Click on the names below to visit each section:

The Sea: A Narrative for Reclamation, by Rawan Sharaf

The Sea as Archive: On Qalandiya International in Beirut, by Reema Salha Fadda

Mare Nostrum: A Petrified Clarity, by Stephanie Bailey

 The Sea

A Narrative for Reclamation

Rawan Sharaf

This sea is mine
This sea air is mine
And my name – if I mispronounce it on my coffin – is mine
And as for me – full of all reasons for leaving –

I am not mine.

– Mahmoud Darwish, The Mural [1]

Hamody Ghannam, from the exhibition The People of the Sea, Haifa.

Copyright the artist.

 

This sea is mine is the title of the third edition of Qalandiya International (Qi); a collaborative contemporary art event founded in 2012 by a coalition of Palestinian cultural institutions that takes place every two autumns. Organized and conducted against all odds in a challenging political context, the event endorses diverse activities – including exhibitions, workshops, seminars, screenings and tours – and is mainly featured across Palestinian cities and villages (including 1948 Palestine). This year, the geographical domain of the event has expanded to include Amman, Beirut, and London; a gesture that recognizes the fact that those cities (except for London) have accommodated Palestinian refugees since 1948 and today host vast numbers of refugees escaping the horrors of regional warfare. This transnational extension does not only serve the necessities imposed by the particular theme of Return but also responds to one of Qi's primary goals: to reach out to wider audiences in the local and international domain and position Palestine on the map of international contemporary art events.

For this edition, the sea has been introduced as an alternative entry point to contemplate the question of the Return – the 'antithesis'[2] of the Nakba, to reference Qi2016's curatorial statement – which refers to the ongoing expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland. The title, borrowed from Mahmoud Darwish's epic poem The Mural, simulates the Palestinian diasporic anguish. While the ultimate manifestation in the verse is a claim of ownership of the sea – the intangible and unattainable – it negates the ownership of the self, mirroring Palestine's collective absence of control over its present and future. It is within this context, marked by political failure and stagnation, that Qi2016 offers a window to re-think the Nakba and the Return, through the relationship with the sea as a concept, a metaphor, and an actual territory.

The sea in the Palestinian context is bitterly associated with the loss of the coastline in 1948. Major cities such as Yafa, Haifa and Akka, which at the time, thrived socially, economically and culturally, were tormented by the erasure of their coastal centres, cultures and livelihoods in acts of war, iconoclasm, and ethnic cleansing. Historically, the Mediterranean has been the gate for invaders (the Romans, Crusades and Bonaparte, to name few) such that it became allied in popular culture with ghader, or treachery. After all, the sea was the access for Zionist European migrants to Palestine in the early twentieth century, through the ports of Haifa and Yafa, as it carried Palestinian refugees away to their Diasporas. Additionally, coastal cities embraced urban modernity – much of which was correlated with the British Mandate and Zionist enterprises – and exemplified an open, subversive and innovative culture that seemed rather foreign and provocative to the traditional social norms of the mountain rural culture, as coined by Salim Tamari.[3]

Conversely, the land represented the stable source of economy and livelihood for Palestinians – the tangible physical loss borne in 1948. Following the Nakba, mountain culture prevailed in the Palestinian national and cultural rhetoric and was manifested, for instance, in visual arts through representations of landscape, rural culture and folklore. Land became the metaphor for the lost paradise, identity and resistance as depicted in the works of numerous artists. The representation of the sea, however, remained constrained to the context of the Nakba, portraying forceful displacement in boats, as depicted by Tamam Akhal and Abed Abdi.

Thus, while Qi2016 seeks to explore the sea as a way to articulate Nakba, it also provokes a reclaiming of the sea in order to weave it back into the national narrative and collective imagery. Through a vast range of exhibitions, screenings, public interventions and talks as well as a four-day symposium, Qi2016 encompasses versatile interpretations and conceptual frameworks for the concept of the Return, produced independently yet collaboratively by partner-institutions. With some drawing the sea as embodiment of hopes and agonies, openness and limitations, pleasure and demise; others contemplate the connotations of the Return through notions of urbanism, destruction, reconstruction, repetition and myth. This intellectualized theoretical realm is both an attempt to overcome restrictions on movement within and across Palestine, and to create a prism through which ties between coastal and mountain Palestine might be restored.

Two exhibitions adopted the sea as a conceptual framework: The People of the Sea, organized by Arab Culture Association in Haifa, and The Sea is Mine, organized by Eltiqa Group and Shababeek in Gaza. Both exhibitions are staged in coastal cities, which share equally catastrophic yet opposite histories. Haifa, on the northern coast witnessed one of the most brutal offensives of ethnic cleansing by the Zionist militias in 1948, leaving the majority of its Palestinian residents displaced[4] and the remaining minority compelled to have Israeli citizenship. While Gaza on the southern coast, which fell under the Egyptian rule following the ceasefire in 1948 – hosted over 200,000 refugees – three times its population[5]. For the opening event, Qi2016 is arranging buses to transport audiences from Ramallah to Haifa in what mimics a symbolic act of return. The visit, which would mainly include Jerusalemites and international audiences, demonstrates the depth of territorial segregation established by the Israeli apartheid system, since Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are prohibited from accessing historical Palestine unless they have a permit from the Israeli military. Concurrently, no buses are arranged for the Gaza exhibition.  The strip has been under Israeli military siege since 2007 (following the takeover of the strip by Hamas), in addition to regular aggressions, destruction, displacement and severe socioeconomic situation, all of which accentuates its isolation and rupture from the rest of the Palestinian geography.

Echoing these historical and present differences are the two exhibitions in question. The exhibition in Haifa curated by Mohamed Badarne, The People of the Sea, considers the state of loss that is present in Palestinian relationships with the sea: from those who were forcefully separated from the sea, to those who still live by it under difficult conditions in Akka, Haifa, Yafa and Gaza. Featuring a myriad of artists from Palestine and the Diaspora, the exhibition seeks to portray the living cultures of the sea, which bear the layers of erasure and resurgence, as well as the memory of, and nostalgia for, its loss. Staged at the Arab Culture Centre – formerly an Israeli cinema recently acquired by the Arab Culture Association – suggests the reclamation of cultural public space in Haifa, a city which has – over the past few years – been resurrected as a cultural hub for Palestinians. The location weaves through a narrative of repair into the unfolding layers that make up Haifa's torn history.

In another approach, the exhibition in Gazacurated by Raed Issa and Shareef Sarhan, The Sea is Mine, features only Gaza artists tackling the sea from their perspectives, entailing contradictory connotations of a sea is both the only public space for leisure and source of living for fishermen, and another harsh border zone and death route for those seeking to escape across the Mediterranean. Here, the situation in Gaza is a bold reminder that the right of return is rather remote, while literal return is practically impossible given that those who were displaced 67 years ago are no longer the same people, and their homes are no longer waiting for them.

Yet, while the intentions of Qi2016 are to transcend the coercive fragmentation of Palestine, the realities on the ground – of ongoing Israeli assaults and entrenchment of its colonial apartheid policies – accentuate the extremity of the physical division and renders Qi's ambitions of unification quite difficult.

It is these imperious urgencies that the Jerusalem Show VIII, organized by Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, addresses in its exhibition Before and After Origins curated by Vivian Ziheri. Staged at two venues, Al Ma'mal Foundation in Jerusalem old city and the Youth Activities Centre in Shu'fat Refugee Camp, the show considers the ongoing threat of displacement for Jerusalemites through constant harassments, pressure and discriminative colonial law. It is this palpable threat that the exhibition seeks to address: the struggle for the right to stay and possibilities of resistance and steadfastness in the face of Israel's systematic policies for emptying the city from Palestinians.

Nevertheless, as art is capable of escaping the harsh realities on the ground by producing virtual terrains of imagination, contemplation and provocation, so Qi2016 crosses beyond the subjugation of political, social and economic hegemonies in order to revisit rather than negate the right of return. After all, as Omar Alghbari proposes, in order for return to actuate, new practical strategies need to be established through critical cognizance of its meanings and connotations.[6] Primarily, it is essential to abandon the mentality of refugees into constructing the mindset of returnees, throughpractically endorsing urban, economic and politically decolonizing mechanisms. Reflecting this is the Ramallah Municipality exhibition, Sites of Return, contemplating return through stories and memories from across the city, which includes Campus in Camp – an experimental educational initiative cofounded by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti in 2012 to activate critical learning in refugee camps. Through their work, they develop conceptual and practical means for breaking the social exclusion and political stigmatism attached with refugee camps and refugees, embracing them as proactive producers of contemporary Palestinian identity and culture.

Nakba in this perspective is not an event of the past, but rather an ongoing process regulated by the colonial edifice and its mindset. Here, pondering on aspects and scenarios of Return while the colonial condition persists harshly on the ground necessitates equally an attempt to re-think urgencies, nuances and implications of colonization and political subjugation in this context and prospects of decolonization of imagination and knowledge to reclaim the narrative despite the fragmented reality of Palestine and that of Qi.

 The Sea as Archive

On Qalandiya International in Beirut

Reema Salha Fadda

 Everything began in 1948. In May. My grandparents were on a boat to Beirut,

after their city Jaffa had been bombed. During those few days,

the waves became too intense. They were forced to return.

They sat in the port for one week, waiting for the sea to calm down…

the waves wouldn't subside. But when they came back, Palestine was already gone. 

– Kamal Aljafari, The Roof (2006)

Ahmad Barclay & Hana Sleiman, PLO ships leaving port of Beirut.

Copyright and courtesy the artists.

The sea has been a site of precarious politics in Palestinian history: a bitter reminder of the loss of Palestine's economically prosperous costal cities (notably Jaffa, Haifa and Akka) during the Nakba of 1948; a territory marked by waves of forced Palestinian exile and settler migration from Europe; and, as with Gaza today, repeated Israeli incursions have turned the sea and its surrounds into a theatre of war. Yet in spite of, or perhaps driven by such ruptures, the sea continues to occupy the spatial imaginary of Palestinian artists, offering a vast and fluid space to consider the political and emotional resonances of contested geographies that deny their free movement. The impenetrable border politics and militarized checkpoints that disrupts the geographical continuity between the land and sea is a point articulated to trapping effect in Inass Yassin's short film, Dreaming of the Sea (2006).  As the film suggests, though the sea cannot be reached, its absence heightens its symbolic poignancy for Palestinians – at home and in the diaspora – as a site where trauma and hope intersect.

The title for this year's Qalandiya International (Qi), The Sea is Mine, considers the sea as a departure point from which to negotiate a critical discourse on the Palestinian right of return.  In keeping with the theme of return, Qi2016 will for the first time extend beyond the geographical borders of historic Palestine, to host exhibitions in Beirut, Amman and London. At a time when the politics of exclusion is becoming increasingly pronounced through the maritime refugee crisis, the exhibition frame pays heed to the contemporary regional struggle by connecting to Palestinian diaspora communities across borders. As Heba Amin has argued, the mass displacements occurring globally over the past five years has given rise to 'new geographies of activism'[1]: an approach encapsulated in Qi2016 trans-national exhibition programme in which the politicized subject of the refugee is mobilized as a political agent of return within Palestine's 'diasporic public sphere'.[2] Thinking of Palestine within a global perspective marks a liberatory gesture that not only affronts Israel's ongoing settler colonial project, but also considers ways to re-think the trans-national tyranny that prevents free movement across borders. Thus new strategies of organizing and exhibiting culture, not only works to diversify the creative ecology in Palestine and beyond, but inquires into the nature of cultural production as a platform for new political and artistic solidarities to be formed.

The curatorial framework for the Beirut iteration of Qi2016 at Dar El-Nimer, titled Sea of Stories, aims to open up 'a space for conversation on what return means for today's Palestinian community in Lebanon…[and to] retrace the journeys of people, ideas, narratives, and objects across the Mediterranean'.[3] Dar El-Nimr, which opened its doors in May of this year, offers a necessary space to reactivate Palestine's fragmented cultural and political history. As an institution dedicated to promoting Palestinian culture, it is already playing a sizable role in activating and building the Palestinian cultural archive through private collections, workshops, exhibitions, including the Palestinian Museum's inaugural exhibition, At the Seams: A Political History of Palestinian Embroidery. Moreover, it's position within the cultural landscape of Beirut, highlights the powerful role of institution-led cultural agency in countering Palestinian invisibility.

Lebanon has been a precarious home for Palestinian refugees and a compromised site for its cultural and political narrative. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, which led to the destruction of Palestinian social and cultural institutions and the PLO's forced withdrawal from Lebanon, Palestinians lost the 'base to conduct their struggle'.[4] It was the image of the PLO ships leaving Beirut port, a watershed moment that marked the end of the relative autonomy of Palestinians in Lebanon, from which the exhibition title takes its cue. The theme's emphasis on storytelling, attends to the accumulative process and personalised narratives that make up Palestine's diasporic cultural expression. Ahmad Barclay and Hanna Sleiman's extensive inter-active archival project Sea of Stories: Voyages of the Palestinian Archive – which will be exhibited in the gallery's main space – looks to the sea as a unifying archival space that has transported multiple narratives across the Mediterranean to various locales. In framing the Palestinian archive around the fluid and expansive metaphor of the sea, the historical archive is positioned within an ever-evolving framework, accounting for the erasures and ruptures that the Palestinian historical narrative continues to suffer.

That Qi2016 takes place two-weeks after the 34th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 – a bloody period in Palestine and Lebanon's history – is not insignificant.  It is within this context of violent suppressions inflicted on Palestinian camps in Lebanon that informs Abdulrahman Katanani's The Wave (2016) – a metal sculpture constructed from barbed wire ­that speaks to the impossibility of imaging freedom beyond man-made borders, wars, massacres and border policies that continue to limit spatial freedoms.  The violent waves of history that have afflicted the lives of Palestinians in the Sabra refugee camp where Katanani grew up, is pronounced through this visual gesture. But its production also points to the spirit of resilience, echoing Edward Said's claim  that,  '[t]o be a Palestinian is to stand at the nexus of these forces, either to be swept away by them or in some way to comprehend and employ their force constructively.'[5]

The forces Said spoke of back in 1980s – Zionism, colonialism, Arab nationalism, to name a few – continue to persist today. Yet the impact of neoliberalism and globalization on Israel's settler colonial project, has intensified the way in which the state asserts its power at home and abroad. The most illuminating example of this is the government-initiated Brand Israel campaign, which seeks to present the nation 'as a productive, vibrant and cutting-edge culture'.[6] To use an example that takes into consideration Qi2016's curatorial theme, Israel's beaches have become a marketable commodity to promote the idea of a 'cool', de-militarized Israel to visiting communities: an image that obscures the culture of oppression routinely inflicted on Gaza's shores just 30 miles away, which has rendered its Palestinian population in a state of dependency and an ongoing process of de-development. And so, when Israel teamed up with the French municipality to host 'Tel Aviv sur Siene' – an initiative to celebrate and promote Tel Aviv's beach culture in Paris, which came only a year after the Israeli military killed the four Baker boys on Gaza beach – it pronounced the power inequalities and visual dissonance between Palestine and Israel's relationship to, and re-visioning of, pubic space.

Thus the desire to reclaim access to public space has become a central consideration for Palestinian artists, seen in the works of Qi2016's contributing artist Kamal Aljafari, whose cinematic practice is informed by an impulse to reclaim Jaffa's buried cultural past through the act of collecting, and re-appropriating, images from Israel's cinematic past. It is the sea that offers a spatial anchor amidst the rapid urban transformations of the costal cities in Jaffa, in Kamal Aljafari's Recollections (2016). The layered images of Jaffa (past and present) are presented in a synthetic attempt to narrate the city's complexity as both part of Palestine's history and Israel's present. In doing so, his films provide a cinematic archive for a vanishing Palestinian landscape that seeks to (re)imagine and (re)image the urban landscape away from the gripping powers of state power and neoliberal agendas that are aggressively transforming the coastal cities of historic Palestine.

The neoliberal production of urban space is a regional dilemma that informs the artistic practices of Dictaphone group – a Lebanese collective, whose site-specific performance seek to challenge the post-war reconstruction developments in Beirut and its alienating effects on Lebanese publics. In a newly commissioned video installation for Qi2016, titled Camp Pause: Encounter in Rashidieh (2016), the film follows the journey of four inhabitants of Rashidieh refugee camp – the closest camp to historic Palestine located on the coast of southern Lebanon, near the city of Tyre – to re-map their personal relationship to the geographies they inhabit. The group will also extend their intervention through a site-specific performance of The Sea is Mine, a boat-tour that sets off from from Ain el Mraiseh Port, to expose audiences to the corrosive effects of privatization on Beirut's sea front and its consequent restrictions on Lebanese publics.

Despite the insurmountable blockages to free-movement that has been exacerbated by military, maritime, political and economic forces, Qi is an insistence on the reiterative power of culture to reclaim public spaces or sites that have become synonymous with Israel's colonial apparatus. (It is important to note that Qi is named after Israel's notorious Qalandiya checkpoint that separates the West Bank from historic Palestine and the international community).  By activating a cultural space that interrogates the silencing mechanisms of power that suppress Palestinian narratives and platforms of resistance, Qi attests to the sizeable role culture can play in sustaining a spirit of persistence against the ongoing Nakba. As an event that is firmly positioned within the international art circuit, it is also it forces us to consider the privileges of movement across borders, that underpins global art world flows.

By reaching beyond borders, institutions and public space, Qi offers a wider vision of how to read Palestinian culture: in flux; in exile; unfixed; communal; hyphenated; compromised; obscured; and, caught in an ever-evolving process to restore an interrupted history through cultural acts of reclamation.  And whilst culture may not be able to produced meaningful political change – to borrow a phrase from Ralph Ellison – it offers 'raft of hope… that might keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course towards and away from the democratic ideal'.[7] In a region crippled by autocratic regimes, wars, mass migration, and ongoing colonisation, Qi offers a temporary, symbolic raft between cities, to move beyond the unstable present and to open up a space for narratives that have been lost or buried – at sea or on land – to be (partially) restored.