LIFTA x CPS Present: ‘Palestine, IN-BETWEEN’, a semester-long program that explores contemporary Palestinian cultures and yearnings across generations in Palestine and its diaspora. Through media including live panels, original videos, podcasts, essays, film screenings, and social media campaigns, ‘Palestine, IN-BETWEEN,’ spotlights the untold and unfamiliar. It gives precedent to the under-celebrated; the agents of design who draft and re-draft blueprints for present-day liberation. ‘Palestine, IN-BETWEEN’ is an ode to the powers of self-freedom and agency that breathes life into all beings, unbound from restrictions imposed by states and systems. Its content helps to lay the foundation for desired futures by rejecting the projections of a homogenous Palestinian experience and deconstructing the often flattened Palestinian identity.
This program is presented by CPS + LIFTA with Lena Mansour and Cher Asad.
Palestine, IN-BETWEEN is co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center | Amman.
THIS WEEK
1) Love & Intimacy
Learn more and watch the videos here
*Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave.
2) Visit the Palestine, IN-BETWEEN Blog for special features and further explorations.
UPCOMING EVENTS
-Special Live Panel (TBA)
-Love & Intimacy Part 5 (Arabic Versions)
PAST EVENTS
*January 22-26:
FILM SCREENING: MUSSOLINI'S SISTER BY JUNA SULEIMAN + TROUBLE IN PARADISE AND MOONSCAPE BY MONA BENYAMIN
*January 26:
LIVE PANEL WITH FILMMAKERS JUNA SULEIMAN AND MONA BENYAMIN, MODERATED BY DR. NADIA YAQUB
Please view the special live conversation at this link and the event page with more information at this link.
*February 11:
Live Panel / Palestinian feminist discourses: contemporary views and emerging movements with Riya Al'Sanah, Nour Swirki, Yara Hawari and Ghadir al Shafie, Moderated by Aamer Ibraheem
Learn more about the participants and the panel here and watch the conversation here.
*March:
Preservation, conservation, and adaptation: archiving practices inside Palestine + Intergenerational approaches to preservation, conservation, and adaptation in the Palestinian Diaspora
1) A podcast exploring land and food politics throughout Palestine. We'll discuss the criminalization of food and its production within Palestine and the autonomous practices that exist amidst legislation, occupation, and ongoing colonialism.
Episode 1: Sustainable Farming Practices Within Palestine
Learn more about the podcast here.
In conversation with Raya Manaa, the founder of Al-Ameen Archive, an archival photo project that pulls from her father Mahmoud Manaa's past home-run Studio Al-Ameen in Majd Al-Kurum. You can read the interview now at palestineinbetween.com or here.
Episode 2: Criminal Foods
In this episode, we explore the criminalization of three popular edible plants within Palestine with our guest Rabea Eghbariah. Zaatar, akkoub, and miramiya are staples in Palestinian cuisine, and yet there is currently a legal ban on their picking, possession, and trade. We discuss these plants' cultural and economic history within Palestine and the history and significance of their prohibition by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
Learn more about the podcast here.
*April:
1) 4/26 Live conversation ‘Nothing Old, Nothing New’ with Bilna'es
Watch this special conversation that took place 4/26/2021 by clicking here.
As an extension of Haitham Ennasr's project with Bilna'es, Nothing Old, Nothing New, he will be in conversation with Freya Dutta, Elias Wakeem, and moderator Ruanne Abou-Rahme, discussing how their practices correlate and intersect revolutionary cultural practices at large. The panelists will discuss the relationship between class, gender, race, capital, the colonial, and the use of art as a tool to illustrate systems of oppression and imagine a future where they aren't tolerated as a natural fact of life.
Nothing Old, Nothing New (Project of Bilna'es)
Nothing Old, Nothing New is a collection of experimental videogames, drawings, text, and objects developed over the course of six years. The project plays on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, depictions of landscapes, real estate development, and folklore.
Participants: Haitham Ennasr, Elias Wakeem, Freya Dutta, Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Moderator)
2) ‘Palestinian Wild Food Plants’ with Omar Imseeh Tesdell
Learn about edible plants in Palestine during the month of May and more!
*July-September:
1) Palestine is southern Syria: On Palestinian solidarity with Jawlani communities by Muna Dajani, Alaa Iktaish, Bassel Rizqallah and Diaa Ali Hroub
We feature the photo essay 'Palestine is southern Syrian: On Palestinian solidarity with Jawlani communities', by Muna Dajani, Alaa Iktaish, Bassel Rizqallah, and Diaa Ali Hroub of Mapping Memories of Resistance in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
'Mapping Memories of Resistance in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is an ongoing collaborative effort between academic institutions, activists, artists, and students who are interested in narrating, documenting, and re-telling stories and experience of living with, resisting, and enduring forms of political, socio-economic and cultural domination.
This photo essay and the mapping project aims to initiate a recollection of testimonies, memories, and strategies of collective struggle, resistance, and resilience (sumud) that Palestinians and Jawlanis engaged with in their collective struggle and encounter with Israeli settler-colonial rule. We shed light on how this solidarity has shaped the Palestinian and Jawlani struggles and how we see its pertinency to inspire and invigorate future generations to reimagine new pathways of action.'
2) ‘Taking Leila Home’ by Solenne Tadros
In her essay, @solenneternet expands on the process of creating a VR experience to take her grandmother living in exile back home to her childhood bedroom in Haifa, Palestine. Like many survivors of the Nakba, Palestine and the events surrounding 1948 were topics Tadros's grandmother Leila Khoury Nimry spoke little of. The simplicities of her day-to-day life she spoke of even less. Inspired by her grandmother's story, (X)odus is a project that supports and encourages the rebuilding of lives that have been affected by man-caused displacement.
3) Love & Intimacy Parts 3-5
The LOVE & INTIMACY video series includes short films that center intergenerational outlooks on love and intimacy in Palestine and the diaspora, with discussions highlighting—but not limited to— disconnects, desires, relationships, trauma, teaching, learning, and beyond. This series includes intimate interviews and conversations held between Palestinians who share a close relationship, including old friends, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, lovers, cousins, and more.
Conversations explore what has been inherited and what is being shed, as well as the ways in which taking care of ourselves and each other is to care for the collective—now and into the future. Dialogue moves beyond topics of love in the human-to-human sense, extending to the deep connections one shares with an object, time, smell, memory, land, and ritual.