Jumana Abboud, 1996-2003 #1, 2003, courtesy of the artist.
Emily Jacir, Crossing Surda.
Al-Muqata, October 2007, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements, Source: Wikipedia.
Al Muqata, Arafat’s mausoleum, January 2008, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements, Source: Wikipedia.
P’sagot seen from Al Bireh, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements.
P’sagot, inside the settlement, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements.
Oush Grab, the public park under construction in the area of the former tank parking, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements.
Oush Grab, from inside the turret of the only almost intact watch tower of the camp, from Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios for the transformation of Israeli settlements. |
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Centre for Fine Arts
10, rue Royale Koningsstraat
02 507 82 00
Brussels
Palestina Festival
October 19, 2008-
January 11, 2009
Jerusalem, the mid-1950s — Amoz grows up on one side of no man's land. In his parents' flat he maps out military strategies to protect the Jewish people. In his social environment he is hardly ever, if at all, confronted with an Arab. Sari grows up on the other side, at a distance of less than a hundred metres. His parents are hardly aware of the Holocaust. They have been driven away by the Israeli army. The families of Amoz Oz and Sari Nusseibeh lived next to each other, absorbed in their own tragedies. Nusseibeh: “Is it not the inability to imagine what the life of the 'other' is like that is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”
The Palestine Festival presents a variety of cultural events which will give visitors the opportunity to discover the many facets of contemporary Palestinian arts. This initiative is being organized in close cooperation with the Masarat Festival at the Halles de Schaerbeek within the context of the first edition of the Brussels Biennial event which is aiming to promote a wide range of projects from different institutions in joint partnership.
Never-Part,
Histories of Palestine
October 19, 2008-
January 1, 2009
There are certain things one would never part with. This intimate relationship, beyond any materialism, is what inspires the narration of Never-Part. The exhibition brings together objects and artworks that Palestinian artists from four corners of the world, would never give away, sell or discard. The personal histories of these artists, their reasons and destinies, put the exhibited elements in context.
Curated by Jack Persekian, the project is part of Masarat Palestine – A cultural season of art in Brussels.
On the occasion of Masarat Palestine, this original exhibition tells the story of a narrator who draws inspiration from works inseparable from their authors, each of whom is a Palestinian artist. They form a part of their experience of life and, over time, crystallise the essence of lives lived. A way to capture the intimate side of the torments of a nation in shreds. A respectful look at a diaspora and a dream of a dispossessed people.
Artists include: Jumana Abboud, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Sobhi al-Zubaidi, Ayreen Anastas, Asad Azi, Mona Hatoum, Janah Hilwé, Emily Jacir, Vera Tamari (in collaboration with Tania, Nasir and Vladimir Tamari), Sliman Mansour, Marwan Rechmaoui, and Nida Sinnokrot.
Crossing Surda,
(a record from going
to and from work) – 2002
An installation
from Emily Jacir
October 19, 2008-
January 1, 2009
Since March 2001, checkpoints have blocked the road between Ramallah and Birzeit, making access to the university and around thirty Palestinian villages difficult. In December 2002, camera in hand, Emily Jacir wanted to pass through this barrier and thus bear witness to the absurdity of the situation. After the Israeli army confiscated her video cassette, she resumed her mission, but this time with her camera in her bag.
Since March 2001, the Ramallah-Birzeit Road has been disrupted by a checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers, APC's and sometimes tanks. This road was the last remaining open road connecting Ramallah with Birzeit University and approximately 30 Palestinian villages.
On December 9th, 2002, I decided to record my daily walk to work across the Surda checkpoint to Birzeit University. When the Israeli Occupation Army saw me filming my feet with my video camera, they stopped me and asked for my I.D. I gave them my American passport and they threw it in the mud. They told me that this was "Israel" and that it was a military zone and that no filming was allowed. They detained me at gunpoint in the winter rain next to their tank. After three hours, they confiscated my videotape and then released me. I watched the soldier slip my videotape into the pocket of his army pants. That night when I returned home, I cut a hole in my bag and put my video camera in the bag. I recorded my daily walk across Surda checkpoint, to and from work, for eight days.
All people including the disabled, elderly, and children must walk distances as far as two kilometers depending on the decisions of the Israeli army at any given time. When Israeli soldiers decide that there should be no movement on the road, they shoot live ammunition, tear gas, and sound bombs to disperse people from the checkpoint.
— Emily Jacir, 2003
It is now May 2004 and the situation has worsened. I can no longer move freely through the borders with my American passport. I can not make the project "Where We Come From" today. I am no longer allowed to enter Gaza, and certain Palestinian towns in the West Bank. Israel is relentlessly moving forward in the construction of the Apartheid Wall which began in the spring of 2002.
Decolonizing Architecture, Scenarios
for the transformation
of Israeli settlements
October 31, 2008-
January 4, 2009
The Bethlehem/London based architectural collaboration of Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, uses a series of architectural proposals to open an arena of speculation about possible futures for Palestine. The exhibition deals thus with a fundamental question: how Israeli colonies and military bases the architecture of Israels domination could be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians, at the moment it is unplugged from the military/political power that charges it.
Areas of Palestine liberated from Israeli presence provide a crucial laboratory for the multiple ways in which we could imagine the reuse, re-inhabitation or recycling of the architecture of Israel’s occupation at the moment it is unplugged from the military/political power that charged it. This project forms thus as an “arena of speculation,” in which a series of discussions around this problem would take place. Israeli colonies are built on stolen Palestinian land and are amongst the most excruciating instruments of domination. This is the reason that the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only in the professional language of architecture and planning but rather in tuning to the multiplicity of voices, individuals and organizations, and in the incorporation of varied cultural and political perspectives.
There were various historical precedents for the reuse of decolonized architecture. These depended generally on the location, period, and process of decolonization. Evacuated colonial architecture was alternately understood as symbols for racist ideologies, as physical entities embodying power relations, as military weapons or ammunitions, as the site and instruments of a crime and even as haunted places. At other situations they were seen as economic resources, bargaining chips, and even as “piles of bricks,” the accumulation of the materials composing them.
Three general approaches in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture could be discerned: •destruction•, •re-occupation•, and •subversion•. These approaches were sometimes used simultaneously.
Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula-rasa, on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development. But demolitions may not be the only, or even the best way to deal with the burden of memory. Rather than the ruralization of built up areas, destruction would create further environmental damage. For example, the homes in the settlements of Gaza were destroyed, but underneath their paving there was no longer the white sand dunes to be found, their rubble has rather released its toxic content into the ground.
Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was to re-occupy colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossession tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: Colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies.
Evacuated colonial architecture did not always reproduce the function it was designed to perform, there are numerous examples of other functions, planed and spontaneous that have invaded the evacuated architecture of colonialism, subverted, made another uses of it, traversed it and reconfigured its connectivity. All built matter can change its use, and even the most horrific of structures could surrender to the formless typologies of new life. The strangest of juxtapositions between function and structure could thus be generated and new connections formed.
This is our starting point in dealing with the scenario of the evacuation of Israeli colonies and military camps, calling for the subversion [transformation] of the evacuated spatial infrastructure of these colonies, using their structures to ends other that those they were designed for.
Simply reusing the liberated structures of Israeli domination, according to some of our interlocutors in Palestine, might reproduce their inherent alienation and violence; the settlement’s system of fences and surveillance technologies would thus serve their seamless transformation into gated communities for the Palestinian elite.
This project is realized by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman.
Guest curator is Lieven De Cauter |
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