Event overview
A seminar series on ‘minor practices’ for alternative futures
Scaling down from the occupation of land and the destruction of homes to a focus on the senses, the Occupation further seems to permeate people’s everyday lives and sensibilities in Palestine. These (settler) colonial practices prompt existential insecurity and uncertainty that impedes Palestinian futures and instead promotes a future that is governmentalized by the occupier. Yet, everyday life goes on despite the Occupation. In the interstices of the Occupation, we find ‘minor practices’ – not insignificant nor unimportant, but, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the minor, practices whose efficacy lies in creating subtle shifts, that open possibilities for constructing life otherwise and on its own terms.
These arts of living contribute to what Felix Guattari called the ‘new aesthetic paradigm,’ capable of reinventing life and cultivating alternative futures. For example, the making of a home in a refugee camp, there where it seems impossible due to the transitory nature of the camp; the use of humour to re-sensitize a village under threat; or a design label creating fertile ground for a new generation of Palestinian artisans and designers imaging shared futures. Such an experimental perspective seems pertinent to a situation that, from a conventional political perspective, seems to worsen and can provide a different way of understanding what is going on.
This seminar series seeks to open space to creatively and speculatively explore possible futures and minor practices that engender those futures by entering into dialogue with multiple creative practitioners from the West Bank. How, then, are those senses, lives, and futures reclaimed? What can we learn from Palestinian minor practices? What kind of unprecedented, unforeseen, and otherwise unthinkable qualities of being are surfacing? What kind of alternative futures are imagined by Palestinians?
Speakers:
Dima Srouji, architect and visual artist and currently the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum and leading the MA City Design studio at the Royal College of Art in London.
Yazid Anani, Director of the Public Programme at the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah and former professor at the Department of Architecture, and the Master Program in Urban Planning and Landscape at Birzeit University, Palestine.
Discussant:
Chiara de Cesari, Associate Professor in European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Nov 2022 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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