‘Palestine Is Everywhere’ is an encounter and screening at Museo Reina Sofía organised together with Cinema as Assembly as part of Museum of the Commons. The conference starts at 18:30 pm (CET) and will also be streamed on the online platform linked below.
Palestine Is Everywhere is the international slogan of solidarity with the Palestinian people and also the title of a global debate that situates Palestine at the centre of our historical time, understanding the war in Gaza as the start of a new cycle shaped by colonial expansion. Under this title, Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter that opens with a video recital by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the best-known poetic voices in the Arab language. Following his intervention, artists and theorists Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, part of the Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement, philosopher Marina Garcés and anthropologist Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona will exchange reflections, experiences and viewpoints on the Palestinian situation and cause in a round-table discussion. As a coda to the session, there will be a viewing of Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019), a work by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The eleven-minute video piece sets up a dialogue between the writings of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said (1935–2003) and AI-created images of protests at the wall that runs along the Gaza Strip.
With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau. With their resistance and demands, these territories are crying out for a new world-system that is more just, diverse and equal. What does it mean to be part of the planetary anti-colonial struggle? How to reorient ourselves towards fresh global movements that question the hegemony of the nation state? How to relate images of global freedom, those considered from desire, not pain, in this new temporal framework?