In a recent text, postcolonial scholar Nasser Abourahme discusses Zionism’s impasse and Palestinian forms of resistance where settler regimes are challenged by Palestinian insistence on habitable life despite ruination. Abourahme states that “Palestine … is the living archive of our future. But it is also the name of a renewed planetary consciousness” (Abourahme, 2024:19). Taking this idea as a point of departure, we suggest connecting anti-colonial struggles for inhabiting unsettled grounds along an imaginary meridian. Across the many different forms of narrating Palestine, its architecture and landscape, unsettled grounds are what Eyal Weizman reminds us so aptly in the new preface for the recently republished Hollow Land: soil is a prerequisite for life. It holds the resources on which life depends. Today it is ungrounded and poisoned. And with it so is life in Palestine. To reflect on the deep ties Palestinians hold with their ground and the landscape, the conversations are structured around four main themes, Stones, Seeds, Voices and Walks. The intention is to expand beyond the confines of singular projects to invite reflections on the role cultural institutions play in imagining a resistance to the disaster, locating the conversations within the political and historical framework of the region. The acts of digging, bombing, flattening and uprooting contribute to unsettle the surface on which human activity rests. In Palestine, both physical and conceptual foundations are deeply shaken when associated with the voids and cracks on the earth’s crust left behind by the genocidal destruction. In, around, and under the craters, life continues in precarious circumstances. The course, constructed along four conceptual keywords, and parallel inputs delivered by guests, readings, collective discussions, is a laboratory where participants can use their work and experiment alternative approaches and develop possible overlaps with Palestinian imaginaries. The idea is to emphasis the potential of the architectural project as research, practice and pedagogy, inhabiting the hole of the rubble, of the ruins, in search of a new ground. Using approaches such as: transversal methodologies; art practices; transdisciplinarity; participants will be invited to discuss and present work related to their own research topics to explore uncharted spaces and territories. In particular, the notion of archive, and stratigraphic inquiry will be used to work across disciplines and with different forms of knowledge, interrogating the interlink between architecture, politics, ecology, and social justice in a time of conflict.

none

Palestine ungrounded: architecture, violence and our present, is a sequence of 5 conversations curated by Tomà Berlanda. The sequence takes cue from reflections on reflections on the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, Palestine, which inform the content of a recent volume: Architecture of Commonality, Grounds for Hope, edited by Berlanda. The long history of the genesis of the Museum as an institution is the framing device for a multiplicity of voices to reflect on the role architecture plays in the orchestration of memorialization, on the significance of curatorial strategies that respond to situations of conflict, and a discussion of the blurred boundaries between architecture, landscape and land art. 1. Introductory seminar – Tomà Berlanda 2. Stones & Films – Dana Abbas/Riwaq 3. Seeds & Maps – Luzan Munayer 4. Voices & Sounds – EEU Anastas 5. Walks & The project of resistance – Yara Sharif/AfG readings – Nasser Abourhame, In tune with their time, Radical Philosophy, 2024 – Tomà Berlanda (ed.), Architecture of Commonality: Grounds for Hope, 2024 – Ilan Pappe, Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2018 – Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian walks, Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, 2007 – Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 2024 (3rd edition)

In presenza

Presentazione orale

P.D.1-1 - Gennaio

none