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Frontiers Against Genocide: Reimagining Resistance Through Culture

Conversation with Majd Nasrallah

Thursday, October 24^th, 2024 at 19h

Center kuda.org

Braće Mogin 2, Detelinara, Novi Sad

Majd Nasrallah is a cultural practitioner, community organizer, researcher, and curator from Qalansuwa, the Triangle area in Palestine. He focuses on popular education, grassroots political formation, and critical knowledge production.

Majd Nasrallah announces the conversation with the following words:
“As the brutal and unabashed genocide unfolds on screens all over the globe, challenging the very fabric of our human values, the critical responsibility and role of cultural institutions, spaces of art and imagination, and grassroots collectives become undeniably central.

This significance is augmented in light of the strategically designed campaign of distorting reality through systemic censorship, and a dehumanization strategy spearheaded by international actors, ranging from governments to news agencies. It is in this context that cultural practitioners, artists, and activists recognize the imperative to not only participate in but to brave the discourse on resistance.

Cultural organizations in Palestine today exist within a precarious paradigm. On the one hand, compromised by donor policies and, on the other, their freedom of expression violated by the security establishment. It is at this historic moment that we are also offered the opportunity for a critical reevaluation of knowledge and cultural production methods.

This also necessitates that we begin to address the difficult questions like what does opening spaces for the radical imagination of a different future that emboldens the discourse of resistance truly entail? How can we bravely explore new political and social values and propose creative forms of community organizing that actively work toward realizing them? Given the immediate danger and threat to cultural organizations, what does global solidarity truly mean in practice? More importantly, how can our work transcend merely highlighting the violation of human values to actively positioning these values at the heart of our collective struggle for dignity, liberation, and freedom?”

Photo:

1.‘I Witness Silwan’ – The Silwan neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, December 2019, credit: Ohad Zwigenberg.

2. Echoes of Solidarity by Qattan foundation