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Collective Study in Times of Emergency. A Roundtable

 

The following roundtable, which took place online in October this year, forms a group reflection on the motivations for and process of the publishing stand ‘Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency’ by members of L’Internationale Online’s editorial board. The conversation, and preceding note, serves as the introduction to the digital publication Collective Study in Times of Emergency.

Collective Study in Times of Emergency brings together nineteen contributions published by L’Internationale Online since November 2023 under the strand ‘Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency’. Unlike previous publications assembled and edited by L’Internationale Online, the publication was not preconceived as a book. As the first editorial from November 2023 articulates, the impulse, urgency and necessity for this work was to try to understand the implications of the genocide unfolding in Gaza for the cultural sphere, from the places in which L’Internationale’s partners operate.

Working with members of our editorial board, we invited contributions as a means to engage with what Fred Moten describes as ‘collective study’ – what he and Stefano Harney have expanded on as a form of ‘study without an end’ – as both a means to work beyond the limitations and pitfalls of the ‘statement’, the single utterance, and to come into relation with practitioners, communities and contexts affected by the genocide.1

The commissions have come out of long-term relationships, friendships and new encounters: from within the confederation, through the programmes of some of our partners, and most importantly, with peers and allies within the Palestinian cultural ecosystem.

In this light, we are incredibly grateful to the many conversations that have resulted in the writing, music and broadcasts you will find here: to Waad and the Learning Palestine Group; to the people and projects we encountered, including Rana Anani, The Institute for Palestine Studies and the 24 hrs/Palestine project, during a trip to the West Bank in July 2024 hosted by the A. M. Qattan Foundation; to the artists, performers and activists who have taken part in programmes in our institutions including ‘Song for Many Movements’ (MACBA), ‘Critical Thinking Gatherings – International Solidarity with Palestine’ (Museo Reina Sofía), and ‘Gathering into the Maelstrom’ and ‘Red, Green, Black and White’ (both Institute of Radical Imagination, the latter in collaboration with the Free Palestine Initiative Croatia at MSU Zagreb); to the individual academics and practitioners working without institutional support, like Rana Issa, Sanabel Abdelrahman and Françoise Vergès, for their powerful articulations during moments of intense personal and collective trauma; to L’Internationale colleagues Bojana Piškur, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu and Mick Wilson for their precise contributions; to the members of the wider editorial board for their valuable input; and to all those who must remain anonymous but whose vital work across organizing, research and practice has been so crucial for Collective Study. Thank you.

We, members of L’Internationale Online editorial board, feel this is one of the most transversal publications we have worked on – one that, we hope, has the capacity to connect with a broad set of audiences and publics, across student, activist, artistic and institutional communities. Our intention in putting these contributions together in a publication is for it to circulate and be used within and beyond the circuits of the arts and academia.

Rather than offer a formal introduction, the following roundtable, which took place in October this year, forms a group reflection by the editors on the motivations for and process of Collective Study. Like the other contributions, it came into being at a specific moment through specific subjectivities. It is partial and inconclusive but nonetheless a beginning, a way in, for what we will hope will be a valuable resource for those invested in the process of study during times of emergency.



Nick Aikens: We are speaking a year on from 7 October 2023. Since then, as our former colleague curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez reported in the recent ‘Climate Forum’ seminar, following an Instagram post by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, Israel has dropped the equivalent of six times more bombs per square kilometre than the weight of the atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in World 2

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