Please RSVP below for this online event, taking place on 28th April 7pm (London time).

Rouzbeh Shadpey talks about the ‘missile pill’ – cameras that are ingested to survey gut health – and their origin as technologies of Israeli combat. M2A is a lecture performance about biomedical warfare. The performance examines missile-pills, drawing a correlation between Palestinian necropolitics (dictating the life of some, and the death of others) and the biopolitics (power and the individual’s bodily autonomy) of the Global North. Conceived as such, the missile-pill becomes an apparatus that is visceralised as a weapon that invades both the organs of human life, and the land.

M2A deploys the PillCam as a poetic mapping of the stomach: an affective and material space where Palestinian injury and death is processed in a ‘minimally invasive’ medical procedure that maintains Israeli-European-American gut health. Refusing the myth that this camera is ever excreted, M2A follows the flight of missile-pills into white visceral folds to ask: What are the physiological traces of mnemonic violence and how are they digested?

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an adisiciplinary artist and musician with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. His work explores (de)colonial pathophysiologies of illness and weariness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of neuroimaging, diagnostics, and fatigue. He currently lives in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.

Image 1 and 2: Courtesy of Rouzbeh Shadpey. Image 3: Portrait Rouzbeh Shadpey. Courtesy of the artist.