2024 - 2025 FACTORY student led: ASSEMBLING ON PALESTINE V: The Throw

ASSEMBLING ON PALESTINE V: The Throw

MAY 26, 2025

Led by Ivor Glavaš & Despina Sanida Crezia 

When: 16:30 - 17:30 

Starting Location: Outside Vleeshal 

A rehearsal of the embodiment of throwing. Throwing the only thing left to us, or even throwing away our burdens.Throwing as an action of liberation and self-determination. Throwing as an embodied negation of oppression. Embracing the absurdity.

From Diego Agullós Dangerous Dances:

"Throwing, first of all, is an expression of a force, a

capacity (and therefore a power) to cause change

and movement, to produce displacement, and to

change the position of things. Throwing implies an

impulse, a propulsion and an effort to overcome

a distance between two things. The throw allows

the thrower to reach something that is not him

and that stands far away (e.g. an enemy). What is

thrown is the pro-jectile: something thrown forth

= pro (forward) + iacere (to throw). The path of a

projectile is called tra-jectory, throwing across = tra:

trans (across) + icere: to throw."

Staring place for this student led is Palestinian poetry, which will be red on a 1h walk, together finding momentum.

MARCH 23, 2025 

ASSEMBLING ON PALESTINE IV: Palestinian lullabies for memory and resistance

Led by Olfa Arfaoui, Sarmistha Bose & Tuba Kılıç

When: 20:30 - 22:30 

Location: SPEL (room TBA)

This Factory is the fourth edition of the student-led session Assembling on Palestine.

Assembling on Palestine is a series of workshops where we come together to share ideas and reflect on how we can continue learning, teaching, and gathering around Palestine in meaningful ways.

We invite you to revisit your childhood memories while exploring the power of Palestinian lullabies التَهْويدة أو التهليلة أو الهدهدة أو الليلوة and sharing other berceuses from our early years. Lullabies are poems, songs, and prose, lovingly chanted by parents, grandparents, and family members to soothe children into peaceful sleep and joyful dreams.

Together, we will perform, read, sit in silence, enjoy tea and sweets, and delve into our childhood memories—embracing lullabies as forms of care, memory, and resistance.

We will dive deep into songs from feminist resistance to contemporary artists, including Rafeef Ziadah, Rim Banna, Reem Kelani, and others.

As we gather during the holy month of Ramadan—a time of self-reflection, tolerance, empathy, and generosity in the Muslim community—we embrace values of kindness, patience, forgiveness, charity, and tolerance.

Rafeef Ziadah's 2011 poem We Teach Life, Sir continues to resonate in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response.

And I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions.

But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?

Pause.

I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza.

Patience has just escaped me.

Pause. Smile.

We teach life, sir.

Rafeef, remember to smile.

Pause.

We teach life, sir.

We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky.

We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies.

We teach life, sir.

But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits.

And just give us a story, a human story.

You see, this is not political.

We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story.

Don’t mention that word “apartheid” and “occupation”.

This is not political.

You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.

How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?

How about you?

Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun?

Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood.

But they felt sorry.

They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza.

So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject.

And these are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied.

And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead.

And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile “not exotic”, “not terrorist”.

And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead.

Is anyone out there?

Will anyone listen?

I wish I could wail over their bodies.

I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do.

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre

And let me just tell you, there’s nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this.

And no sound-bite, no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life.

No sound-bite will fix this.

We teach life, sir.

We teach life, sir.

We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir

You can listen to an hour-long collection of poems, songs, and traditional melodies: https://www.nts.live/shows/miss-modular/episodes/miss-modular-1st-december-2023

Additional References:

https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=76

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuGhF_FhWKw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLAY08nMekU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TVG9lRQXc

JANUARY 10, 2025

ASSEMBLING ON PALESTINE III: On Fiction and Poetry

Led by Agnese Spolverini, Hannah van der Schaaf, Sara Alberani

When: 20:30 - 22:30 

Location: Conference Room

This Factory is the third edition of the student-led session Assembling on Palestine.

Assembling on Palestine is a series of workshops where we come together to share ideas and reflect on how we can continue learning, teaching, and assembling around Palestine in meaningful ways.

For this session we propose to read fiction and poetry, to explore Palestinian literature and how living under genocide, apertheid and occupation reflects on these literary productions.

We will read narratives from the publication Reworlding Ramallah: Short Science Fiction Stories from Palestine, edited by Callum Copley and poems by Palestinian poets such as Mohammed El Kurd, Mosa Abu Toha, Hiba Abu Nada, and others.

The session will be open to literary proposals from participants, as a means of disseminating and sharing knowledge on Palestine by reading together.

DECEMBER 9, 2024

ASSEMBLING ON PALESTINE II: Threads of Learning and Language

Led by Annette Rodriguez Fiorillo, Olfa Arfaoui, Qiaoling Cai & Tuba Kılıç

When: 15:00 - 17:00

Location: TBA

This workshop is the second edition of the Assembling on Palestine student-led series. In the first session at PAF, we came together to share ideas and reflect on how we can continue learning, teaching, and assembling around Palestine in meaningful ways.

For this second edition, we are focusing on unlearning colonial ideas embedded in education and reconnecting with forms of knowledge rooted in our own experiences and communities. Inspired by Palestinian educator Munir Fasheh’s reflections on decolonizing education, this workshop invites you to explore six profound Arabic words:

Mujaawarah, yuhsen, muthanna, aafiyah, howiyyah, and ahaali.

Olfa Arfaoui will guide us through the workshop using the text as a reference, helping us unpack the deeper meanings behind these words. Together, we’ll discuss these words, reflect on their meanings, and connect them to our own experiences, languages, and local contexts. Alongside this, the workshop includes a Tadreez (Palestinian embroidery) session, where we’ll stitch patterns inspired by these words onto fabric zines. With this, we would like to offer a space to reflect, create, and weave our collective insights into tangible form.

NOVEMBER 5, 2024

Assembling on Palestine I

Led by Sara Alberani

When: 20:30 - 22:00

Location: Music Room