Kaya Behkalam’s project revisits allegorical depictions of European nations embodied by female figures such as Germania, Marianne or Europa. Their symbolic postures are re-enacted by a group of Cairo-based dancers. Through improvisational appropriations they try to use their bodies as archaeological instruments, tracing both the corporeal and conceptual, utopian and violent origins of these imagined communities as well as the emancipatory potential of the allegoric depiction itself, which in its ambiguity defies monumental models and master narratives of European identity constructions.