Unlearning Maps: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark
The afternoon starts by reading a text that helps ground the political approach, followed by two film screening blocks focussing respectively on Palestinian and Iranian perspectives. Afterwards, participants reflect on and document what was witnessed and learned. In dialogue with the exhibition Life After Love – In Search of the Militant Image, the programme hopes to foster an intergenerational and cross-context exchange starting from situated histories, the horizons of possibility they open up, and grounds for solidarity within the region and beyond.
When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice gets co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also narrows the political imagination, making other futures seem unattainable. Within these constraints, the histories of marginalised peoples, often entangled in these violent frameworks, must be held carefully in order to build other forms of relation and language that resist a return into imperial narratives. Solidarity, then, cannot be limited by choosing sides within the maps already given, or operate by flattening or universalising all struggles. It must begin from where different people stand, their histories, lands, wounds and limits of vision.
This gathering begins by listening not through detached sympathy, but as a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may then become visible. The event stands in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war and mass violence.
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Programme
14:00 Collective reading:
– Feminist Recalibration of a Magical Compass
– On the Difficulties of International Solidarity in Post-Jina Movement
– Shima Vezvaei
14:45 Screening block 1: Subversive films
15:25 Reflection on textile
16:00 Screening block 2: Siege Your Besiege with Madness
17:20 Reflection on textile
