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”From a Dream” is a performance by Elena Poka, realized in Palestine on 6 May.

Emerging from the terrain of dream, the work unfolds as a ritual of transformation. A woman walks through the streets and, gradually, becomes a deer.

A small group of additional performers follows the deer, voicing through loudspeakers words and phrases drawn from Mural by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Moving between encounter and apparition, she visits places across the city, speaks with those she meets, and listens. As a deer, she enters the everyday life of the city
as both witness and presence—at once vulnerable and alert, familiar and estranged.

The performance inhabits a space where dream and reality become indistinguishable. It traverses states of fear and tenderness, violence and refuge,
threat and protection. The act of metamorphosis becomes a meditation on the human desire to escape imposed identities while remaining bound to the conditions that shape existence.

As the deer moves through the urban landscape, the work reflects on the invisible boundaries that govern social and political life. It asks what it means to inhabit a body exposed to power, to navigate a world where freedom and restriction coexist, and to seek forms of belonging amid uncertainty.

At its core, From a Dream is an exploration of fragility: the fragility of the human condition, of trust, of relationships, and of the delicate agreements that allow us to live together. Through a simple yet archetypal gesture of becoming-other, the performance opens a poetic space in which vulnerability is revealed not as weakness, but as a fundamental condition of being.

The work unfolds over the course of an entire day in public and site-specific locations, weaving itself into the rhythms of the city and the lives of those who encounter it.
Like a dream remembered upon waking, it lingers between presence and absence, reality and imagination, leaving behind traces of another possible way of seeing.