Blasti – C’est ma place

[Blasti Postcard. Image by @Robert Hampicke via SocialVisions] [Blasti Postcard. Image by @Robert Hampicke via SocialVisions]

Blasti – C’est ma place

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Blasti –C’est ma place is a cultural and social photography project about women’s and young girls’ perspectives on public places in Tunis and Tunisia. The project seeks to give women a voice, and simultaneously enhance dialogue between women from different backgrounds and with different visions. Women are asked to upload photos about places in Tunisia on the Blasti website which forms the basis for further discussion and intervention. Between 3 and 10 November 2013, a one-week photography workshop gathering ten women from various backgrounds and locations in Tunis will work together on their projects. The results will be shown, as well as the website, at an exhibition in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Tunis between 29 November and 13 December 2013.

Blasti is organized by SocialVisions, a Berlin-based initiative established by urban geographer Miriam Stock and photographer Anja Pietsch. It encourages people to communicate through photography. SocialVisions works with individuals, local communities and partner organizations to create participatory photography programmes that aim to achieve meaningful improvements in the lives of participants. Blasti is carried out with local partners in Tunis: Christine Bruckbauer (curator), Patricia Triki (photographer and visual artist), Makrem Mestiri (website) and the Maison des Arts in Ariana. The project is funded by the “Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen” (ifa) of the Federal Foreign Office in Germany. 

\"\"
[Syrine, seventeen-year-old student, Hammamet: This is my place because the contradiction between the beauty of nature and the destroyed building expresses here a kind of hidden and unexpected beauty. Image by @Syrine Ouerfelli via SocialVisions]

Call for Contributions Blasti –C’est ma place

Are you a young girl or woman living in Tunis? Blasti invites you to show photos of places in the city that are particularly dear to you. They could be your favorite place, a place that you patronize regularly, or a place where you would like to be someday.

This call for contribution is on the Blasti website which was launched early October 2013 in Tunisia, targeting women and young girls living in Tunis. Women’s role in society is taking an increasing importance in the controversial transition period undergoing in Tunisia today.

Blasti (Tunisian Arabic for “my place”) is a public art and collective mobilization project, which seeks to give women voice and, simultaneously, enhance dialogue between women from different social backgrounds, and different visions. The project was limited to women living in Tunis, but given the success of the website, the Blasti team decided to open the project to all women living in Tunisia.

Blasti –C’est ma place runs three sets of activities:

  1. A Website: www.blasti.tn (starting October 2013)
    Women are invited to upload photos of their preferred places in Tunis on the website, and to situate them on a map with short comments justifying what makes this place theirs. The results can be then seen on an interactive map, signaled with symbols and photos. Different perspectives of young girls and women will be thus featured.
  2. Photography Workshop  (3 to 12 November 2013)
    A photography workshop will bring together a diverse group of about ten women in Tunis, who will get trained in professional photography, and produce collective projects about their perspectives on women’s place in public spaces in Tunis. The workshop starts in Ariana, in the cultural center Maison des Arts, and then spreads to different neighborhoods in Tunis.
  3. Exhibition and Discussion Panel  (29 November to 13 December 2013) 
    The photos of the workshop will be presented in an exhibition, and will be accompanied by a debate with social and political stakeholders, at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Tunis. Perceptions and visions of women in Tunis will be thus made visible to a wider public.

To learn more about Blasti – C’est ma place: please email contact@blasti.tn

\"\" 
[Fatma, 55 year-old worker, Cité Ettadhamen, Tunis: This is my place because I like going to the flea market on Sunday.
Image by @Fatma via SocialVisions]

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

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