Fragmented Return

When Huda (b. 1982) and Farah (b. 1985) first met in Gaza in 1997, neither could have anticipated that their brief musical performance at the Latin Patriarchate School, also known as Deir al-Latine, would become the catalyst for a lifelong journey.

Fragmented Return is a multimedia performance by Palestinian artists Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi, blending elements of their experiences with exile and attempts at return. Through words, music, and visuals, they weave a shared narrative of lives shaped by occupation, displacement, and borders, as well as by joy, resistance, and a quest for collective liberation.

Their intertwined experiences across cities such as Gaza, Cairo, and more recently Brooklyn, bring to the stage a retelling of their version of Palestinian diaspora and the constant struggle of belonging, all viewed through a critical political lens, delivered with humor and raw emotions.

Registration details

All guests are required to register for this event. For those who do not register in advance, we will require registration on site with proof of ID.

Flyer by Tracy Chahwan

This event is part of CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania's annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): Sound & Color.

This year, we will be unhinging from indexical representations and reorienting towards what is possible when we attune ourselves through the senses: music and sound, color and light, touch and taste. It is a call to inhabit the modality in multimodality and to embrace abstraction as we listen, learn, teach, exchange, and prototype freer conditions in the long story of life on earth. CAMRA invites a chorus of artists and writers including Sonia Sanchez, Immanuel Wilkins, Huda Asfour, Farah Barqawi, among others, who recall Christina Sharpe’s provocation that “spectacle is not repair” by attending to feeling through creative practice in research.

This event will take place in the Rainey Auditorium at the Penn Museum on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Please enter the Museum through the fully accesible . If you are walking towards the museum from campus, this means walking down South Street until the furthest end of the museum, and taking a right once you approach the garages on Convention Avenue.

Please note that parking is limited around the museum, but the museum is near the SEPTA Penn Medicine Station, several bus routes, and a short walk from 30th Street Station and University City Trolley Stops.

Host or Publisher CAMRA@Penn