Trauma Then, Trauma Now examines the embodied and intergenerational legacies of the Algerian Civil War (1991–2002), situating contemporary psychic rupture within longer colonial and postcolonial histories of violence.

Developed through archival research and performance-based inquiry, the work responds to the material and environmental aftermath of the conflict, including the large-scale forest burnings that accompanied counterinsurgency operations. These scorched landscapes function as both historical record and metaphor - sites where political violence and ecological devastation converge.

Created in collaboration with dramaturg Illyr, the filmed performance employs gesture as a method of reprocessing memory. Drawing on principles associated with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), the choreography disrupts linear recollection, allowing the body to move through repetition, rupture, and recalibration.

Rather than narrativising conflict, the work positions performance as a site of somatic investigation - interrogating how colonial trauma persists across bodies, landscapes, and generations, and how embodied practice might offer alternative forms of witnessing and reframing.