The River Has Two Banks: Full Program (Various Locations, Sep. - Nov. 2012)

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Oct 17, 2012 Palestine
[Image from artpalestine.org] [Image from artpalestine.org]

The River Has Two Banks: Full Program (Various Locations, Sep. - Nov. 2012)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The River has Two Banks

The politics of segregation has greatly hindered a collective understanding of shared realities and common histories across the east and west banks of the River Jordan. As individuals who are invested in the relationship between Palestine and Jordan, the historical trajectory of the two compels us to examine where we are now, and how we can build new alliances to overcome the social, economic, and political challenges of today.

The river has two banks is an initiative addressing the growing distance between those living on either side of the river by creating multiple occasions for discussions. The program unfolds over a time period starting in September and running until November 2012, across different locations in Amman, Ramallah, Birzeit and the Jordan Valley, and culminating in a bilingual Arabic/English online publication.

This series of connected events is made up of a showcase of artworks, film screenings, research projects, and traveling artist talks that explore different contemporary and historical aspects of Palestinian Jordanian identities and politics. The invited contributors reveal unexpected stories around leading figures, unappreciated heroes, and recovered audio-visual materials to create multi-layered interpretations that bring into question dominant ideological narratives.

The river has two banks examines the landscape that ultimately leads us to the river itself–both a symbol and a myth–which today, stands as a diminishing natural resource only a few of us have access to.

Program of Activities

“Traveling Artist Talks” an ongoing intervention launched in September 2012

 An open call inviting Palestinian artists/writers/thinkers traveling via Jordan to stay for an additional night/day and deliver an artist talk about their work at Makan art space in Amman.

For those in Jordan, traveling to Palestine remains a dream that is determined/prevented by an Israeli visa. For Palestinians living in the West Bank, Jordan is only an exit point, a transient and temporary space. The border between the two, which is referred to as “the Bridge”, is vested with political and social connotations from the last 40 years, serving both as a connection in the present and a disconnection from the past.

This invitation takes advantage of existing traffic and proposes a new way to consider restrictions regarding mobility; rather than seeing it as an obstacle, perceiving it as an opportunity to address new audiences, make new friends, and cement existing friendships in Jordan.


Sunday, 14 October 2012
7:00 PM at Makan art space, Amman, Jordan

Research Presentation
Searching for Godard, by filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi, followed by a moderated discussion

In the early 1970’s, a wave of new activist Palestinian cinema had been taking place in Jordan, inspiring the likes of the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to join. As Yaqubi attempts to trace Godard’s footsteps, he stumbles across found footage, stories and news clips from a tumultuous time period. Connecting the image to the landscape, the story to its people, this presentation is a glimpse into Yaqubi`s ongoing research on Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema for his first feature documentary "Off-Frame."

Mohanad Yaqubi is one of the founders of Idioms Film, a filmmaker collective based in Ramallah. He graduated from Goldsmiths College in London and has directed several short films. His work stands between video art, documentary and fiction, creating a visual narrative that is not entirely abstract.


Wednesday, 17 October 2012
7:00 PM at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine

Film Screening
Perforated Memory, (2009), by Sandra Madi, followed by a discussion with the director

Perforated Memory tells the story of a group of ex-guerrillas (Fedayeen), who were active members in the Palestinian Revolution Movement during different stages of the struggle. Many of them have since settled in Jordan, where they suffer poverty and neglect. The film is a raw portrayal of physically and sometimes mentally wounded characters. Madi’s camera shows how these men have quickly forgotten their own heroic past, and how even quicker history has forgotten them.

Sandra Madi, born in Amman, is a Palestinian film director, actress, producer and writer. A graduate of the Arab Institute of Film, she has produced and directed several documentaries for Al Jazeera and local and international agencies. In theatre, she has twenty plays on record that have toured worldwide and engaged youth in training and improvisational workshops.


Saturday, 20 October 2012
6:30 PM at Arman Cafe, Birzeit old city, Palestine

Lecture & Listening Session
Round in circles - Looking for Jordan’s music identity in Palestine by music critic Ahmad Zatari

From 1949 to 1959, pioneering Jordanian musician Tawfiq Al Nimri joined the Jordanian radio station offices in Ramallah, where he started producing and composing work that came to define the genesis of Jordanian national music. In this newly commissioned research, Zatari follows Nimri`s journey, unpacking some of the complex transnational influences that informed his music and challenging the common enforcement of singular identity directions on nationalist and patriotic music production in Jordan today.

Ahmad Zatari is an independent journalist and writer based in Amman, Jordan. He has published two books, working on the third, and is a regular cultural correspondent for the Al-Akhbar newspaper. As a coordinator for "Freemuse," he also works on promoting freedom of expression in music in the Middle East and North Africa.


Saturday, 20 October 2012
9:00 PM at Birzeit Old City Square, Birzeit, Palestine

Concert
“El Far3i” Live in Concert

Tarek Abu Kweik presents “El Far3i” for the first time in Palestine, an acoustic set that moves between stories of love, religion, and politics, while protesting class divides and neo-liberal policies plaguing both Jordan and Palestine. A combination of melodic singing and spoken words that break into rap verses, “El Far3i” is an intimate and witty performance that teases audiences with unexpected questions and daring statements.

A percussionist and lyricist, Tarek Abu Kweik takes the banks of the River Jordan, his home, as his starting point. “El Far3i”–meaning "secondary" in Arabic– is a metaphor for a voice from the margins or sidelines, which gives his solo rap project its name.


Monday, 19 November 2012
7:00 PM at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah, Palestine

Film Screening
Struggle in Jerash, (2009), by Eileen Simpson and Ben White. A  limited edition of the DVD be distributed at the event.

Struggle in Jerash (2009) re-animates Jordan`s first feature film that is now out of copyright. By creating a new soundtrack that moves between the original plot–a tale of thievery and romance filmed in 1957 across Jerash, Amman, Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea–and an engaging commentary by local practitioners who narrate the story of the production, loss, and eventual recovery of the original film wheels, all of which reflect on shifting modernities and national borders.

Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks, and seek to challenge conventional mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of culture. Their ongoing project Open Music Archive is an initiative to source, digitize, and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings.


Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Time and location to be announced

Saeed, exhibition elements in various institutional settings, (2012)

In 1964, Jordan presented a thirty-foot high column at the New York World’s Fair. Also showcased at the fair was a painting by Mohanna Durra, of a Palestinian mother embracing her child in fear. Huge controversy broke out by fair visitors, lobbying the censorship of the painting, and demanding that the work be removed.

Oraib Toukan is an artist based in New York, she teaches and works in Jordan and Palestine.


Wednesday, 21 November 2012
6:30 PM at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah, Palestine

Lecture
The Jordan River–a stream of contradictions, by hydrogeologist Clemens Messerschmid

Today the Jordan River is merely a faint memory of its former self. Under occupation, the Jordan Valley, the water richest area of the entire east and west banks, has turned into the most water-stressed area for Palestinians. How did this come about and are there ways out of this deep social, environmental, economic and political crisis?

Messerschmid will present past and present flows of the Jordan River, untangle its myths and discuss present technical and political approaches by riparians and the international community.

The lecture will be preceded by the first screening of Dalia Al Kury’s short documentary “The River Jordan - the last breath” that chronicles the lives and hardships of some of the Jordanian inhabitants on the eastern banks of the river.

Clemens Messerschmid is a German hydrogeologist based in Ramallah, who has been working in water projects for the past fifteen years, mostly in Jordan River riparian states, focusing both on technical as well as hydro political issues of water resource development and allocation.

Dalia Al Kury is an independent documentary filmmaker living in Jordan. Her documentaries Arabizi, Amman: East vs. West, Caution! Comment ahead, and Smile, You’re in South Lebanon among others have screened on various TV channels and in international film festivals, portraying contemporary social and political issues.


Saturday, 24 November 2012
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM,  meeting point at the 7th circle bus stop, Amman, Jordan

Hike
A daylong guided hike along the eastern bank of the River Jordan

To walk along the River Jordan is perhaps only a fantasy; most of the areas surrounding the river are designated as military zones and require special permits to enter. In an attempt to get as close to the river as possible, this trip aims to discover and illustrate the obstacles in the Jordan Valley area for visitors and inhabitants. A local guide will walk us through the permissible paths, and lunch will be arranged with the local community.

The trip is open to a maximum number of twenty-five participants. To register, please send an email to river2banks@gmail.com.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412