Join us for a collective reading session and launch of Bouchra Khalili’s newly published book, The Circle: Timeline for a Constellation. The publication explores the enduring legacy of the Arab Workers Movement (MTA) and its theatre troupes Al Assifa and Al Halaka.

The MTA theatre troupes’ pioneering provocation to imagine how performance and storytelling can become forces for civic transformation culminated in the 1974 presidential candidacy of Djellali Kamal. At a time when migrant communities in France were silenced under threat of expulsion, Kamal’s candidacy became a public performance, declaring against the denial of migrant rights and imagining a vision of transnational citizenship.

This gathering invites participants to read aloud selections from interviews, testimonies and conversations featured in the publication, including voices of surviving members who organised with the MTA.

In reading these words aloud together, we honour and celebrate the stories that began with undocumented workers who dared to imagine belonging in their own terms – stories that continue to resonate today.

In collaboration with Book Works.

All welcome. No prior reading is required.