end, I did not move. That interval became the work: a choreography of stillness.

Working with analog film, each frame insisted on slowness and attention. At night, I wrote; tracing what the body had absorbed. Over time, these fragments formed an archive: a practice moving between choreography (writing movement) and chorography (writing place through the body).

The Insisting Body does not attempt to repair violence. It studies its duration.

To insist is not only to resist
it is to remain.