Paris, Beruit
In the midst of struggles, protests, and revolutions, the voices of the oppressed, sidelined, silenced, and forgotten become more salient. In The Articulation of Protest (2002) Hito Steyerl reflects on the functions and forms of ‘articulation’ as being both about the organization of protest movement and the expression of its organization. She meditates on the ways an act of editing can erase the multiplicity of voices and contradictions, inherent to struggles. How can one turn the act of restoring images of past struggles into a critical and sensitive testimony of this erasure? How, through the use of new recording tools, can we echo the current struggles and share across contexts the connection of our outcry and hope?
Our Partners:
Films
CONGRESS OF IDLING PERSONS
The film features five interlocutors who play themselves and greater fictions, in the shadows of recent world-historical events. Artist and writer Bassem Saad, DJ and translator Rayyan Abdel Khalek, musical artist Sandy Chamoun, writer Islam Khatib, and organiser Mekdes Yilma examine a cartography of protest, crisis, humanitarian and mutual aid, migrant labour, and Palestinian outsider status. Punctuated by the late Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter revolts of 2020, and the Beirut port explosion, the film weaves through transhistorical constants — from rage and mourning to spontaneity and besiegement — propelled by the speech and acts of its performers. If a group action is a riot and not a revolution, then who films it? If four is a riot, it is also a congress.
THE WHITE ELEPHANT
Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada and trance music gatherings, The White Elephant de-composes the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s, through the distorted mirror of Israeli pop culture.
O, PERSECUTED
“In O, Persecuted, Alsharif offers an occluded view of the restoration of Kassem Hawal’s 1974 work of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine agitprop, Our Small Houses, before launching into a rapid-fire montage of decadent Israeli party photos, set to a pounding gabba soundtrack. Despairing at the contrast between the certainties of the past and those of present, Alsharif suggests an effort to shatter the former through the recapitulation of the latter.” – Colin Beckett for the Brooklyn Rail