Sihame Haddioui

Country: Brussels

Biography

Sihame Haddioui is a writer and performer, and a former Alderwoman for Culture, Gender Equality and Equal Opportunities in Schaerbeek (2018–2024). A former production worker in the pharmaceutical industry, her work mainly explores memory, transmission, and the power relations that shape and move through our bodies.
With a background in stand-up comedy, she is also a member of Transfocollect, with whom she has co-written and performed in several projects, including Lone Wolves (Haider Al Timimi, het TheaterFestival, 2017), Bal Mosquee(Kloppend Hert, Ghent), and Trigger of Happiness (Ana Borralho and João Galante, 2018).
In 2025, she created and performed Exhibit a, directed by Ilyas Mettioui (Les Halles de Schaerbeek, 2025), which received the Maeterlinck Award for Best Discovery of the 2024–2025 season. She is also completing her first literary essay, Rendre Corps, to be published on 2 September 2026 by Les Liens qui Libèrent in Paris.
Protocol(e) Point Zéro is her second solo performance, scheduled for spring 2028 and produced by Les Halles de Schaerbeek. She is both the writer and performer of the piece.

Exhibit a

Exhibit a is an obsessive investigation. I collect fragments of embodied memory from my family and turn them into “exhibits”, almost as if I were gathering evidence of our existence.

Exhibit a is a performance based on live writing and silent reading. Throughout the piece, the text is written in real time and projected for the audience to read. Instead of speaking, the performer writes; instead of listening, the audience reads. This shift changes the usual relationship between performer and spectator and redirects attention away from the performing body towards the act of writing itself.
The performance explores embodied memory, working-class experience and the traces that work, family and social structures leave on the body. Silence functions as a dramaturgical device: not as an absence, but as a way of changing how these stories can be perceived. Like the painkillers that structure and name different parts of the performance, silence does not erase pain, but alters the way it can be felt and made visible.
Exhibit a is a project conceived, written and performed by Sihame Haddioui, directed by Ilyas Mettioui, with the staging developed through close artistic collaboration between them.