“Wound Deep” is an electronic music performance and staged experience based on medical and anthropological research into war injuries and displacement across the Eastern Mediterranean. Being physically wounded has become an everyday reality for many people living under the distress of protracted conflicts and economic meltdowns. The collapse of healthcare, exodus of doctors, and layered exposures to environmental toxicity constrain the healing of these open, bodily wounds. The performance by medical anthropologist Omar Dewachi guides the participants through personal and collective encounters, exploring entanglements of the physical, social and symbolic registers of the wound and its healing projects: field recordings, sonic scores and documentary text. The wound is a biosocial perspective, an openness mediating the experiences of the body and a material archive of war ecologies. From “immunitas” to “communitas”, the body is made and unmade: a site of danger and rebirth.

Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Trained in medicine and anthropology, Dewachi’s work examines the impacts of decades of war and violence in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His award-winning book, “Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq” documents the untold history of the rise and fall of Iraq’s healthcare under decades of US-led interventions. His forthcoming manuscript, “When Wounds Travel”, chronicles close to a decade of ethnographic research on war and displacement across East of the Mediterranean. https://anthropology.rutgers.edu/195-people/full-time-faculty/776-omar-dewachi; https://rutgers.academia.edu/OmarDewachi

Research, Concept, Electronic Music: Omar Dewachi
Performance: Rawya El Chab
Visuals, Set Design: Lina Younes
Light Design: Matthias Rieker

The performances is part of "Bodies, un-protected"