Against Forgetting: Exploring poetic gestures of return(ing) to the land in Palestine.

Over several phases and centering around memory, resistances, and imaginaries — this project intends to examine the erasures undertaken by settler-colonialism and the subsequent practices of resistance to that erasure, by exploring ways of relating to and cultivating the land through generative acts of resistance rooted in issues of seeds, soil and popular pedagogies. The main objective is to interlace the reactivation of collective memories with multiple forms of storytelling and critical remembrance drawing from notions of the undercommons and fugitivity, collaborative grassroots filmmaking methodologies and practices of critical fabulation, to inform artistic gestures and conversations envisioning post-colonial and land-centered imaginaries. As a starting point, this project experiments with developing decolonial aesthetics and forms grounded in lived realities. It also looks into facilitating moments of encounter and congregation in and with the landscape through walking, alongside exploring filmmaking and walking as subversive forms of re-relating to the land and of re-worlding? Structured around the Palestinian agricultural calendar, the project unfolds through different strands; a speculative documentary located primarily in Om Sleiman Community Farm capturing histories and moments shaping current sociopolitical and ecological movements; a participative digital sound archive encompassing personal cartographies and sounds of a fading landscape; a series of guided pedagogical walks, and finally collaborative multi-lingual journal.

Keywords:PALESTINA, LAND

Disciplines:Documentary film, Choreography, Social and relation art

Project type:Collaboration project