Echoes of Solidarity is a project that probes the epistemologies of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and its political, social, and cultural manifestations inside and outside colonized Palestine. The project’s starting point is the 4th edition of Qalandiya International art festival 2018, under the theme of Solidarity.
The notion of ‘solidarity’ has been synchronic with the history of the Palestinian
struggle for liberation and self-determination. The ethos, definitions, and practices of solidarity with Palestinians have gone through a plethora of delineations since mid-last century. The spectrum of the conflicting values and practices of solidarity nowadays ranges from right wing and religious utilization of the concept in order to horde larger social and popular recognition to surviving leftist activism calling for global socialist manifestoes, hinged unremittingly on Pan-Arab idealism. A new neoliberal definition of solidarity has also surfaced, entrenching its values in the consumption of products in the name of solidarity such as solidarity with nature or impoverished children of Africa. Other forms of solidarity can be identified in Palestine based either on political party ideologies, folkloric communal practices, calls for universal freedoms, Patriarchal tribal alliances, and many others.
Nonetheless, the term solidarity has been, and still coined as a buzzword in the struggle for liberation. Its forms, practices and ideological stances have morphed over time, however now it has become a forefront amidst the absence of a leading political structure and the thrive of a middlemen kleptocracy. This moment of social and political ambiguity, where uncertainty has become the norm, fundamental religious groups, social media populism and neoliberal cultures are redefining the collective social and political values, hence solidarity. Echoes of Solidarity does not engage in any definition or redefinition of the term solidarity. The three plots of the project instrumentalize the shifting definition of solidarity to requestion the Palestinians struggle now and contemplate possibilities of departure out of the current stagnant reality.
Echoes of Solidarity is divided into three main non-linear plots that intertwine in a nonchronological order where each plot’s narrative does not necessarily follow the direct causality pattern of its constituent events.
Curator: Yazid Anani
Assistant Curator: Majd Nasrallah
Plot One – Rippling Sounds
Rippling Sounds is a series of performances and a concert, deducted from archival research that explores the resonances found in the intellectual and cultural discourse around solidarity during crisis produced by different epochs, namely the Nahda (the Arab cultural renaissance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the post WWII decolonization era, and the Arab Spring and its repercussions. Issues such as the return to the land, localism versus internationalism, national identity, Pan Arabism, Westernization, decolonization, the role of the intellectual, freedom, socialism, and democracy, seem to echo between these eras, questioning how and why these issues have never been transformed or integrated historically in the making of the social and political projects in Palestine and the region.
Artists will reiterate the visual and textual material into a new poetry of sound and words. Their task of the commissioned artists is to awaken these past echoes in their new work and speak to the present and future. The dual functionality of the artist both as ‘translator’ and as ‘poet’ was pivotal for the task whereby the translator’s attention is directed toward the archival material as a language and the poet focuses on weaving the echoes of the past into contemporary structures of sound and content.
Artists: Haya Zaatry, Busher Kanj, Jameel Mattar, Radio No-frequency (Lama Rabah & Zeina Zarour), Emile Saba, Khalil Al-Batran, Maya Al Khalidi, MakiMakkuk, Shi’Rap (Mohammed Al-Jamil), Najwan Berkdar, Haykal
Researchers: Arwa Labidi, Bojana Piškur, Leyla Dakhli, Maher Sharif, Teja Merhar
Plot Two – The Question of Palestine
Is a series of discursive events that investigate the turn in the meaning of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as means of questioning the shift in the values of the current liberation project. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Question of Palestine has always been allegoric to larger global movements and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and racism. The Palestinian struggle for liberation stood for a universal ethical response to the transformation of the world after the grave atrocities of WWII and the malign Fascist and Nazi examples of how humanity can become if universal rights of liberation, self-determination, and equality are not seriously embraced. At that time, political and cultural solidarity with the Palestinians rendered their struggle for liberation universal, not only through the official diplomatic channels of supporting governments from the Global South, especially by the non-aligned governments, but solidarity was also as an expression of wider historical and political epistemologies of peoples' struggle for equality, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation worldwide.
Commissioned curators from the global south, namely Pakistan, Chile, and South Africa were invited to work on the interplay between the local struggles and universal solidarity as key in reinstituting the allegorical Question of Palestine as a fundamental question of the era. These conversations and discussions dwell on interrogating how can we reinstate the universal allegory of the Question of Palestine today? How can the local particularities of Palestinians and their daily struggle today become a militant idea that can be translated into a global and local language of political movement? What can we learn from Palestine?
Curators: Emilio Dabed (Republic of Chile), Ramis Sohail (Islamic Republic of Pakistan), Zeenat Adam (Republic of South Africa)
Plot Three – Mapping (Un)Solidarities
The long history of cultural solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, coalesced groups of artists and art collectives who perpetually engaged in cultural initiatives calling for the freedom of Palestinians and the end of the Israeli colonial dominion. Such solidarities and their socio-political stimuli can only be understood in a determined moment of their history. The focus of the historical inquiry on the topic on solidarity becomes a fetish which can be read sometimes as a desperate leftist desire to reincarnate these glorious histories against today’s upsurge of right-wing conservative politics, the rise of autocracy, neo-colonial modes of domination and an accelerating decline of democracy.
Mapping (Un)Solidarities is an exhibition that hinges on examining (un)solidarity as means of questioning the notion of solidarity itself and its exigency nowadays. The exhibition does not concern itself in portraying the leftist utopic desire of seeing historic art movements resurrected into today’s political and social crisis as a means of propagating change. The exhibition unpacks questions of cultural (un)solidarities in Palestine by exploring veiled stories and narratives that partake in shaping our present by means of shifting the gaze to the dysfunctionality of solidarities rather than intonating how to shape triumphant dissent.
Artists: Majd Darwish, Michael Baers, Minna Henriksson, Mohammad Sabaaneh
Curators: Bojana Piškur, Yazid Anani
Assistant Curator: Majd Nasrallah