COOP ~ The Salt of the Earth from Day to Day

Seminar 4: 14 - 16 April 2026

“What is buried deep in everything I hear are not whispers of some ghosts, but the unvoiced longing toward a truer world.” - Haytham Al-Wardany, Labor of Listening 

Building on the themes, experiences, and readings from our previous confluences on issues related to land and water, this gathering turns its focus toward responding to our shared resources through making and working together. The confluence builds on our ongoing collective process in preparation for the upcoming summit. Including, three sessions led by our guest artist Tewa Barnosa, alongside two student-led sessions, the COOP is invited to deeply engage with prompts and subjects that were part of The Salt of the Earth trajectory.

During the sessions with Tewa Barnosa, we will oscillate from within the African Mediterranean and the Sahara as sites of fugitive and untamed resistance and encounter, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems rooted in the voice, the body, the oral, and the ephemeral. Central to the conversations, listening sessions, sound wandering and field work during the workshop is the relationship between land and water imaginaries and interspecies relations despite the colonial continuum. By looking into and beyond themes of return, loss, remembrance, extinction, survival, reclamation, refusal, extraction and regeneration that are connected to non-linear events and intangible beings, be it a sacred wind in the planetary ecosystem, an extinct species of plants that still echos, fragmented and manipulated narratives situated between the historical, mythological, political and personal.

The sessions are guided by embodied transmission through (Kashkoul) as a medium in which we transcribe text, sounds and graphical scores that evoke notions and questions around interrupted history, possible futurity and contested methods of making meaning in a neo-colonial reality. We’ll be questioning and reflecting on how to position ourselves and our emancipatory work and labor in an ongoing spatial complexity where time is stolen, crossing is controlled and collective and individual temporality is ruptured. We address fracture and fugitivity within the invisible contexts of our localities, departing from Barnosa’s input relating to Libya’s past and present, that interwines with the African continent and the Arab region at large. 

***

Day 1: 

Morning 

10:30 - 13:00

Check-in: Tea/coffee & introduction to the three-day confluence

11:30 - 12:00 COOP summit introduction by Flip and Peter 

12:00 - Introduction with COOP guest artist Tewa Barnosa

  • Sharing performance excerpts: In Yesterday’s Forecasts, 2025 & The Moon Above The Forlocks, 2025. Students are invited to bring a sonic object, poems, a piece of music, proverbs, photographs or offerings. 

Afternoon 

14:00 - 19:00

Kashkoul of Collective Resistance: Session with Tewa Barnosa

In the first session, we visit (Kashkoul of Collective Resistance, 2020) a zine produced collaboratively during the siege of Tripoli between 2019-2020, a collage of words, poems, photographs, cooking recipes, songs shared by people living under bombardment. We look into the history of Kashkoul as a practice in the Arab world ranging from newspapers to artist books and militant posters. The Kashkoul as a medium invites us to gather notes, thoughts, stories and sketches that we transform to sound scores and graphical notations.

We move between the recited and written transmissions, as we engage in reading and listening to a collection of poems by the survivors of the Libyan concentration camps during the Italian colonial period between 1928 - 1942. Oral literature is understood as a relational archive, a living testimony of ongoing liberation struggles against the backdrop of land theft and weaponisation of water infrastructures.

We watch (Invisible Sounds / Sonido Invisible, 13’ min, 2025) a two-channel audio-visual installation created in collaboration with the communities who collect and recycle metal in Barcelona, communities which are denied their human rights to work and housing upon arrival in Europe and many of whom hail from the African diaspora.

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00 

Self-led session by Aimee phillips

'Through working with salt, water and flower this student led will tune into the COOP’s interest in the relationships of land and water as formative resources. By combining these three ingredients one makes a dough that, after sculpted, can be baked in an oven to harden like a clay.

The student-led is inspired by our previous confluence in Matera where we lingered on bread baking, fountains, wells and the underground water infrastructures of the Sassi. Furthermore it is informed by two works of the artist Jumana Manna ‘Old Bread International’ (2022) and ‘Cache Series’ (2018-2023) where Manna draws inspiration from the khabya, a once commonly used structure for grain storage across the Levant and the practise of laying leftover bread on the street as an offering to be taken. Both works revolve around exploring the tension between preservation and ruination.’

***

Day 2: 

Morning 

10:30 - 13:00 

Revisiting our Magical Possibilities document, inspired by the prompts and exchange of our COOP together with Jumana Emil Abboud, we initiate our preparations for the summit. Working together and our brainstorming process is to lay the group’s common ground of what we will offer in Matera.

Afternoon 

14:00 - 19:00

We start the second part of the workshop with a one hour sonic lecture by Tewa Barnosa, merging soundscapes, textures, rhythms and vocalities practiced communally across traditionsof North African Arab, Amazigh and Tuareg folklore, rooted in land reclamation, seasonal harvest and anti-colonial struggle. We consider how poetry and protest are intertwined in communal oral literature and chants in relation to labour and myth-making, stories and scenographies of stones, seeds, plants and places. 

Building on the discussions and reflections from the sonic lecture and film, field work will take place outdoors. Guided by the water bodies in Breda, we tune into the water and urban landscape, what sounds and knowledge are we able to encounter and what of that remain inaudible? What kind of prompts, frequencies and messages are we able to receive and transmit? Considering the position of the field recorder in a multiplicity of roles, intentions, emotions and offerings that we transcribe, draw and compose into the kashkoul.

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00 

Self-led session by Rana 

This session proposes a collective drawing exercise that reflects on our relationship to images, particularly in relation to questions that emerged during previous confluences. It builds on a performative work developed by Rana Kelleci as a response to the representation of displaced Syrian populations in the media.

Opening with a short introduction (15 minutes), Rana shares about the context of the work Repost, including selected documentation. This is followed by a guided drawing exercise (25 minutes), where participants place tracing paper over their phone screens and trace images sourced from news platforms or specific hashtags. This session concludes with a group debrief and discussion (20 minutes), aiming to create a space for reflecting on how we engage with violent images from the position of the witness.

***

Day 3: 

Morning 

10:30 - 13:00

Continuation of the Magical possibilities document:COOP summit preps

Afternoon 

14:00 - 16:00 

Working with the notations, graphical scores and sound recordings from the Field Kashkoul, and building on the previous sessions, we wrap up the workshops in a parallel play between collaging, compiling the Kashkoul of the confluence and a sonic improvisation/harvest.

16:00 - 17:00 (TBC)

Radio episode on Radio Al-Hara, produced by Erik Peters, Jip Van Der Hek and Sarmistha Bose in collaboration with The Salt of The Earth COOP

17:30 - 19:00

[COOP summit doc drafting]

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00 

Wrapping up: a conversation around the confluence & our summit preps.

  • Signing up for the radio contribution, chronicles, and self-led sessions for the next confluence.

***

References: 

Seminar 3: 9 - 11 March 2026

The Mother of All Fountains of Matera

During the three-day confluence in Matera, The Salt of the Earth COOP works closely with artist Jumana Emil Abboud. Through a sequence of study sessions including walking, poetry writing, site-specific exercises, readings, and film screenings, the group engage with sites in Matera connected to our shared focus on land and water. Here, water comes into focus as a relational force that shapes geographies, communities, and imaginaries, carried through storytelling, folktales, and other narrative forms.

Jumana’s study sessions unfold as a collective practice of working with, and as, water and story. We enter Matera’s wateriness not as observers, but as participants inside its agreements, vessels, and offerings, recognising that our being-together is shaped by visible and invisible pacts, inheritances, denials, and possibilities.

We approach myth in the present tense and attend to the permeability between archive and voice, stone and memory, promise and refusal. Working across fountain, museum, and underground water site, we engage in acts of witnessing, collaborative writing and drawing, object-study, and shared composition. We explore how to hold cultural landscapes through promise and unrealised dreams; how archives can be re-animated through collective attention; and how story can be gathered, woven, and re-spirited.

By slowing time and working from cracks and leakages, we cultivate a practice of attunement — to water, to one another, and to the layered agreements that shape our gathering. The study sessions offer tools for re-spiriting waterlores, and for carrying story as a living, relational force beyond the site of the sessions.

***

Day 1: Monday, March 9

Morning 

10:30 - 13:00

  •  Check-in: Tea/coffee & introduction to the three-day confluence
  • Drawing from our activity book, COOP participants and the tutorial team are invited to bring an object or a song connected to water and myth, as a starting point for storytelling — whether through an object, a poem, or a song. 

 12:00 - Introduction with COOP guest artist Jumana Emil Abboud 

  • Reading from Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti*

Link: Four Denials, youtube session, 03:46 for exact reference of the denials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIgO3tVr_m0

Afternoon 

14:00 - 19:00 

Session with Jumana Emil Abboud: The first relation is An Agreement

Focus: attunement, denial and the work of gathering.

The opening session(s) asks what are the stories that makes our being together possible. We prepare the work of story-interweaving through exploring the environment of our entanglement. Drawing from Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and referencing her work on modernity’s “denials”, we shall examine the visible and invisible agreements embedded in co-making. We shall also explore the work of Ayreen Anastas in conversation with Pier Paolo Pasolini, and in relation to agreements lost across ripples of making, asking what does it mean to re-visit a site as a story-sanctuary, and/or as breakage? 

The session continues at the Ferdinandea fountain site to pay tribute to Matera‘s first “mother-water“ through two actions of witnessing and co-making. 

Direction: recognizing the stories and water-ways we stand inside.

  • Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti’s “Hospicing Modernity” and their work with Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and the Four Denials*
  • Ayreen’s letter to Pasolini and an excerpt from her 51-minuutes film, Pasolini Pa Palestine
  • Fontana Ferdinandea site visit, interaction and collaboration

Link: Ayreen Anastas’s Letter to Pasolini https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1339

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00 

Following the swell until the stars rise

Self-led session hosted by Erik Peters (2hrs)

How to navigate turbid geographies and realities? What can we learn from listening to the stars, observing the routes of birds, the ocean swells and the journeys of the wind? Many ancient navigation systems are not “maps” as understood through the lens of modernity, but rather material codes that encode patterns of movement, orientation, and relationships between bodies. They are both technologies of memory and instructions for action. Inspired by oceanic way finding techniques such as Polynesian stick charts (The Navigators: Pathfinders of the Pacific (1983)), we will experiment with creating our own navigational codes as counter-technologies and traditions of oral knowledge.

Diagram of a Wapepe, a traditional Marshallese stick chart used for navigating the Pacific Ocean

***

Day 2: Tuesday, March 10 

Morning 

09:30 - 11:00

Palestine Teach-Out 

A presentation by Jumana Emil Abboud culminating in a participatory event. 

Initially hosted by the interdisciplinary residency program Sakiya  - Art| Science| Agriculture in Ein Qiniya, Palestine, The Water Diviners is a research-led project by artist Jumana Emil Abboud. The work centers on seven endangered springs on the Abu al-Adham hillside, treating these vital water sources as "spirited sites" rich in Palestinian folklore. Through collaborative community engagement, the project seeks to bridge local indigenous knowledge with a growing global network of water diviners to reimagine and protect threatened landscapes.

11:30 - 13:00 

But what does paper say if we listen?

Self-led session hosted by Sarmistha Bose 

Paper is everywhere. We wake up to the newspapers in the morning (or at least, we used to), write and draw and paint on it, make art on it, print a lot of stuff on it (necessarily and unnecessarily), wipe ourselves with it, produce currencies with it, seal deals with it, our legal, financial, medical and marital fates are often tied to it, the list goes on. However, we are often concerned about what is on it. When paper is blank, it is mostly used and disposed of.

Ancient forests have been wiped out to produce papers that are meant to be thrown away after a single-use. It is so mundane that we do not spend a split second even thinking about it.

But what does paper say if we listen?

This session, we start with a workshop of making paper from scrap, and exploring paper as a medium.

Afternoon 

14:00 - 19:00

Session with Jumana – The second relation is A Vessel

Focus: archive, voice and the instinct of water divining.

The second day turns toward objects, archives, and the everyday sacred associations with water. Continuing from yesterday’s reflections with Ayreen Anastas on landscape, longing, and unrealised dreams by looking at the work “Becoming Alluvium” by artist Thao Nguyen Phan and exploring the elements tied with re-spiriting waterlores. At the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Domenico Ridola, we work with selected objects related to water-life and past ritual, re-animating them through collaborative writing and drawing practices. 

  • continued reading, Ayreen + Etel Adnan
  • Site visit and work at Domenico Ridola archeology museum

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00  

Screening film by artist Thao Nguyen Phan (16min)

***

Day 3: Wednesday, March 11 

Morning 

10:30 - 13:00

Session with Jumana: The third relation is An Offering

Direction: weaving agreement and vessel into an act of offering. 

The third day opens with an invocation of Persephone/Kore, as feminine-body, and as a figure of negotiated disappearance and return. We combine our past story-work into a collated narrative. 

Afternoon 

14:00 - 16:00 

Continuation of the last session with Jumana:

we visit Palombaro Lungo, and offer our collated tale in a silent performance to the underground waters of Matera.

16:00 - 17:00 

Radio episode produced by Rana Kelleci, Oliver Turvey, and Asmaa Barkat in collaboration with The Salt of The Earth Coop

This episode marks the harvest of the COOP’s final session, “The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it.” — Iman Mersal, The Threshold, at Nida Art Colony, Lithuania. The piece unfolds in two chapters. The first is a collective reading of “The Key” by Anwar Hamed from Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, a science fiction anthology where twelve Palestinian writers imagine the year 2048. The second chapter reflects on Palestinian perseverance in preserving culture amid destruction, featuring selected artworks from the Palestinian Museum Collections, translating images into words and voices.

Between these chapters, city soundscapes merge with improvised music—a weave of traffic hums, distant melodies, strangers’ voices, footsteps, the call to prayer, and ambient noise that grounds the listener in an acoustic landscape.

17:30 - 19:00

[Midterm evaluations]

Evening 

20:00 - 22:00 

Wrapping up: a conversation around our experience in Matera and how the study group can think of this experience as a potential to develop their collective work for the summit, and an introduction to our forthcoming guest artist, Tewa Barnosa.

  • Signing up for the radio contribution, chronicles, and self-led sessions for the next confluence.

***

References: 

 

Seminar 2: 21 - 23 January 2026

“The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it.” — Iman Mersal, The Threshold (2022) 

Departing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, the study group will delve into the different themes and questions that our collective reading offers, such as how we understand power, place, and freedom. Rather than seeing prisons, policing, and social abandonment as isolated problems, it shows that they are part of a larger political-economic system that shapes who is valued and who is discarded. Abolition becomes not just the dismantling of systems of control, but the creation of new ways of living together in places where justice, care, and collective freedom are real and tangible. 

In this context, the three-day confluence will focus on how (organizing) groups, communities, and minorities resist forms of power by finding ways to escape or subvert violence. Across different sessions, we will unpack several interconnected themes central to this inquiry. The first part will explore the notions of movement, displacement, tunnels, choreopolice, and choreopolitics. The second part will focus on how colonized and minority communities have been represented within cultural production, archives, and museums, and the ways they have resisted these representations. The third, and final, part returns to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, drawing out resonant threads across the discussions unfolding over the three days. The COOP will engage in collective readings, conversations, and film screenings, and will host artist and writer Saba Innab, joining us remotely to unpack her essay Tunnel — I mean, trench! 

Throughout the program, each day, a self-led session by peers takes place, building on the themes and threads of the COOP, by Agnese Spolverini, Jip Van Der Hek, and Javier Rodriguez Perez-curiel. Furthermore, as part of the collaboration between de Appel COOP and Radio Alhara, the study group will also hold a collective listening session streamed via Radio Alhara while we are together. This will mark the COOP’s first contribution of the year, created by Aimée Philips, Shiva Yourdkhani, and Javier Rodriguez Perez-curiel, and The Salt of the Earth group as a whole. The airing session builds on the COOP’s first gathering at PAF, which centered on the politics of time, space, and sound. The Nida confluence will conclude in the spirit of Mujawaara, a self-organizing format of co-learning coined by Munir Fasheh. 

Wednesday 21 January 

Morning: 10:30 - 13:00 

Check-in: Tea/coffee and introduction to the three-day confluence. I: Self-led session by Jip Van Der Hek. 

Listening session: Composed by Aimée Philips, Shiva Yourdkhani, Javier Rodriguez Perez-curiel and and The Salt of the Earth group as a whole, streamed via Radio Alhara. 

Afternoon: 14:00 - 19:00 

Remote talk by Saba Innab: Tunnel — I mean, trench! 

Departing from an anecdote drawn from Innab’s personal involvement in the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, the talk interlaces multiple layers: colloquial knowledge of abolitionist spaces and practices, and the dialectics of concealment and exposure. The talk will foreground the imaginary of land as a methodology — an epistemic structure that renews itself against systems that generate its absence and abduction, from settler colonialism to capital extraction. 

Break 

Collective Reading: Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer by André Lepecki 

The choreographic delement in Jacques Rancière’s notion of “police” is used to advance the concept of “choreopolice,” which can then be set in opposition to “choreopolitics” to redefine “choreography” and release it from imperative, or normative (i.e., policed) constructions of movement. Hannah Arendt’s notion that freedom is the telos of politics identifies how within several types of choreography (TURF street dance, Tania Bruguera’s Arte de Conducta, and Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer), the dancer’s task is to search and enact that freedom, over and over again. 

Film by José Cardoso 

What the Soil Remembers (2023), 29’ 

In 1960s South Africa, a close-knit community from Die Vlakte was forcibly and violently uprooted to make way for the Stellenbosch University as part of the

Apartheid regime’s segregation measures. José Cardoso’s What the Soil Remembers recounts the traumatic effect displacement had on residents by bringing to the foreground a university that is still grappling with its racist legacy. To this day, the Die Vlakte community is fighting for justice and seeking reparations with little to no tangible solutions. 

Evening: 20:30 - 22:00 

Film by Khaled Jarrar 

Infiltrators (2012), 70’ 

For his compelling 2012 debut, Khaled Jarrar followed Palestinians for over four years on their nerve-racking search for openings in the wall at the heavily militarized Qalandia checkpoint in the West Bank. Running, jumping and crawling through dark tunnels are part of a daily ordeal for Palestinians of all backgrounds seeking routes under and over the wall to East Jerusalem. 

Thursday 22 January 

Morning: 10:30 - 13:00 

COOP session: “We’re still alive, so remove us from memory” 

A joint conversation on museums and archives, examining how colonized people are documented and represented within colonial archival and museum structures. Starting from the contexts of Cyprus and Palestine, the session will share insights rooted in the COOP’s localities. 

Film: Cyprus is an Island (1946), 34’ 

Cyprus is an Island is a black and white documentary shot on location in 1946. The film was a British colonial documentary, scripted by Laurie Lee and directed by Ralph Keene, showcasing British rule's "benevolent" progress, but later analyzed for its patronizing portrayal of Cypriots and colonial propaganda, reflecting post-WWII decolonization efforts and ethnographic perspectives, with interviews with villagers providing diverse interpretations of its impact. 

Afternoon: 14:00 - 19:00 

Film: Un Documented – Unlearning Imperial Plunder by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 35’ Here, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay critiques museums and archives as instruments of imperial violence. The film exposes documentation as a tool of dispossession rather than neutral record-keeping, and calls for “unlearning” imperial frameworks in favor of responsibility, restitution, and shared histories. 

Let This Radicalize You: A Workbook by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

The COOP will interact with a workbook on abolitionist organizing, which we will keep returning to over subsequent confluences. By outlining a set of lived questions and proposed scores, the group will discuss and draft a rehearsing action using the prompts shared in the guide. A walk in the surrounding area of Nida Art Colony will take place, informed by the study guide in the workbook. 

Break 

Collective reading: Venus in two Acts by Saidiya Hartman — followed by a conversation. 

Saidiya Hartman confronts the violence and silence of the historical archive to attend to the life of Venus, a young Black girl whose existence in the records of Atlantic slavery is fragmentary and mediated by those in power. Rather than attempting to recreate her life in full, Hartman uses a method she calls critical fabulation — a blend of archival research and imaginative narration — to show both the limits of what we can know and the ethical challenge of writing about lives erased by violence. 

Evening: 20:30 - 22:00 

II: Self-led session by Agnese Spolverini 

Friday 23 January 

Morning: 10:30 - 13:00 

III: Self-led session by Javier Rodriguez Perez 

Collective reading: Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence by/with Ruth Wilson Gilmore — followed by a conversation. 

Afternoon: 14:00 - 19:00 

Mujawaara: Based on Munir Fasheh’s concept of neighbouring as a medium of learning, this session will explore Mujawaara as a form of organization without hierarchy. It is a basic ingredient in stitching together the social, intellectual, and spiritual fabric of communities. Mujawaara embodies the spirit of regeneration in one of the most important aspects of life: learning. It demonstrates that another vision of education is possible, and that wisdom is a shared practice. Closing remarks and allocation of chronicle contributors, as well as the subsequent self-led sessions in Matera. 

References

Necropolitics by J.-A. Mbembé, Libby Meintjes Public Culture, Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11-40 (Article). Published by Duke University Press. Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer by Andre Lepecki Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman 

We’re still alive, so remove us from memory. Asynchronicity and the Museum in Resistance by Lara Khaldi 

Abolition Geography by Ruth Willson Gilmore 

Archives & Crimes by Iman Mersal 

On Art Activism by Boris Groys 

The Funambulist #49-63

Seminar 1: 25 - 27 November 2025

“We’re telling all of you, but we’re not telling anyone else”—Fred Moten & Stefano Harney 

During the three-day confluence, de Appel’s study group will engage with the propositions of this year’s COOP and create space to share and reflect on each other’s practices. Each COOP participant, alongside the tutorial team, will give a short presentation relating to their work and how it may connect to what will be brought into the group. Afterwards, the tutorial team will share a perspective on lumbung as the basis of the COOP’s shared mode of working, considering each other’s practices as resources and how they can contribute to the collective process throughout the year. This will also include an invitation to all participants to activate an offering during the year’s confluences. 

For this commencing confluence, Palestine-based sound artist and musician Dirar Kalash will join us as a guest, facilitating a series of three workshops on the relationship between sound, silence, time, and space — and their configurations within composite forms of everyday life and praxis, particularly in relation to the ongoing genocide(s) in Palestine and beyond. The workshops will grapple with our relations to these notions — not as relations that create an in-between, but those that come from within. Among other propositions raised during the sessions is the question: How do we create and build our resistance? 

Alongside a series of film screenings and readings, the sessions with Dirar will take off from a multi-layered reading of Memory for Forgetfulness (August, Beirut, 1982) by Mahmoud Darwish, together with Gazan testimonies. We will stay with possible relationships among lived experience, the writing of history, events, structures, and language — from writing and narrating the Nakba to the current transformations of 

time and space in Palestine today. This engagement is not approached from a theoretical or intellectualizing position but from a conscious and committed one. The sessions will also include listening and mapping exercises, through which we will reflect on and discuss questions of solidarity, engagement, cultural work, everyday practice, and activism. 

Tuesday, November 25th 

Morning 

10:30–13:00 

– Introduction to the COOP alongside a discussion on how to work with/through lumbung. 

– COOP participants are invited to bring a sound or object relating to their practice, followed by a five-minute offering unfolding from it. 

Afternoon 

14:00–19:00 

– (Part I) Workshop w/ Dirar Kalash: Politics of Sound 

This first part of the workshop will depart from reading Memory of Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish, a poetic account of daily life under siege during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. Written from within the bombardment, the text moves between diary, essay, and poetry, capturing the intimate details of survival while reflecting on language, belonging, and the role of the poet in times of war—questioning what we hold on to, what we must forget to keep living, and how writing becomes a form of resistance and presence. 

(break) 

– Wrap-up: thoughts and reflections on the day 

Evening 

20:00–22:00 

– Film Screening: Location Hunting in Palestine by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1965), 55’ This documentary follows Pasolini as he travels through Palestine and the broader region in search of locations for The Gospel According to Matthew. The film becomes more than a simple scouting journey: Pasolini reflects on the landscapes, the political reality of the 1960s, and the tension between biblical imagination and the contemporary conditions he encounters. 

Wednesday, November 26th

Morning 

10:30–13:00 

– (Part II) Workshop w/ Dirar Kalash: Politics of Time 

This second part of the workshop turns to the politics of time, attending to the resonances and entanglements of everyday life and history through a rehearsal of mapping exercises. Rather than tracing relations in the in-between, we trace relations from within—through lived experience. We take to heart Palestine as a historical case in non-linear time, where past, present, and future remain in motion. Moving from creativity to forms of knowledge production, we consider how practices emerge under these conditions and ask: how do we produce our resistance? 

Afternoon 

14:00–19:00 

– Listening session w/ Dirar Kalash (3h) 

During this session, we will listen to different sounds gathered or recorded by Dirar Kalash—ranging from traditional music (land), to Black music (jazz), to other sonic materials that move against the “orientalist ear.” We will reflect on how we listen against colonized knowledge production and how to drift away from the commodification of sound. 

– Conversation on questions of terminology: fieldwork, soundscape, music (break) 

– Discussion on the text R-Words: Refusing Research by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang 

The text invites us to rethink what research does, and for whom. Instead of assuming that more research automatically leads to justice, the authors ask us to consider refusal as an ethical stance, a way of protecting communities from extraction, misrepresentation, and harm. The text questions the power structures of research and to imagine inquiry grounded in respect, consent, and relational responsibility. 

Evening 

20:00–22:00 

– Film screenings: 

They Do Not Exist by Mustafa Abu Ali (1974), 25’ 

They Do Not Exist is a Palestinian film by Mustafa Abu Ali, created during his time with the Palestine Film Unit. Shot partly in the aftermath of the Israeli bombing of the Nabatiya refugee camp in Lebanon, the film blends documentary footage with a

poetic, urgent political narrative. Its title responds directly to Golda Meir’s claim that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” making the film itself an act of resistance and assertion of presence. Through images of daily life, displacement, and resilience, the film challenges erasure and insists on the visibility of Palestinian existence, memory, and struggle. 

Here and Elsewhere by Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, Dziga Vertov Group (1976), 53’ 

Here and Elsewhere is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, and the Dziga Vertov Group that reflects on the making and unmaking of political images. The film began as a project supporting the Palestinian struggle, but later transformed into a self-critique about representation, solidarity, and the power dynamics behind who films whom. It weaves together footage shot in Palestinian training camps with scenes of a French family watching television, questioning how images travel, what they hide, and how viewers become implicated. The film becomes both a document and a reflection on the ethics of seeing, reminding us that “elsewhere” is always connected to “here.” 

Thursday, November 27th 

Morning 

10:30–13:00 

– (Part III) Workshop w/ Dirar Kalash: Politics of Space 

The final thematic, workshop invites us to attend to the imagination of the soundscape and the idea of landscape, building on impressions and thoughts that emerged during the film screenings of the night before. We consider how space is constructed, sensed, and narrated. Through sound and image, we look at space at the intersection of ecology, geography, and the Land. 

Afternoon 

14:00–19:00 

– Technical workshop w/ Dirar Kalash: Sonic Technologies & Practical Tools During this closing three-hour session, Dirar will introduce COOP participants to basic tools for working with sound, both for our study group and within their artistic practices. The methods shared do not focus directly on sound production, but rather on understanding the role of sound and its intersections with other mediums—such

as spoken word, film or video work, installation, performance, and other forms that merge with or are shaped by sound. 

– Wrap-up: thoughts and reflections on the confluence 

Readings: 

– Memory for Forgetfulness (August, Beirut, 1982) by Mahmoud Darwish – R-Words: Refusing Research by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang 

Journals: 

– The Funambulist (issues #49-61) 

Sonic material & radio: 

– Malcolm X In Gaza by Dirar Kalash, Parts 1 & 2: We can’t breath (for Frantz Fanon) & By any means necessary 

– Radio Alhara

BACK TO INTRODUCTION