Palestine Teach-Outs
DAI's Palestine Teach Outs came into being, shortly after 7 October, 2023, as an urgent initiative from the part of the theory tutors and then quickly evolved into a broader platform within the DAI's framework. For the academic year 2024-2025 Palestine Teach Outs will continue to offer an improvised space for multi-facetted invocations (artistic, historical, theoretical or otherwise): IRL or online during Confluences ~ contact: gabrielle.schleijpen@dutchartinstitute.eu
DAI Confluence 2 ~ NAC in Nida, Lithuania
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #6 “Prisoners' Letters: A Plea for a Better World”
Wednesday 11 December, 2024
10:30 - 13:00
Location: Conference Room
For the 6th iteration /part 2 of our Palestine Teach Outs the tutorial team of our COOP study group Living Room: Rehearsals towards Place-making have invited Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator Dalia Taha who will join us remotely for collective reading of letters from political prisoners in Palestine. Dalia Taha dispatched part of her archive of political prisoners’ letters, offering poetic guidance on how to engage with such emancipatory literature. She explores the process of writing, receiving, and reading these letters after their dangerous journey. Through collective engagement, a crucial question arises: How do we become better readers in this world?
The session is open to all.
DAI Confluence 2 ~ NAC in Nida, Lithuania
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #6 No Communist Must Be Allowed to Remain
Friday 6 December, 2024
20:00 - 22:00
Location: Conference Room
For the 6th iteration / part 1 of our Palestine Teach Outs we haved invited Edwin Nasr who will introduce his forthcoming book project:
February 1987. The Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), in a state of existential consternation, reports through its weekly magazine Al Nidaa that several Shi’a clerics in southern Lebanon’s Nabatieh governorate have issued a religious edict urging the killing of all communists in that area, one of the party’s historic strongholds. Throughout that year, the LCP, which had been scheduled to celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of its formation, will witness the liquidation of hundreds of its fighters in Tripoli, Beirut, and the South, as well as the targeted assassination of over forty of its cadres, among them prominent Marxist intellectuals Hussein Mroueh (b. 1910) and Mahdi Amel (b. 1936). No Communist Must Be Allowed to Remain is a book project that aims to work through the multitudinous futures of 1987—somewhere among the detritus shaped through the end of the Lebanese civil wars and the persistent resurgence of its ghosts into our present, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the longue durée of Iraq’s US-led invasion and Syria’s thwarted revolutionary process, and the continued expansion of the Zionist settler-colonial project in historic Palestine. The forthcoming book expressly charts the afterlife of Lebanon’s radical Left tradition as it came to reckon with postwar power arrangements resulting in the political reorganization of Hezbollah and its mutation into a regional paramilitary force to be reckoned with. This session will address some of the core tenets of the book as well as the ways in which the events of October 7, 2023 as well as the ongoingness of the Zionist entity's genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza and aggression on Lebanon have challenged its shaping.
To be followed by Q&A
DAI Confluence 1 ~ PAF at St.Erme, France
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #5 WE NO LONGER PREFER MOUNTAINS
Monday 4 November, 2024
10:45 - 12:45
Location: Mediaroom at PAF
We welcome Inas Halabi who will screen her film We No Longer Prefer Mountains(2023) for us. We No Longer Prefer Mountains takes place in the Druze town of Dalyet el Carmel, in northern Palestine, pulling the viewer into a surreal world of geographic isolation, shrouded mysticism, and a locale shaped by co-optation, coercion, and control. Weaving together intimate engagements with members of the community, in shared domestic spaces and outdoor environments, the film sets out to explore how the inner politics of the Druze have been controlled and reshaped as a result of the establishment of Israel in 1948. The film is informed by the landscape theory (fûkeiron), a Japanese Avant Garde film movement in the 60s whereby the filmmakers posited that filming the everyday surroundings reveal the oppressive and repressively isolating landscapes and the powers at play.
To be followed by a Q&A moderated by Rachael A.Rakes
DAI Confluence 5 ~ Middelburg, the Netherlands
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #4 Wild Plants of Palestine and Japanese Knotweed: Exploring Territorial Extensions, History and Colonisation.
Monday 27 May, 2024
14:30 - 16:30
Vleeshal ~ join us if you are in Middelburg, this is a IN REAL LIFE public event
We welcome Alaa Abu Asad (DAI, 2018) for firstly, the screening of his work ‘Wild Plants of Palestine’, which follows journeys of observational tours to collect photos and information about Palestinian flora, questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”. The video-essay stands on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in the West Bank. It also addresses photography as a practice and tool of distributing and restricting information at once.
Then the event will move to the presentation of an ongoing research on unwanted species, mainly known as invasive species. The performative reading in three acts traces the history of the Japanese Knotweed plant (Fallopia Japonica), actual policies, national campaigns of combat and control, social / economic / political effects, the conflation between natural and national history, and most importantly the language (whether verbal or visual) used when talking about the plant and other invasive species. It also imagines alternative ways of living with these species via raising questions about mass production ethics, exploitative forms of economy, and a common future.
Both works will examine the political roles plants can play throughout history, beyond their aesthetic and agricultural values, exceeding the tendency of seeing them as something to be studied, looked at and researched. Plants help us understand our position in the world, showing us a way to a liveable, common future.
To be followed by a Q&A.
DAI Confluence 5 ~ Middelburg, the Netherlands
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #4
Boycott is Long-Term: A Conversation with PACBI
Sunday 26 May, 2024
18:00@ Vleeshal, Middelburg, this PUBLIC EVENT is before life audience while Omar Barghouti joins us online. Join us at Vleeshal or follow us under this LINK ).
DAI Confluence 4 ~ Essaouira, Morocco
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #3 What is the Future of Art?: A Manifesto Against the State of the World & selected poems.
Wednesday 24 April, 2024
20:30 - 22:30
Café Essaouira ~ 178, Av Maa Alaynin, Lot 4, Essaouira
This year, the Palestinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale takes the form of a manifesto, presented as an A3 Xerox pamphlet. Titled "What is the Future of Art?: A Manifesto Against the State of the World," this gesture calls for urgent action in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It confronts the stark realities shielded by nation-state rhetoric and imperial power. Accompanied by poetry, the manifesto resonates with the themes of dismantling nation-states, reclaiming land, and restoring art and poetry as essential tools of resistance.
COOP study group ~ Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Place-making will host an unpacking of this timely manifesto and invite participants to join with a selected poem about or relevant to the Palestinian struggle.
The session will begin with a word of welcome by Hosseini, activist, founder and host of Café Essaouira – a very special literary cafe & political library situated in a residential neighbourhood outside of Essaouira's Medina. Hosseini and his son join the poetry-reading by reciting a poem by Mahmoud Darwish.
DAI Confluence 4 ~ Essaouira, Morocco
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #3 Humanitarian Violence in Gaza: Open Source Methodologies and Tools for Investigating Israel's Military Campaign.
Saturday 20 April, 2024
10:15 - 11:45
Cafe Moga Style ~ Av. Lalla Aicha, Essaouira
Since 7 October 2023, Forensic Architecture has been documenting systematic patterns of violence and destruction in Gaza, focusing on the attack on life-sustaining infrastructure, such as hospitals, and mass displacement of Palestinian civilians under humanitarian measures.
DAI's How To Do Things With Theory-tutors will host Júlia Nueno for a presentation that will delve into the methodology and tools developed to respond to a humanitarian crisis at the scale and severity of the genocide in Gaza, focusing on how to keep up with pace of events, practices of legitimacy, and narrative as an object of intervention.
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #2 Militant Film from and beyond the Palestinian Liberation Struggle
DAI Confluence 3 - PAF, St. Erme, France
We welcome Subversive Film, a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels.
Their contribution comes in two parts:
Saturday 9 March, 2024
17:30 - 19:30
Film Program curated by Subversive Film
Media Room@PAF
Media Room@PAF
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #2 POLITICAL FILMAKING
Saturday 5 March, 2024
20:00 - 22:00
IZKOR means 'remember', an imperative that is imposed on Israeli society through the public educational system. During the month of April feast days and celebrations take place one after another. Passover, the celebration of freedom gained by Hebrews after slavery for the Pharaohs, marks the beginning, then festivities make place for mourning during the Holocaust Day and Memorial Day. All over the country people pay respect to the martyrs and heroes of the Holocaust and a week later to Israeli soldiers who died for their country. Independence Day is the peak of this violent succession of emotions. Memory orchestrated vigorously by all official institutions.
Film screening:"IZKOR, slaves of memory" (1990), followed by a Q & A, with the film's director Eyal Sivan
Media Room
Sunday 6 March, 2024
10:00 - 13:00
Workshop "Political Filmmaking" led by Eyal Sivan. In this workshop, Sivan will discuss his films and the filmmaking process.
Green Room
PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #1 Rethinking Statehood in Palestine
DAI Confluence 2 - NAC in Nida, Lithuania
Sunday, January 21, 2024
From 16:00 - 18.00
This was the first in a series of teach-outs on Palestine initiated by the HTDTWT tutors, which will include guest lectures, films and workshops. In this first edition, Dr.Leila Farsakh spoke about the historical and political background to the ongoing war on Gaza and its implication for the two-states solution and future of peace in the Middle East.
You can watch the registration here:
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PALESTINE TEACH OUT: #0 Introduction
DAI Confluence 1 - PAF, St. Erme in France
Friday, November 24, 2023
From 17:00 - 19.00
DAI has fully embraced the initiative from the part of several theory and COOP tutors, to host Palestine Teach Outs during each DAI Confluence of the academic year 2023-2024. The Teach Outs will include films, podcasts, texts and guest speakers (on zoom and IRL).
During the introduction days, the plans for the Palestine Teach Outs were introduced by our theory tutors.
See also DAI's evolving feed at the World-section of our home-page.