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 invocations (artistic, historical, theoretical or otherwise): IRL or online during Confluences ~ contact: gabrielle.schleijpen@dutchartinstitute.eu

Palestine Teach Out #5 Inas Halabi

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 

Palestine Teach-Out# 4 ~ Alaa Abu Asad webpage-banner

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.

PalTO#4 Omar Barghouti

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 ).

76 years of the systematic enclosure and erosion of the Palestinian people, 7 months of  genocide, 20 years since the founding of the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS)  movement. Reflecting on these temporalities we meet with Omar Barghouti, co-founder of BDS, to discuss the continuous hard work of organising for cultural boycott and divestment. We ask: How do we gather during heightened moments of intensity to cultivate and think about organizing for liberation in the long term?
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To be followed by a student led Q&A 

03_PalestineTeachOut_Collective Reading

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. 

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 and his son join the poetry-reading by reciting a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Photo: Nikos Doulos. April 2024.

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. 

190424_PalestineTeachOut-webpage

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. 

PalestineTeachOut_2_WebPage

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

1. Land Day (Japanese adaptation)
dir. Ghaleb Shaath, 50 min, 1983 (original 1977)
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The original film was shot around the time of the first commemoration of Land Day in 1977, and it documents the different events taking place in Palestinian cities and villages of the Lower Galilee region in occupied Palestine. The remembrance events are used to garner witness accounts to what happened in 1976 during the demonstrations against the continuous land grab of Palestinian land. Other interviews with mayors and heads of local councils provide context and a history of Land Day. The screened version is the Japanese adaption of the original “Land Day”, produced six years later with additional historical context of the Palestinian struggle and Land Day itself.
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2. Scenes of Occupation from Gaza
dir. Moustafa Abu Ali, 13 min, 1973
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A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. The film won the prize as best film at the Damascus Film Festival in 1973 and was screened at multiple festivals. It was the only film produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 came to the Palestine Cinema Institute.
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3. Kufr Shuba
dir. Samir Nimr, 35 min, 1975
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An iconic work produced by the Palestine Cinema Institute in Beirut, the film is directed by the Iraqi filmmaker Samir Nimr, and is titled after the small village of Kufr Shuba in South Lebanon, the site of solidarity between the Lebanese people and the Palestinian resistance following a battle that has devastated the village. The film is a poetic testament to the steadfastness of people, a liberation struggle and their love for their land.
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Sunday 10 March, 2024
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16:30 - 18:30
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Today we welcome Reem Shilleh for a remote lecture during which she will talk about how the films that we watched yesterday, were produced by film units and bodies that were operating under the different political and militant wings of the Palestinian revolutionary movement 1968-82. The copies we are seeing here are part of the Tokyo Reels collection, which will also be described and discussed in this session.

Media Room@PAF  

Palestine Teach Out#2 Eyal Sivan

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

Eyal Sivan on a Q&A following the screening of 'IZKOR, slaves of memory (1990)'. PAF (St.Erme), 5 March 2024. Photo credit: Nikos Doulos.

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-outs #1

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: 

Dr. Leila Farsakh online talk Rethinking Statehood in Palestine for the first iteration of Palestine Teach Outs. Photo credit: Egija Inzule. Nida, January 2024.

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TEACH OUTS general banner website

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).

Palestine Solidarity Teach Out ~ How To Do Things With Theory Tutors at PAF, St. Erme. November 2023. Photo-credit: Jacq van der Spek

During the introduction days, the plans for the Palestine Teach Outs were introduced by our theory tutors.

Palestine Teach Outs

See also DAI's evolving feed at the World-section of our home-page.