Sometimes you feel out of place, but being in the middle is not a loss. It’s the point from where you can see two worlds, while others see only one. I feel I’m a crescent that doesn’t need to become sun to shine. 

These were the words of Tamara Al Zool, the 23 years old who goes by her art name TÄRA. She has reached millions of Italians through the mainstream TV-program Le Iene in May with a monologue on identity that soon became viral on social media. 

A week later, her debut EP “Zefiro” went out on a date that could not be more important for her: May 15, the day of the Nakba, a day and a history she has always known from her parents and grandparents who lived it. Today, touring Italy and Europe with concerts and events, she is taking on the Italian music scene with a style that, according to Rolling Stone MENA, “Italy has no category for”. 

To learn more about her artistic journey, UntoldMag sat with TÄRA for an exclusive interview. 

 

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Born in Italy to Palestinian parents, TÄRA is making waves with her own genre. She calls it Arab&B, a new type of R&B where she mixes Arabic, English, Italian (and at times also French) in such a natural way that one would not imagine that at one point in her life, she had challenges in feeling her identity.  It would not seem so either when, two years ago, at her very first appearance on TV for the music program X Factor Italia, she made it very clear why she was there: “I came to X-factor to represent, to be a voice”, she said, wearing a keffiyeh as she performed Ariana Grande’s song 7 Rings with some parts reinterpreted in Arabic. 

Palestine – and all that comes with it, from the ongoing genocide to resistance and memory –, the Arabic speaking world, and the Mediterranean as a whole are constant themes in her songs, through which the listener can soon appreciate that TÄRA makes music with universal messages. Like in “Diaspora”, which draws a line between the Palestinians expelled from their land and the Southern Italians who leave their homes behind out of necessity. 

In the “Petra” music video, shot in Tunis, within 3 minutes the music takes the listener through a romantic journey from Maghreb to Mashreq. Not to mention her rendition of Ya Helwa Ciao, her Arabic rendition of Bella Ciao, the song adopted by the Italian Resistance calling for freedom and an end to fascism, so popular among Palestinians (and generally among minorities fighting for their rights). 

Stefano Nanni: Identity is a recurrent topic in your songs. But who is TÄRA before and after becoming the artist, and has that helped in affirming your own identity?

TÄRA: The beauty of all that I’m living is that before, during and after, it’s always me. I can definitely say that my public persona is not a ‘character’ but genuinely who I am, expressing my values without fear. 

It has not always been easy to belong to different worlds at the same time, but I learned with time that being in the middle is an additional perspective rather than a deficiency. And I think I grew in awareness and courage to translate my innate self into art. Being able to represent all these middle lands is certainly not an easy task, but it’s like my whole world is made of many different points of view. 

For example, in the song “Petra” we chose Tunisia as a destination because it perfectly encompasses my multifaceted world, highlighting the beautiful similarities among seemingly different cultures and transcending societal divisions.

SN: Still on identity, in the very powerful music video “Beauty standards”, you seem to affirm something also about the type of aesthetic you want to embrace. 

T: With this EP I am going through a whole journey, including certain beauty standards because it is a theme that I have personally experienced, having felt ‘not beautiful enough’ according to certain norms imposed by society. 

I am sure many other girls have experienced and continue to experience this type of ‘discomfort’ – that’s what I call it. With that video I wanted to represent, through a short monologue, how the beauty you have today, even if it may not conform to mainstream models represented by the media, actually carries history and tradition. 

It is important to acknowledge and remember that the people before you have fought to make you be here, so you have to bring these unique features, with pride, not shame.

SN: Do you feel somehow that your music is able to represent people who often had no one to identify with? And can it contribute to more unity?

T: Let’s say that my goal is precisely to represent those often unrepresented: The too many Italians with foreign roots caught in the middle like me. If in my own small way, my music succeeded in attracting even two or three persons who feel I am doing something positive for them, then I am very happy and I hope it will go even better. 

I don’t want to sound too utopian, but it would be nice to get to a point where we don’t even have to make all these divisions among all of us anymore, and then be able to live in unity simply as human beings. I have a strong desire for my music to foster unity among all people, dreaming a world without such divisions, where cultural beauty is celebrated by all humans. I hope that my art will play a role in all this.

SN: How are you handling success? Did your direct relations with fans change by becoming so popular? 

T: When it comes to my relationship with fans I think it is even improving, as I continue to live the direct connection with them through social media, receiving immense support and love. I think it is a very beautiful way of living this experience. 

At the same time, it is obvious that social media can be a double-edged sword, as the toxicity of certain users brings also a lot of negativity. Sometimes it’s hard to confront that, especially hate speech and comments about Palestine, but I am learning to use indifference as a more effective strategy, because in the end, those who want to hate stick to anything in front of them.

Generally, about success, I think I’m living a fairly quiet relationship with it, actually. I see it as a means, I have the privilege to access a wide audience, to share the messages I want to transmit, especially about Palestine and the genocide we’re still suffering. So why not do it? Indeed, in certain places like on mainstream TV there seem to be certain rules about not talking about certain topics, but I am approaching them, as much as possible, with my naturalness and my identity, without hiding anything. 

SN: On the power to use popularity to take a stance, recently in Italy there were some controversies about the words of Francesco De Gregori, a very popular singer, who said that he “feels embarrassed when an artist takes a political position”. What do you think of that?

T: I have honestly not read what he said, and I don’t want to decontextualize his words, but my opinion is a totally different one: I want my art to give a voice to the voiceless and to minorities. 

As an artist, I believe I have the power and responsibility to educate younger generations and empower those who might otherwise feel silenced. I don’t want to live in a world where somebody grows up fearing that exposing themself is something that leads them to something negative. I don’t want that, I want something different.

The post Giving Italy a Sound It Has No Category For: An Interview with Palestinian-Italian Singer TÄRA appeared first on Untold.

Developed as part of the European Research Council–funded PalREAD project, the platform brings together archival material, podcasts, network visualizations, and thematic narratives to document a literature created under conditions of exile, occupation, and censorship. It offers a critical intervention against erasure—especially vital in a moment of genocidal violence against Palestinians and the systematic suppression of their voices.

In this interview, Refqa Abu‑Remaileh reflects on the origins and goals of the project, the challenges of building a literary history from fragments, and the urgency of documenting Palestinian cultural production in the face of historical and ongoing destruction. Through her work, she not only tells the story of Palestinian literature but also how we can learn from this rich creative history of defiance, resistance, and survival.

Walid El Houri: How would you describe this massive project? What made you decide to do it, and who do you believe it is for?

Refqa Abu‑Remaileh: One of the main reasons I started this project was to answer my own questions. I was struggling to understand how to read, write about, and make sense of Palestinian literature. There are many anomalies in this field—disconnections, gaps, scattered histories—and I kept hitting a ceiling. Even though the existing work was incredibly important, it felt like we couldn’t see the bigger picture: how everything connects, how the diaspora relates to the homeland, and how we make sense of a history shaped by fragmentation.

At some point, I became disillusioned with the limits of traditional literary analysis. It no longer felt sufficient to analyze texts in isolation. I felt the need for unconventional approaches to make sense of what is, in many ways, an unconventional literature.

I’m also a visual learner, so I wanted to create something that was visual and interactive. Simple facts, like whether Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani ever met were unclear. The canon of Palestinian literature has been reduced to a few major names, but even those figures lived in entirely different cities, cultural spheres, and political realities. We often treat them as though they belonged to a single, unified literary scene—which they didn’t. So, I wanted to build something that would allow us to explore these disconnections and interconnections more clearly.

This is how the idea of an atlas emerged—something that could show the motion of literature across geographies, a “literature in motion.” I realized that the best way to represent that was through a digital platform that allowed for textual, visual, and audio components. It had to be non-linear and participatory—something more democratic, that could reflect the fragmented and scattered nature of Palestinian literary history. I didn’t want to write a conventional, linear literary history.

The digital realm became essential not only for hosting the project but as a conceptual space—a virtual meeting ground for dispersed data and fragmented narratives. It helped me see Palestinian literature as a story of movement, elasticity, and rupture. I didn’t know all of this when I began, but the drive to answer these questions and see the bigger picture is what propelled the project forward.

WH: What defines Palestinian literature and what makes it special or particular? How is it different from other national literatures?

RA: This was one of the biggest challenges I faced—trying to define what is and isn’t part of Palestinian literature. Early on, I decided to adopt an inclusive approach inspired by the spirit of the Palestinian revolution, particularly the Beirut years. Many people I spoke to, including in our podcast interviews, emphasized that Palestinian identity—at least in the context of literature and culture—wasn’t strictly about nationality or ethnicity, but about belonging to a cause.

So, I made a conscious decision to include non-Palestinians in the project—writers, editors, thinkers—anyone who made a major contribution to Palestinian literature, regardless of their background. This wasn’t about gatekeeping based on origin but about contribution and connection. That inclusiveness felt essential to reflecting the spirit of the literature itself.

At the same time, I had to confront a recurring question: Is Palestinian literature really that different from other Arabic literatures? I remember meeting Salma Khadra Jayyusi, an incredibly important but underrecognized Palestinian poet and literary critic, who was already in her 90s when I interviewed her. She looked at me skeptically and said, “Why do you need a separate project for Palestinian literature? It’s no different from Arabic literature. It has the same genres, styles, movements.”

And she was right—on the level of the literary texts themselves, Palestinian literature is very much part of modern Arabic literature. It shares its genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays—and it’s shaped by the same regional trends and intellectual currents. These writers were writing in, and part of, the broader Arab world.

But what makes Palestinian literature different is the context of its production and circulation. It’s a national literature without a nation-state—a literature that is unhoused, fragmented, scattered across geographies. Its writers, critics, readers, publishers, and archives are not located within a centralized, territorial state. This affects everything: how the literature is written, read, archived, and remembered.

Most national literatures emerge from relatively stable territorial entities. Palestinian literature doesn’t. Its very conditions of existence are shaped by displacement, exile, censorship, imprisonment, and erasure. These are not just background facts; they define the literature. There’s also a kind of latent transnationalism that has always been there, but we’ve tended to overlook it—perhaps because of a desire to normalize Palestinian literature within national literary frameworks.

So, we end up analyzing the canonical figures—Kanafani in Beirut, Emile Habibi in Haifa, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Baghdad—as though they were part of a unified literary tradition. But they were living in completely different political and cultural environments, and rarely, if ever, interacting directly. Ignoring that reality means ignoring what actually makes Palestinian literature distinct.

It’s also a literature that has been systematically targeted—through censorship, imprisonment, exile, and erasure—in ways that go beyond what’s typical in other Arab literatures. All of this contributes to its particularity: a decentralized, transnational, and constantly disrupted literary tradition that still manages to cohere around a sense of collective memory and struggle.

WH: Does Palestinian literature need to be in Arabic, or do you consider it a multilingual literature? Which other languages have you encountered and documented?

RA: Yes, Palestinian literature is multilingual. During the research, I encountered material in many languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, English, French, among others. However, for the purposes of this project, I made the decision to focus primarily on Arabic-language sources. That wasn’t because the other languages aren’t important—they are—but because the vast majority of literary production, especially in the 20th century, has been in Arabic.

This sometimes frustrates people, but we can’t deny that Arabic is the dominant language of Palestinian literary expression. And the Arabic corpus is enormous—much of it still unexplored. I realized we’ve barely scratched the surface. When people think of literature, they often focus only on the major literary texts, but there’s so much more: criticism, editorials, letters, essays, manifestos, cultural commentary. All of this exists in Arabic, scattered across newspapers, magazines, private archives, and oral histories.

That said, the multilingual dimension is real, especially when we look at the diaspora—Latin America in particular. One of the surprises in my research was discovering just how much Arabic-language publishing was taking place there, starting in the early 20th century. Many of these publications eventually became bilingual—Arabic-Spanish or Arabic-Portuguese—and then fully Spanish or Portuguese. This history is often overshadowed by the emphasis on Arab migration to the United States, but in fact, Latin America has a rich and largely untapped archive of Palestinian and broader Arab cultural production.

I think we’ll see more work emerge around this in the coming years, and I hope others take up that research. My project doesn’t deny the multilingual nature of Palestinian literature—it simply focuses on Arabic because that’s where the core of the historical production is, and because it remains a massive field requiring further excavation.

WH: What is the importance of this type of documentation amid the genocidal destruction of all things Palestinian—communities, history, heritage, places, and more?

RA: This project was actually completed before the current genocide began—it just happened to be published a few days after October 7. At first, I couldn’t make sense of that timing. But slowly, everything started to click into place. The patterns I had traced over nearly a century of literary history—the erasures, the silences, the censorship, the imprisonments, the massacres—they all pointed toward what we’re witnessing now. This eruption of violence didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a culmination.

Through the project, it became clear to me that there have been two forms of genocide at play: a slow, grinding genocide that has unfolded over decades, and a fast, spectacular one we are now witnessing. But both follow the same logic: erasure of Palestinian presence on the land, culture, memory, and people.

I didn’t expect to find what I found. When you write literary history, you don’t usually think you’ll be documenting prisons, massacres, and mass censorship. But these elements kept appearing in the sources—so often and so forcefully that I couldn’t ignore them. So I began highlighting them as themes in the project. These include imprisonment, censorship, and massacres—tools of suppression that have shaped the conditions of Palestinian literary production for over a century.

The sheer number of writers who were imprisoned, exiled, banned, or silenced is staggering—and unprecedented. These weren’t isolated incidents. They formed a pattern, and this pattern maps directly onto the political project of erasing Palestinian identity and culture.

And yet, even in times of catastrophe, people wrote. One example I highlight is a magazine published in East Jerusalem after 1948, where the editor, Amin Shunnar, proposed a new literary genre: “Adab al-Nakba”—the literature of catastrophe, or the literature of the Nakba. He believed Palestinians could contribute something unique to the Arab literary tradition by reflecting on how to write from the ruins—not just about destruction, but also about survival, hope, and the future.

This kind of resilience is threaded through the entire history of Palestinian literature. Despite the attempts to destroy and silence, people kept writing, thinking, and imagining. There are precedents to draw on. There is a legacy of resistance—creative, intellectual, cultural—that didn’t emerge out of nowhere in the present moment. It’s been built over generations. This project is one attempt to document and preserve that legacy—not only for memory, but also as a resource for the present and future.

WH: At a time when there is violent erasure and suppression of Palestinian voices, what can the history of Palestinian literature and literary figures teach us about the present moment?

RA: One of the central themes I traced in this project is censorship—not just of Palestinians, but of anyone speaking about Palestine. What surprised me was how early this began. For example, I found Arabic newspapers published in Santiago, Chile, as early as 1920 reporting on events in Palestine, like the Nabi Musa uprising. These papers received Palestinian newspapers from the homeland, but they arrived heavily censored—entire sections blacked out. And the editors in Chile understood this as a systematic attempt to silence Palestinian voices and to decimate their political and cultural leadership.

That was under British colonial rule. What’s striking is how seamlessly the Israeli state inherited these tools—prison, censorship, bans—and expanded them. Palestinians themselves understood this continuity. The poet Tawfiq Zayyad, for example, explicitly said that his struggle inside Israel after 1948 was a direct continuation of the struggle of poets like Ibrahim Touqan under British colonialism. The colonial conditions hadn’t changed—only the rulers had.

This suppression wasn’t limited to literary production. The writers I researched weren’t just writers—they were also teachers, journalists, organizers, activists. Their work spanned cultural and political spheres, and because of that, they were seen as threats. One powerful example is the Al-Ard movement, an anti-Zionist political group inside Israel after 1948. It was quickly banned, and when its members tried to publish a bulletin, they had to use a legal loophole from the British Mandate period that allowed for one-off publications without a license. They issued a series of underground bulletins, each under a different name, editor, and location—but always with “Al-Ard” in the title. It was a brilliant act of resistance using colonial legal mechanisms against the colonial state.

That example reminds me of what we see today with social media. Palestinian journalists and activists create multiple Instagram or Twitter accounts because once one gets taken down, they open another. This pattern of silencing and persistence goes all the way back to the early 20th century. Palestinians have had to fight media blackouts, censorship, and suppression for generations.

What this history teaches us is that Palestinians have always resisted erasure—and they’ve done so with incredible creativity and resilience. The erasure isn’t new, but neither is the resistance. What’s crucial now is to recover those histories—not just to honor them, but to learn from them. They remind us that we’re not starting from scratch. There is a long archive of creative defiance that can guide us through this moment.

WH: In your project to document this rich literature, what were the biggest challenges? And what were the biggest discoveries?

RA: The challenges were many—legal, logistical, emotional, conceptual. First, I had to accept that this project would never be comprehensive. Palestinian literary history is full of ruptures, silences, and missing pieces. I wasn’t dealing with a cohesive, well-preserved archive; I was working with fragments. That required a shift in mindset. I had to be okay with documenting what I could, knowing it would remain partial, interrupted, and unfinished.

There were also major logistical obstacles—accessing sources across geographies, finding rare materials, dealing with COVID travel restrictions. Much of the archive doesn’t exist in national libraries or formal institutions. It’s in people’s homes—private libraries, boxes in garages, basements, old community centers. You have to look in unexpected places.

As a literary scholar, I wasn’t trained in archival research or oral history. But I had to embrace those methods, because often there were no written records. Oral interviews became essential for filling the gaps—especially for capturing lived experiences and connecting dots that the written archive couldn’t provide.

Then there was the digital side. This was a team-based project, and it couldn’t have been done alone. We worked with researchers across the region—in Gaza, the West Bank, inside Israel, in Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait—and coordinated a small team in Berlin. Creating the project’s database  was hugely labor-intensive. There are no pre-existing datasets for Palestinian literature. Everything had to be manually collected, coded, and entered—biographical data, periodical metadata, geographic information, thematic connections.

And because the digital infrastructure is geared toward Latin-script, left-to-right languages, we faced constant hurdles with Arabic—OCR (optical character recognition) is still inaccurate, right-to-left formatting is often buggy, and nothing could be automatically generated. Every node and connection you see in the platform had to be mapped manually in Word docs and Excel sheets.

Conceptually, one of the most difficult questions was: how do I represent a fragmented, non-linear story in visual and textual form? Edward Said’s idea of “counterpoint” was key here—multiple narratives happening simultaneously, often in tension with each other. That’s why I created a timeline with overlapping geographies—showing events in the homeland and in the diaspora at the same time. Palestinian literature has never existed outside occupation. Whether in the homeland or abroad, it’s always responding to colonial pressure. Representing that contrapuntal history was a major challenge, but also one of the most meaningful parts of the work.

WH: What journey do you want the reader to take when navigating the site?

RA: This isn’t a conventional book. You don’t have to read it from beginning to end. The idea was to create multiple entry points so that readers—depending on their interests and background—could navigate the project in a non-linear, intuitive way.

The heart of the project is the timeline, which is also the landing page. It doesn’t follow a single narrative but offers seven overlapping historical periods, each with its own geographic and political context. As you scroll through the timeline, you can literally see the geographies shift—dots move across the map to reflect changing centers of literary production. The idea is to make the fragmentation and movement of Palestinian literature visible.

If you click into any period, you’ll find a narrative that includes highlighted elements. These highlights are color-coded: blue for literary figures, green for periodicals, and red for themes like censorship or exile. There are 94 highlighted figures, 35 periodicals, and 12 themes, all cross-referenced and pre-mapped to show how they connect.

From there, readers can jump to the network view—a meta-perspective that shows the relationships between periods, people, periodicals, and themes across different periods. This was especially helpful for me while writing. I’m a visual thinker, and I often needed to draw connections by hand just to make sense of the data. The network view automates that, allowing readers to hover over nodes, follow links, and see unexpected connections emerge.

There’s also a visualization gallery, which serves as a standalone knowledge source. These graphs and charts are embedded in each chapter but are also available on their own because they contain far more data than I could write about in the text. For instance, someone might discover that a writer based in Tunis was publishing in a periodical in Paris—things I couldn’t always explore in depth, but the data is there for others to pursue.

Finally, we have the audio interviews, which became a podcast. These are also standalone, and they add personal and historical depth to the project. Many of the voices you hear there reflect on periods, people, and publications that are documented in the text or visualizations, but from lived experience.

So, the journey is really up to the reader. You can enter through the timeline, the network, the visualizations, or the audio. You can follow a theme, a writer, a periodical—whatever interests you. The goal was to create an experience that is interactive, non-linear, and generative, where readers can follow their curiosity and find their own path through the story.

WH: What’s next for the project? How do you see it—or wish it—to live on?

RA: The current version of the project is static. That was one of the conditions of publishing with the digital arm of Stanford University Press. I can’t add to or update it, but the upside is that they’ve committed to maintaining the infrastructure over time—keeping the site online, updating it as needed, and ensuring its longevity. That was really important to me. I didn’t want to build something this labor-intensive only for it to disappear once the funding ran out.

That said, I see this project as a foundation for future work—my own and hopefully others’. It was also a way for me to document everything I wished I had time to explore in more depth. I plan to return to many of these threads, starting with the Mahjar period, which is incredibly rich but still under-researched. There are several figures, texts, and publications I want to dive into further. The data I gathered points to so many pathways—Palestine and the Maghreb, Palestine and Latin America, Palestine and Europe—each deserving much more detailed study.

This atlas is also a map for my future research—articles, books, maybe even new collaborations. And I hope it will be the same for others. I wrote the texts in accessible language, without academic jargon, and it’s all open access. That was intentional. I wanted to break through the academic paywalls and make this resource usable for people outside the university—students, educators, cultural workers, or anyone interested in Palestinian literary history.

I’m also developing teaching tools based on the platform. During the project, I didn’t have time to build them, but I’ve started working with collaborators to create digital teaching modules—courses that can be used in schools, universities, or workshops. I’d like to expand that work further, especially with cultural centers and museums, so people can engage with this material outside of academic settings.

Some colleagues are already using the platform in their teaching, which is great to hear. I want to do the same with my students. The idea is for this to be more than a static archive—it’s meant to be a living, generative space where people can learn, research, and pursue their own questions. I hope others will take it in directions I haven’t imagined yet.

The post A Country of Words: Mapping Memory, Resistance, and Exile in Palestinian Literary History appeared first on Untold.

Davide Oberto: Kamal, can you tell us how you encountered cinema and how you started to make films?

Kamal Aljafari: When I was a Palestinian student in Jerusalem, I wasn’t really interested in art and cinema – in the sense that it wasn’t something that I aspired to pursue. 

At that time, I was mostly an activist at the university, a member of a left-wing student group.

Within that context, I began working with the (editorial) team of a magazine, where I learned how to investigate the different issues I wanted to write about.

At that point, almost by chance, I started going to the cinemathéque in Jerusalem – mainly  because everybody seemed to be going there. You could get a membership and then watch films. And I really enjoyed watching films!

But the idea of studying and making films only came later, when I started thinking about creating something to express things that I couldn’t articulate in other ways.

This desire coincided with my growing urge to leave the country. I was involved in a kind of Marxist group – it was almost like a sect – and it was really difficult to break away. So for me, making art and wanting to express myself differently and artistically became a way to escape that situation and eventually to leave the country.

I ended up going to Germany because someone told me about the school in Cologne and offered to let me stay at their place.

I was 26 when I left. That was already many years ago – my God!

I think things often happen by coincidence. In the end, I could have ended up doing something completely different, not necessarily filmmaking. 

D.: What about your first films?

K.: Well, the first film I made was at film school – the one I did in Geneva- Visit Iraq (2003, 25’). I’m not sure if I’ve already told you this: recently I wanted to digitize some old miniDV tapes of my earlier films like The Roof (2006, 61’) and others. While going through the tapes, I found three labeled “Gaza”. I had no idea what they were, I didn’t even remember ever filming in Gaza. Really, I had no recollection.

I watched the tapes, and they turned out to be footage from a visit that I made to Gaza when I was 28. At that time, I was already living in Germany. I had taken a camera from my school, returned to Palestine, and filmed for three days. And incredibly, I never watched the material.  I never digitized those tapes, so I never saw them until now. I am even in the footage myself because I had asked someone to film me while I was talking to people.

This might be  the first thing I ever filmed. You know, it just happened after my first year at film school. I had learned a bit how to use the camera, and then I went to film that. My idea back then was to make a film about my experience in prison. I was looking for someone in Gaza who was imprisoned with me. I didn’t find him, but I filmed that search, and then never watched the material. I’ve carried it with me for almost 25 years. Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m making a film from it called With Hasan in Gaza.

D.: When were you in prison?

K.: When I was 17. I talked a bit about that experience in The Roof.

D.: Have you already finished With Hasan in Gaza?

K.: (laughing) Not yet, not that fast! 

What is interesting is that there’s a lot of great material in the footage, especially the people. I filmed many people, their faces…But what is also fascinating is that I had completely forgotten all of it.

D.: In fact I’m wondering how you will work with this material, with this footage… Since you forgot you even shot it, it could function for you almost like an archive.

K.: Exactly-like an archive!!

I could only remember because I watched the footage. Otherwise, the fact that I had gone there, that I had slept at that person’s place, was completely erased from my memory. It was around the year 2000. There were bombings around the house. And Hasan, the person who hosted me, said “Yeah…don’t worry, let’s watch TV. There is a basketball game”. So he turned on the TV and he started watching the basketball game, and I filmed that. Sometimes I would look and film out of the window, checking what was happening outside. But he kept saying: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just come and sit next to me”.

This time I want to approach the filmmaking process differently, because this footage brought back so many memories – about Gaza, about my time in prison. I’ve written the narration, and I’ll start working on it when I’m in Paris (Kamal received a one-year fellowship at The Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University in Paris).

With Hasan in Gaza is actually the first thing I ever shot, and it’s become a kind of archival footage. It’s crazy, because it has only now come to light. I carried it with me all these years, never watched it – and it’s really strange how things happen. That’s why I say: it’s not always about what we decide to do. It’s about what life brings us, how life carries us to places.

I could have ended up being a writer, instead of making films. I don’t want to say that I was born to make films. Sometimes, we start something, we enjoy it, we stay with it. We live, and life leads us.

 D: Maybe cinema turned out to be the perfect language for expressing a necessity…

 K.: In a way, yes.

I started by writing for the political magazine, doing reportages, but not only. I also expressed more poetic feelings, and I started taking photos for the magazine, too.

I think that filmmaking, in a way, was an accident – a good accident, but still an accident.

It could have completely failed. I went to study in Cologne, and it could have happened that I didn’t enjoy it. But in the end, I stayed, and I’m still making films. It might sound really crazy, but most of the people I studied with don’t make films anymore. No one! At some point, you start a family…I don’t know…You have to work…It becomes too hard to be a filmmaker…

It’s strange, because I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t intend to make films with archival footage, and now even though there is a fiction film I want to make I find myself working in an archive again.

This time, it’s my own archive, but it really is an archive. I can watch myself at 28 years old. I still had a lot of hair, and I was very attentive and curious.

D: I think cinema, in your case – especially considering your early films like The Roof, Balconies (2007, 7’), Port of Memory (2009, 62’) – is a remarkable opportunity , or perhaps a serendipitous accident, to combine space and time. You went to this film school in Cologne, then returned to Ramleh (Kamal Aljafari’s hometown, Editor’s note) where you began  intertwining  the space around you with the personal (hi)story and the time of your family…

K.: For me, it was something natural and instinctive – to fill the environment I came from with meaning.

 I grew up in a house where the second floor was left unfinished. So, for me, the sense of belonging to a certain sense of history was always there.

When I returned,  I made my first feature-length film, The Roof, in 2004.

I was immediately attracted by this landscape, which was part of my story, part of what I wanted to express. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do without relating to that.

D.: Maybe you can tell us where your family lives.

K.: On my mother’s side, the family came from Jaffa; on my father’s side, from Ramleh. Both families were internally displaced, meaning they lost their homes, and were resettled to houses that belonged to other Palestinians. They couldn’t return to their original houses, because their neighborhoods were destroyed. After 1948, the Israeli army created ghettos for the Palestinians who remained in Israel. 

In Jaffa, out of 120,000, only a tiny minority, about 2000, stayed. The same happened in Ramleh, only 100 remained out of around 30,000. The house where I was born had previously belonged to another Palestinian family. It was “given” to my family because this area had been designated as the area where all the Palestinians who stayed after 1948 were gathered. The house was unfinished – the second floor was never completed – and they lived there. It has remained the same ever since, because the municipality doesn’t give permission to build further. It’s been frozen in time for 76 years.

So, naturally, this space became part of my films. And this space is, of course, also intertwined with time. Generation after generation, you inherit a special sense of time. I think I tried to explain this spacetime idea in The Roof, where I said that my parents live on the ground floor, and the past lives above them, on the second floor.

D.: And then you move on to using archival material or, rather, creating your own archive.

K.: I wanted to tell the story of where my mother came from and of the neighborhood where  her family came from. It was a fisherman’s neighborhood, now part of Tel Aviv. By chance, I discovered that some Israeli films from the 60s had captured this place before it was completely destroyed. And that’s how I came up with the idea of making a film. Initially, I just wanted to collect images of the backgrounds from those Israeli films. But then, I found that there are many films shot in Jaffa in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. I began a photographic project, taking snapshots of these backgrounds. I would project the films and focus on the details appearing in the background: houses, people and fragments of everyday life. At first, I didn’t intend to make a film, it was just mostly about collecting images. I was so thrilled to see and discover these places in the background of Israeli films.

That led to my decision to make Recollection (2015, 70’), a film about memory and the act of recollecting or remembering. I made it precisely because those places no longer exist physically: they survive only virtually, in images. And, as I mentioned earlier, one project leads to another.

D.: in Recollection and in An Unusual Summer (2020, 80’) you are no longer working with the footage you shot yourself. Especially in Recollection, you did something incredibly powerful politically too. You used these Israeli films shot in Jaffa and you deliberately erased  the actors…

K.: I’ve always reworked the images to make them my own. I didn’t just take the archival footage as it is. I reworked these images and, by doing so, I created a different ownership. Altering these images is both an artistic and political act. In a way, by changing them, you liberate them and they become your own images.

D.: This might be the difference between a document and a documentary.

K.: I never think in terms of  style or genre, like “Now I’m making a documentary…” . I just try to find the right way to express myself. I don’t set boundaries. I use whatever tools I think are necessary.

For example, in A Fidai film (2024, 78’) I also used some Israeli fiction films scenes, because they helped me express myself and show something. What I’m doing is, in a way, free-form art.

D.: In fact we can say that in A Fidai Film, your most recent work, you express your freedom to the fullest. Can you tell us about the genesis of the film? How did you discover the material?

K.: I’ve been collecting images for a long time, from many different places. During the  COVID pandemic, the Israeli Cinema Archives began uploading a large amount of material online, and I’ve been watching these videos from the very beginning. I was particularly interested in what they had  on Jaffa and Ramleh, and I started recording images that I found interesting. 

Then, by chance, a friend sent me an article about what happened in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Israeli army looted and destroyed the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut. That  article sparked the idea of making a film – one where I would sabotage the material coming from Israeli archives. I came up with the title, A Fidai Film, because “Fidayin” refers to the Palestinian fighters who, in the early years, crossed the border and made actions not to harm people but to sabotage the Zionist project, such as planting a bomb in a factory. 

In Hebrew, they were called “saboteurs”, a term still used today to describe Palestinian fighters. There is actually a very funny interview with Edward Said where he talks about this word. He recounts an incident from 1982, when the Israeli Army had captured a Palestinian fighter in Beirut. During the interrogation, they asked if he was a saboteur. Thinking to save his own life, he answered: “Yes, I’m a saboteur”. Then the interview took a surreal and absurd turn. They asked him what exactly he did as a saboteur and he answered: “I wake up in the morning and I think about sabotaging things”. 

In some way, when I came up with this title, everything fell into place. I began downloading and capturing video materials online with the intention of ‘sabotaging’ the images.

In many of the Israeli films that I captured, both documentary and fiction, Palestinian places and landscapes are used as visual backdrops during the opening and end credits. That was always deeply disturbing to me, and I felt the need to sabotage it, to literally scratch over the names of the titles. That’s how I started. Then I discovered footage taken by the Israeli army from the Palestinian Research Center, and I did the same to what they had written over the images at the beginning of each clip. So, sabotage by sabotage, the film came to life. The process itself became the film and that’s what makes the Fidai project so unusual and interesting.

The starting point is what happened in 1982, but the material comes from many different sources. I sabotage, I intervene, I disrupt, I remove people, I erase texts, I create a new meaning.

D.: I love the fiction scene with the two lovers on the beach. It feels like a French film from the ‘60s. You can almost imagine a Serge Gainsbourg song playing in the background. You can recognize the style, the period, and yet the effect you create feels so uncomfortable, so unheimlich, so unpleasant.

 K.: That film actually screened in Cannes, as a short, sometime around 1965.

When I watched it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The dialog, in all its banality, reflects  exactly what they are doing to Palestine.

The man says: “I’m gonna go on and on like this. I can’t stop it”, and the woman replies: “It’s terrible, but we can’t stop it”. The scene, to me, captures the essence of the Zionist project: the recognition of the harm and yet an unwillingness or refusal to stop.

By covering their faces and sabotaging the image, you create this new meaning. Otherwise, it’s just a couple on the beach. Once you put on this mask, they become someone else. The scene becomes something else. It’s no longer about them. It becomes a metaphor for  something much larger.

D.: How did you decide to include the text (Letter from Gaza, 1956) by Ghassan Kanafani? (Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, politician, and author. He developed the notion of “resistance literature”. Born in 1936 in Acre, he was assassinated by the Mossad along with his niece on 8th July 1972. A/N)

K.: I felt it was necessary to find references that convey  a sense of history through personal stories. Kanafani always wrote about the stories of individuals.

When I was a teenager, my history teacher asked us to record some oral history. I interviewed an elderly neighbour who told me a story that, years later, I found  again in Letter from Gaza. He spoke about the possibility of going to California and about a boy who had lost his leg.

It’s very likely that  Kanafani had heard a similar story from someone in a refugee camp in Lebanon or in Jordan. I don’t know exactly where. In Letter from Gaza, he recounts a story from 1956, during the first major Israeli military attack on Gaza. He writes about the 13-year-old Nadia who has lost her leg during the attack.

Reading that text today,  it becomes clear just how long this suffering has been going on. Including Letter from Gaza in the film could be seen as a response to what’s happening today, but it isn’t. I’m talking about 1956. And yet, it is about today,  just on a different scale.

People watching the film now often think it’s a reaction to what happened in October. In reality, the film was finished between July and August 2023 – the final edit even earlier. 

But it’s true that the film reveals the background of what is happening today.

D.: That’s probably why those in  power always try to destroy archives.

The footage of the destruction of the Palestinian Research Center in 1983 is incredibly powerful and scary.

K.: Yes, those in  power always try to erase evidence.

The story of the Center is both symbolic and, frankly, quite surreal. First, they tried to assassinate Anis Sayigh, the director of the Center. They sent him an envelope bomb, which exploded in his face. He nearly died, and lived the rest of his life with severe hearing damage and a constant, painful noise in his ears. 

But he survived, and continued his work directing the Center. Later, the Israeli army looted the place. After the army withdrew from Beirut to South Lebanon, some of the Center’s staff came back to rebuild the library. But the army had planted a powerful bomb. Many people were killed, the street was completely destroyed, cars were incinerated. 

The goal was clear: to put an end, once and for all, to the efforts of documenting Palestine. To permanently erase the archive. To destroy any attempt at building a historical record, a collective memory.   

D.: What are your projects after With Hasan in Gaza? You mentioned working on a fiction film…

K.: Yes. I’ve written the script, but I don’t think I will shoot it in Palestine as I originally planned. I want to find a different way of doing it, to continue this tradition of working with something more virtual.

I’m still figuring it out. There are so many possibilities today with 3D technology: you can create anything. Of course, filming remains important to me, but I think I want to use the material differently. I want to create something that isn’t realistic, even in terms of place or setting. That’s the direction I want to pursue, but first, I want to finish the Gaza film.

D.: What you are saying about the impossibility of shooting in Palestine and the necessity to imagine and to build a virtual reality reminds me of a scene from Film Socialisme by Jean-Luc Godard. When the cruise ship arrives in front of Palestine, we don’t see the land itself. 

Instead, we just see a Palestinian postcard with the words “défense d’entrer” (forbidden entry) written across it.

K.: Working with archives is directly tied to this feeling of inaccessibility. In theory, I could go there, but the place is inaccessible because it was destroyed. So I turned to archival films- images captured by others – because these destroyed places continue to exist only through these images.

But the inaccessibility is also deeply psychological. Today, I find it very difficult to imagine myself going back. I can’t picture myself landing there. It’s become such a psychological barrier, and that in itself forces me to rethink how I can make films.

I can’t just make a normal film now. The idea of simply going there and shooting, I can’t imagine myself doing that.

Avoiding that direct return has become a way to protect myself. I know it would be emotionally challenging. So I try to work differently, with distance and with layers. For this fiction film, I’ll probably return to archives again. Over the years, I have collected so much material, thousands of hours, stored in many hard-drives. Some of it I shot myself. I want to find a way to use all this material.

I have to work with limitations. Limitations force you to create something unexpected, which sometimes results in a much more powerful film.

Imagine this: I want to make a fiction film, but I can’t shoot it in the place where the story is set. Maybe, I’ll shoot it in a similar location, not pretending that it is Palestine. Perhaps in Palermo or in Lisbon.  There is something of Jaffa in Palermo for sure. I might insert some shots from there and it will be clear that it is Palermo and not Jaffa, but it doesn’t matter to me. Palermo is also part of my history. 

Ultimately, I’m speaking about a country that we have lost, a homeland that we have lost and I’m not trying to escape from that loss. Every film I’ve made -and every film I will make-, starts  from that condition, from trying to find a way to relate to it.

D.: One last question about the beginning of A Fidai Film. The film opens with a giant red sun: a striking image. It reminds me of the postnuclear films from the 80s…Why did you choose to start the film with such a symbolic image?

K.: This idea came from the feeling that colonialism and the Zionist project want to block out  the sun, and of course this image gives the sensation that a disaster is looming. But you can’t cover the sun forever, you can try, as I did in the film, but it won’t work. The sun always  comes back, even after a disaster. 

The post Accidents, Archives, and Acts of Sabotage: A Conversation with Palestinian Film Director Kamal Aljafari appeared first on Untold.

It is fitting then that Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), the one film that Swinton chose from her extensive filmography to be shown at Berlinale this year – a film centered on the very idea of boycott’s political efficacy and its ethical, humanistic urgency – was screened in the film program of On Strike Berlin, an alternative programme running parallel to Berlinale in various venues across the city. 

Indeed,the program was organized collectively by On Strike: screenings & talks striking Berlinale to answer a call by Strike Germany and Film Workers for Palestine to boycott this year’s Berlin Film Festival. On Strike cites numerous reasons on its website for joining the boycott. Among them the German state’s foreign policies pertaining to Israel’s assault on Gaza, German politicians’ backlash against expressions of solidarity with Palestine, and the events that took place at the 2024 Berlinale, including the recriminations in Germany against the Israeli documentary filmmaker Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian filmmaker and activist Basel Adra, the co-creators (alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor) of the searing documentary No Other Land (2023), documenting the displacement and destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank. 

The film won Berlinale’s Best Documentary award and subsequently the Best Documentary award from the American Film Academy at the Oscars, yet faces censorship and reprisals as it screens globally. 

To counter this climate of silencing voices speaking against the decimation of the Gazan population, the illegality of forced displacements, and against Israel’s assaults, as well as to create a richer climate of discussion about the ongoing occupation of Palestine, the screening of Friendship’s Death featured special guests: British film scholar Nicolas Helm-Grovas (presently writing a book titled Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema) and Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum, moderated by filmmaker Philip Rizk, to contextualize the film’s socio-political and historical context, and its present relevance.

The emergence of a political consciousness

Wollen’s Friendship’s Death tells the story of an extraterrestrial android called Friendship, sent to Earth on a peace mission. Friendship originally is meant to address the United Nations in New York, hoping to persuade humans to abandon their bellicose ways and their annihilation of all life forms. Much of Friendship’s journey to Earth is enclosed within the larger philosophical consideration of her quest for autonomy: A sophisticated robot – a futuristic AI – uploaded with advanced data and facts about Earth by her extraterrestrial creators, she nevertheless originally lacks the sense of  self-determination. Not cognizant of having a choice to decide her own fate, she will only come to it slowly. 

This aspect of self-determination and autonomy, mingled with Friendship’s undying fascination with and compassion for humanity, serves as the basis for Wollen’s launch into historical and political debates running throughout the film. In this sense, Wollen’s film is particularly urgent today, because its underlying theme is the emergence of a political consciousness, and the contrast between passivity and commitment, with Friendship’s android mind serving as a cognitive tabula rasa, in which this consciousness emerges.

The film’s historical backdrop is “Black September” of 1970; the action takes place in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, where Friendship lands, after her spaceship crashes mid-flight. Friendship loses her documents, suddenly becoming a non-entity: As an android, she’s trapped in the human shell, essentially undocumented, and stateless – a fact that immediately aligns her with all the Earth’s political outcasts, as all people denied their dignity, and their civic and political rights. This position gradually pushes Friendship from her original impartiality and wish to complete her mission to her alignment with the oppressed and the dispossessed; a stance that leads her to abandon her diplomatic mission and join the Palestinian cause.

Questions of solidarity 

Friendship has only one close contact at the hotel: Sullivan, a British journalist who is covering the Middle East conflict, and is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. Friendship and Sullivan are stranded at the hotel, in the midst of Jordan’s civil war. This aspect of the film, in particular, gained much from the Q & A discussion, during which speakers framed it within international solidarity and the 1960s’ revolutionary movements. 

Solidarity is indeed a motif running through the entire film. There are the limits of Sullivan’s solidarity, in the sense that his job is to report on the conflict, yet he doesn’t see the possibility of an immediate positive outcome, and, by the end of his stay sounds defeatist (Wollen’s critique of Sullivan aligns with the criticism that Adra makes in No Other Land of journalists expecting immediate resolution to a conflict spanning decades). 

There is the clear theme of Friendship’s solidarity with humanity – her concern about its self-destructiveness, which makes her empathize with both the Palestinian and Israeli victims; an empathy which doesn’t preclude her recognizing that her peacemaking mission is bound to fail; she is more likely to be captured, and used by the US industrial complex to manufacture weapons of destruction, than she is to convince militaristic societies to abandon their quest for power. In this sense, while Friendship’s boycott of her mission is undershot by pessimism similar to Sullivan’s, it is uniquely linked to her acknowledging that she isn’t an innocent bystander; as a robot, she is part of the techno-military complex that perpetuates wars. Wollen clearly also means to say that we are all implicated in the foreign policies and territorial grabs of our governments.

The equally pertinent question of solidarity on which Wollen touches, explained in detail by Hazem Jamjoum during the film’s Q & A, lies with the Middle East: Friendship’s Death records a critical moment in Middle East history, when, after Jordan hosted Palestinians in the wake of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, the idea of Pan-Arab solidarity that had mobilized the region in the early ‘60s, giving rise to the idea that the Arab countries would liberate Palestine, comes to an end, as Jordan attacks Palestinian resistance fighters: “A crushing moment for the notion of the Arab revolution.” 

Jamjoum also stressed in the Q & A that the student movements aligned with Palestinians, some formed into militant factions, were anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchist, which put them at odds with regressive Arab regimes. One might add that, in Europe, solidarity with Palestine was inscribed in an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist ideal, which also died in the 1970s.

Friendship’s answer to this collapse of solidarity is manifold. When questioned about her position on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacking planes, she commiserates with both the fear and suffering of the kidnapped, and the anger and desperation of the hijackers. 

In a crucial conversation with Sullivan, Friendship relates how she ventured outside the hotel, to Jerash, a city in the North of Jordan, and was picked up and interrogated by the Jordanian Army Patrol, alongside her PLO escort. Friendship repeatedly confides her helplessness trying to ensure her escort’s safety; she fails as they are separated – a traumatic episode, which, not incidentally, coincides with Friendship identifying the hotel in Amman as “home” for the first time. 

Similarly, in No Other Land, Abraham tries to safeguard Adra and others as the Israeli army bulldozes Palestinian homes, yet Adra’s cousin dies of a bullet wound after being shot by an Israeli soldier. Like Abraham’s, Friendship’s political consciousness evolves out of a profound sense of helplessness, and a growing awareness that the efficacy of her civilian actions is limited. 

Can cinema forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice?

Both Sullivan and Friendship face choices with political implications: Sullivan returns to England; Friendship stays in Amman. Wollen shows her wearing a militant uniform, and in the voiceover, she is heard reading a note, hidden in her pocket, to her future killer. The film ends with Sullivan reminiscing about Friendship years later, in London, trying to watch a film she left behind, finally decoded with a more advanced technology. Yet Friendship’s file is an abstract puzzle of signs, in a way suggesting that humans still lack the wisdom to receive her message. 

Lacking a coda, what remains of Friendship’s legacy is her choice to bear witness and her sacrifice – Wollen gives Friendship the most searing lines in the film, in which she expresses her desire for her existence to have meaning, looping back to the film’s ethical resonance. Friendship chooses to resist, but it is Sullivan who tells her tale, and his daughter who decodes Friendship’s film. In the end, Wollen’s film expresses a hope that cinema can forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice; or, to quote Swinton’s Berlinale speech, to be a vehicle for inclusion, making us consider “what sovereignty means to humans” – one of the most pressing questions of our time.

The post Solidarity, revolution and an android in Amman: A review of Friendship’s Death appeared first on Untold.

When war ends, loss takes form. News headlines would focus on numbers of victims, the missing, the wreckage of streets and homes, the cost of rebuilding. But these figures, though necessary, would fail to capture the full shape of loss. Beyond the physical destruction, war unravels social norms, breaks relationships and shatters the inner worlds of the survivors. Loss becomes more than just absence, it transforms into a quiet, pervasive defeat that is felt in the rubble outside and the emptiness within. 

When war ends, loss settles in. In the face of tragedy, the human mind seeks meaning through stories, symbols and shared experiences. When everything else is stripped away, literature, art and culture become tools through which we attempt to understand what was lost, what remains, and what might still be. Loss manifests itself in many forms in art, each capturing a different facet of human experience. 

Horror, landscape, exile, trauma and shame are five themes that often emerge in the aftermath. These themes aren’t mutually exclusive, many artworks dealing with loss could fall into more than one category, reflecting the layered nature of this loss.

Horror

War is not only lived, it imprints itself on landscapes, bodies and memories. After the Holocaust, Theodor Adorno questioned whether poetry could exist in the wake of such immense suffering. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” he declared, confronting the magnitude of horror and the overwhelming responsibility it imposes on the artist. 

This agonising reflection lies at the heart of the survivors´ struggle, whether those who directly experienced the violence of war or those who witnessed its impact from a distance. Whether on the battlefield or through the cold glow of a screen, anyone who bears witness to such horrors, becomes, in some way or another, a survivor of it, and irreversibly shaped by its presence. 

Maisara Baroud’s “I’m Still Alive” series gives visual form to the horror that is war. His black-white illustrations, deeply rooted in his personal experience of living through the war in Gaza.

Baroud’s figures, which are often distorted, fragmented, and trapped in suffocating, liminal spaces, seem suspended on the threshold between life and death, numbness and raw terror. The horror he conveys in this disfigurement of both body and soul carries a haunting presence, probing the inaction that allowed the machinery of death to keep turning, keep devouring lives like shattered glass.

 

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Bayan Abu Nahla’s “War Portraits” reflect a similarly unsettling reality, focusing on how the horror of war imprints itself onto the body. In her portraits, faces are etched with grief, their eyes heavy with agony. “Our eyes are unlike any others,” she writes in an instagram post, “They are open windows to horror.” 

For Abu Nahla, these faces don’t only depict suffering, they embody it. They speak of pure horror: the death of loved ones, the erasure of everything once held dear, and the violence that strips away the soul’s layers, exposing raw, unfiltered pain. 

Reflecting on her work, Abu Nahla explains: “My art is melancholic, sorrowful, and pointed. It takes on the function of art in catharsis by expressing the despondency planted within us by a cruel life.” 

 

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Landscape 

War doesn’t just claim lives, it transforms the land itself, leaving scars that persist long after the violence subsides. The landscape becomes a testament to destruction, a witness to the remnants of countless lives once lived. 

Tammam Azzam explores this theme in “The Syrian Museum” (2013) where he overlays Syria’s war-torn landscapes with iconic artworks from the history of Western art. He superimposed Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings, starkly mixing love and tenderness with ugliness of ruin. 

 

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The cruel irony in Azzam’s use of masterpieces by Da Vinci, Matisse and others is a stark reminder that the same humanity capable of creating sublime art is also capable of unimaginable destruction.

Another powerful reflection on the lingering scars of war is “Monument to the Living” (2001-8), a Marwan Rechmaoui’s miniature replica of Beirut’s infamous Murr Tower. Once a sniper post, a prison and arms depot during Lebanon’s Civil War, the unfinished thirty-four-story office building remains standing, a skeleton monument to a violent past. 

Deemed structurally unfit for rehabilitation, and too costly to demolish, the tower serves as an “unadorned testament, both to the arbitrary tyranny of the war, and to the inanity of the social, sectarian, and urban constituencies engendered by the failing post-war order.”  

In 2022, an architect reimagined this same tower as a cemetery turning “Murr” into “La Mort” (برج المُر/برج الموت,), reclaiming a site of violence and transforming it into a final resting place for the dead, highlighting once again the complicated set of interactions between war, death and memory in modern urban spaces. 

In these works, landscapes are not only spaces but also living records of the legacy of war. The land in these works is hardly a neutral backdrop but an active participant in post-war narratives. It bears the weight of destruction, the scars of trauma in its ruins, in its walls and in the people who inhabit them. 

Exile

The memories of war often endure in the body and heart long after the physical wounds have healed. Among the deepest of these wounds is the loss of home –whether forced or chosen, the act of leaving one’s place of origin is such a haunting experience for survivors. Mona Hatoum’s “Suspended” (2011) captures this ever-present theme of loss.

Mona Hatoum’s installations also explore gender, race & politics, working in a variety of media including scaled-up household objects, transforming them into foreign, threatening, dangerous things. pic.twitter.com/wPtjaUGsdy

— Bedford School Art (@Bedford_Arts) September 28, 2020

The installation features a room filled with wooden swings, each engraved with street maps of capital cities, hanging obliquely, moving even when untouched, mirroring the relentless dislocation of people, places and memories. The swings’ unsettling movement becomes a metaphor of the lives of those who have been displaced, always in motion, always longing for a home that has been uprooted, no longer exists or can never be reclaimed. 

This exploration of displacement links back to  Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” (2007-8), where a giant crack splits the floor of London’s Tate Modern, symbolising the rupture caused by war and separation. The term “Shibboleth,” a word used to distinguish people who belong from those who do not, highlights the way in which invisible borders (be social, political or cultural) exile people from belonging. 

Like Hatoum’s swings, Salcedo’s crack represents more than a division of space; it becomes a symbol of the dislocation felt by those who have lost everything–their homes, their communities and their sense of self. 

For war survivors, life is forever divided into a before and an after, separated by an unbridgeable rift in both space and soul. For those displaced by war, the loss is of not only a home, but of a self that existed within. The rupture created by displacement, like Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” is a wound that remains visible, never fully healed, even when covered up – Tate Modern filled the crack, but a scarred floor remained. “This is a remarkable symbol of the possibility of healing through figurative and literal closure,” writes Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo “however, the mark is also an obstacle to any attempts to erase the past.” The scar, like the trauma of displacement, cannot be erased, and true healing is only found in facing what’s been broken. 

Trauma

The trauma of war is loss manifested. It simmers beneath the surface, quietly but relentlessly, seeping deep into the survivors’ souls, altering how they navigate their lives and shaping everything from random life moments to the very essence of being. 

Dario Robleto’s work engages with the intersection of war and trauma. Often described as a “material poet”, Robleto’s creations explore how conflict reshapes the deepest parts of the human soul, as in his 2004 piece, “A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Aisle.” 

The installation of a pair of worn military boots struggling through sand and rice, evokes the soldier’s post-war reality, where a man is physically and spiritually fractured. Here, the simple act of walking one’s daughter down the aisle is no longer an act of joy, but one that is weighed down by unspoken grief and a sense of brokenness. 

War distorts life, turning family, love, and celebrations into echoes of what might have been. The work lays bare the reality of trauma: the painful gap between who one was and who the war forced them to become. 

Survivors of war often grapple with a conflicting spectrum of emotions: the yearning to forget contrasts with the need to remember, personal grief merges with collective mourning, and the urgency to move forward battles against paralysing apathy. The weight of survival feels even heavier than the instinct to live, as the past continues to haunt the present. For many, survival itself, becomes too much to carry, leading them to tragically take their own lives. 

How does one go on when their world has been erased? How can a fractured identity be rebuilt when the markers of home no longer exist? 

Alfredo Jaar’s “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” (1996) addresses these harrowing questions by focusing on the trauma borne out of witnessing unimaginable violence. Through a photographic installation centred on the eyes of Gutete Emerita, a woman who witnessed the brutal killing of her husband and two sons during the Rwandan genocide, Jaar forces viewers to see war through her eyes. 

Her gaze is haunting, filled with an unbearable knowledge that cannot be unlearned. In her eyes, the enormity of loss is transformed into something deeply intimate yet universally devastating. Jaar’s work acknowledges that trauma is inescapable, a weight carried by those who survive, shaping how they move through a world that they no longer recognise. 

Shame 

Another aspect of war that is represented through art is the unbearable truth of the actions people are forced to take to survive. Toni Morrisson captures this with devastating beauty in her novel “Beloved,” telling the story of Sethe, a woman tormented by the memory of the daughter she killed to save her from slavery. “It was not a story worth telling” says Sethe, reflecting on the deep shame tied to the most painful choices that can consume one’s soul. 

Actions made to preserve life can haunt survivors forever, leaving a stain on their souls that time may never fully erase. Shame, in this context, is not only personal, it’s collective, shaping how societies confront, or fail to confront, their own pasts, and the weight of their own actions or inaction.

But there also is another kind of shame: the shame of witnessing, the shame of being spared, the shame of being safe, of holding onto loved ones, of watching horror unfold, powerless to stop it. Poet Hala Alyan gives voice to this unsettling shame, writing: “I always sign out of my Instagram. I watch and watch. Then I log off. At the core of this is the shame. The shame of the here. The shame of all that the here offers: spare water, radiators, antibiotics, the ability to log off.” 

Here, shame is not tied to action, but to inaction, to survival itself. It is the shame of distance, of being both here and there, free yet somehow trapped. This is why war extends beyond the battlefield, haunting even those who are not directly in its path. 

In Half-Life in Exile, Alyan captures this torment, the compulsion to bear witness, to transform the wreckage of grief into something tangible:
“Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.”

Later in the poem, she confronts the unbearable question: “Was the grief worth the poem?”  It is the guilt of turning devastation into art, of creating something from what should have never been lost, should have never been forgotten.

 

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Christian Boltanski’s “The Reserve of Dead Swiss” (1990) grapples with the collective shame tied to the gradual erasure of the dead from memory. The installation features metal boxes resembling old storage containers containing a photograph of a man or woman, collected by the artist from Swiss obituaries. Illuminated by desk lamps, the repetitive, almost identical structures highlight how the passage of time erases the traces of those who once lived, reflecting a gradual disintegration of memory, and at times, a sense of shame for forgetting, for failing to hold on to those who are no longer with us. As he reflects, “Nowadays we die twice: once at the moment of our death, and the second time when no one recognises us in a photograph.” 

By naming and acknowledging the dead, Boltanski’ returns a degree of presence to lives which might otherwise fade into oblivion. It is here that the bitter heart of loss lies: the absence of recognition, the erasure of existence. 

This absence resonates powerfully in Gaza, and similar war-torn regions where countless lives end without an obituary, proper funeral, and sometimes even without the retrieval of the body. Perhaps these lives, too, deserve their own metal boxes, their own sanctuary of remembrance.

How do we cope with loss? Can we rebuild what has been destroyed, and if we can, will it ever be the same? The answers are rarely clear, and art, while offering solace or reflection, does not always provide them. 

Loss reshapes us, altering our sense of self and of the world in ways we may never fully understand or recover from. Perhaps the question is not whether we can recover from loss, but how we learn to live alongside it.

The post When War Ends, What Remains? Art, Memory, and the Weight of Loss appeared first on Untold.

A workshop, led by digital media artist allapopp and poet_ess Dinara Rasuleva, took a deep dive into deconstructing dominant technological narratives, centering experiences of those often excluded from the technological matrix and how marginalised voices can reframe their own stories and reclaim power through imaginative future-making. This interview continues that discussion, offering insights into the intersections of technology, colonialism, and art as tools for both political participation and liberation.

allapopp, a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist originally from Tatarstan, brings post-Soviet, queer, and migrant experience into critical artistic practice, fusing performance, machine learning, and digital art to envision new worlds. Dinara Rasuleva, a poet_ess from Kazan, Tatarstan writes in multiple languages and tackles themes of decolonialism and feminism through expressionist and performance poetry. Together, they explore how technologies of control can be subverted, and how storytelling can help imagine alternative futures.

In this interview, they discuss key questions: Who gets to tell the story of the future when the present is fracturing? How can technology be reclaimed from its colonial legacy and used for liberation? How do they envision their work contributing to broader struggles for justice, and what role does imagination play in shaping those futures?

Walid: Technology and colonialism have often intertwined, with technologies of violence fuelling the oppression and erasure of countless peoples. How can technology be reclaimed from this legacy and used as a tool for liberation?

allapopp: I think technology and colonialism are deeply intertwined. Human technologies, their purpose, function and design, are a reflection of human societies. Colonialism and its implications is a present reality for many, some benefit from it, some suffer. In some realms, like in the trans-Soviet space, the conversation about its colonial past and present is in its early stages. If the spectrum of colonialism is the present reality of human lives, it also becomes deeply ingrained into human technology. I think the conversation needs to be held not about the technologies themselves, but about people in power creating technologies and applying them in the most horrific ways. As someone who doesn’t have access to big power or influence, I try to think of tech in the long term and imagine—what else could it be if we had a chance to redo it from scratch? Where it begins, where it gets rotten?

I like Ursula K. Le Guin’s view that science fiction is the mythology of modern technology. Technologies we have today often come from stories—people read them and then try to implement them. It’s not that science fiction predicts the future; it provides a blueprint for what people might want to create in the future; it engrains a vision of a world. So, if we want to change how technology develops, we need to tell different stories about it.

The Decolonial AI Manyfesto is a great source of inspiration for me, because it highlights how AI technologies have a colonial core. For example, why is code written in English? The manifesto criticised the Western-normative language of “ethical” AI and suggestions of “inclusivity”, because these do not address power asymmetries, but rather reproduce them. Because what does inclusivity mean? Who is in a position to include (and exclude) who? 

The Design Justice Principles by Sasha Costanza-Chock were an eye-opener for me, emphasising that technology should be designed with input from the communities it serves. At Disruption Network Lab’s Hacking Alienation conference, Anna Titovez Intekra highlighted how migrant communities in Germany rely on Telegram and Google Maps over specialised NGOs developed apps, as they better meet real needs. Of course these services harvest user data, so it’s not a solution either. But it’s a strong example how there are often only two options to choose from: usability or privacy. Design Justice Principles also advise how to create technologies that are sustainable and non-exploitative for the natural world (which humans are part of), and are genuinely beneficial for the people who use them. We need to stop thinking of technologies as tools and start seeing them as human expression.

Finally, I would like to highlight the work of the Dreaming Beyond AI collective, whose intersectional feminist work creates spaces for imagining beyond what we understand as AI and technology. I highly recommend checking out their website. They focus on feminist practices of community building and providing space and means to support themselves while they are imagining and dreaming (beyond AI) and not just working to cover their living costs. Because when you live with the experience of marginalisation, it’s really hard to carve out time to dream of a future while you’re busy surviving. 

So to summarise, to me reclaiming technologies means challenging power asymmetries and envisioning own technologies. It is the first step in this process of reclamation.

Walid: “Who gets to tell the story of the future when the present is falling apart, and the past is a lie?” How can imagining a future contribute to liberation and the fight for justice?

allapopp: When I think of the future today, a very particular image comes to my mind. Ruha Benjamin points out that there are only two narratives about technology: it will either save us or slay us. There’s the Hollywood version—dystopian, where AI and robots take over, there is an atomic fallout, global wars, humans become eliminated. Such dystopian blockbusters sell a lot of tickets. Then there’s the Silicon Valley version—utopian, where technology solves all human problems, climate change is fixed, and everyone is happy and healthy. This view helps to sell gadgets and services. Both narratives are rooted in American culture, as AI ethicist Sarah Wachter has noted: although “96% of the world doesn’t live in the US, our digital tools and platforms are mostly based on US customs, values, and laws.” I wonder, why do we only have these two stories? 

In my research I’ve realised that indigenous, marginalised, and oppressed cultures are often focused on preserving their past because their existence is threatened as a direct implication of colonialism. While preservation is important, it means our gaze is often fixed on the past, not the future. Of course, some cultures do not operate with such temporalities as future, past and present, but the mainstream does and its stories become self-fulfilling prophecies.

We need to start telling different stories about (our) future(s) that come from marginalised worldviews, experiences, and perspectives. These stories can help us break out of this dystopian-utopian duality and make different kinds of technology—and ultimately, a different kind of world—possible. 

Walid: How do you envision different possible futures as both a political and artistic practice shaped by your own histories and contexts?

allapopp: For me, artistic and political practice can’t be separated. Coming from a marginalised perspective, I can’t just do art for aesthetics when there are so many imbalances and injustices around. I use my artistic practice to highlight these issues.

When I envision different possible futures, I try to involve my own history and context, but it’s challenging, especially when working with technology. Entering the field of technology, you’re confronted with specific aesthetics and narratives of the future—narratives shaped by certain logics, experiences, and perspectives that often don’t represent my own. As an artist, I’m now trying to root myself in my culture, but I have to do a lot of work to overcome the internalised oppressor that tells me my visions aren’t “technological” enough or “relevant” enough. 

The method of “decolonial aesthesis” is very helpful here; it allows me to connect to my culture while entering the technological realm. For example, my native cultural mix is very analog, rooted in connections, textures, smells, and foods. It’s not efficient, optimised, or sleek like the technology we see today. It’s far from the dystopian narrative of control or the utopian vision of perfectly optimised bodies. The non-dystopian tech future looks like these perfect, iPhone-like bodies—everything must be efficient, sleek, and optimised to fit into an accelerating world.

I’m critical of this because I wonder if this is the future we want—one where everything is more efficient and unified? The singularity, as imagined by transhumanism, could mean alignment between humans and technology, but it’s also about power. Not everyone will be invited to access that power; most will be left behind. The transhumanist’s utopia is a dystopia for others.

We’re already living this reality today, where Western societies enjoy AI technologies while workers in the global south perform underpaid, traumatising click-work to sustain it. This inequality is embedded in our technological systems, and it shows that unless we change our approach, technology will continue to replicate and reinforce these power structures. So, as an artist, my challenge is to envision different futures that break away from what is considered technological and how technology is made and used. Currently, it’s a very abstract place to be.

Walid: How can the act of imagining alternative futures connect diverse experiences across geographies? How do your creative and political efforts engage with different liberation and anti-colonial struggles, and what specific cultural or geopolitical nuances do you bring?

Dinara: As I reflected on the loss of my native language and culture, and the resulting identity crisis—whether I am Tatar, Russian, or now even German—I started the poetic experiment Lostlingual, and was approached by more and more people sharing their similar experiences, as a result my investigation later developed into writing laboratories and now into a collaboration with allapop— decolonial future envisioning labs. Many of us, due to colonisation or repressions, were disconnected from our roots. Through coming together, we’ve begun to envision a future where our languages and cultures aren’t lost, but evolve with us. 

The act of sharing these experiences creates a profound sense of empowerment and belonging, making us feel truly understood and included. Soon I realised that it’s not just culture, it’s all intertwined with intersectionality, feminism, queerness, class. We envision futures where our cultures are not only free from various constraints but also from the elements we consciously choose to leave behind—like patriarchy, homophobia or exclusion. We have the power to create anything: to invent languages and literatures that aren’t bound to any rigid, intellectual, or institutionalised speech. 

If we come from working-class backgrounds, we can embrace simple, accessible language in literature. It’s about recognizing the nuances of our experiences and shaping a future that honours what we value and reinventing our cultures, mythology, religion, traditions to make sure we bring them to future but make them inclusive and kind.

Walid: You advocate for fostering decolonial imagination through art, stories, and experiential engagement. How can art and culture challenge and reshape the narratives around AI technologies?

Dinara: Art and culture have the capacity to challenge and reshape technologies by serving as a form of resistance and reclamation. In our workshops, we aim to create environments where marginalised voices can reclaim their narratives. Through small exercises in imagination, we explore how AI could be seen not as a fixed system but as a form of world-building where different elements interact. It can get messy, unconventional, and sometimes even dysfunctional, which is exactly what we aim for—providing an antidote to the logic of optimization and the power imbalances that AI technologies often perpetuate.

The post Reclaiming the future of technology through art, imagining, and lived experiences appeared first on Untold.

Dozakhi is the frontman of a Berlin-based hardcore punk band called Zanjeer. The group consists of immigrants from Pakistan, Britain, Australia and the former Soviet Union, and they recently performed together with other international hardcore bands in Berlin at Decolonoize Mini-Fest, a collective that organises shows “the old punk way: From The Scene – For The Scene.” They also played at a solidarity night for aid in Palestine in Berlin, joined by bands from Israel, Germany and UK/Egypt, paving the way for a new direction for the local punk scene for taking action to make a difference.

“Thankfully, in cities like Berlin, there is a sizable Ausländer (foreigner) presence, and you always feel at home, more or less,” says Dozakhi. “The best part of the show for me was that so many South Asian leftists from the Berlin activist community came to show their support,” he adds. “It’s really important that punk as a culture or lifestyle continues to be accessible and intersectional… places like Berlin are a lot more diverse when it comes to the punk scene, though, and generally, you find loads of Eastern European and South American punks across the country.”

A history of punk in Germany

Looking at the history of punk in Germany, one aspect that has remained true is the urge to create an impact through protest against the status quo and the boredom of convention. In the mid-70s, when punk music gained popularity in the UK and the US, it trickled into Germany as well. What made this history interesting is how differently punk music’s impact partitioned Germans on either side of the wall.

Historically, German punk was about shocking people out of political complacency and state oppression. This feeling still holds true for punks now, especially those from migrant backgrounds who are trying to hold space and have their message heard in an otherwise non-accessible scene.

“It is a white-majority country, so of course it’s going to be like that,” says Dozakhi. “But you do have to pause and think when you see that other spaces, such as hip-hop and electronic music, have way more POCs in them compared to punk. And let’s not forget that Turks and Arabs have been here as guest workers for decades, and their children were born in Germany and had to develop their own subcultures because German society just wouldn’t accept them.”

Punk music in migrant languages

Zanjeer’s drummer, Steve, and Dozakhi both moved to Germany to pursue higher education and have been here for three and five years, respectively. Both have played in punk bands in their home countries, but upon starting Zanjeer, they decided to write music in languages attached to their identities. This helped set them apart from European bands and encouraged others in the scene from migrant backgrounds to do the same.

On their first EP titled Parcham Buland Ast (which means “The flag is high” in Farsi), there are songs in Punjabi, Urdu, and Farsi, creating an unexpected but harmonious mix. In fact, the band name ‘Zanjeer’ means ‘chain’ in Urdu, Hindi, and Farsi.

While Farsi is not Steve’s native language, it played a role in his life while connecting with family in Iran. Despite English being his ‘native’ language, Steve felt dissatisfaction with the lyrics he wrote in English. “I thought that as most listeners wouldn’t understand them straight away, it provided a veil of mystery that I found comforting,” shares Steve. “The response from fans has been great. People think it’s cool and necessary that punk bands are not just singing in Western languages. I’ve seen people get emotional hearing a language they have a connection to in a style of music they like, where they had never heard it before.”

According to Dozakhi, the impact of releasing two songs in Farsi has been larger than expected. The Iranian diaspora includes many dissidents. When some express to the band that they feel they have a voice in the punk scene, it is extremely significant for Zanjeer. “Honestly, I have so many Iranians—diaspora as well as locals—coming into our inbox, both punks and non-punks alike,” says Dozakhi. Through Zanjeer, the band members have come in contact with the emerging punk underground scene in Iran, such as the band TØF, who are in the process of releasing an EP soon.

Immigrant punks in Germany

As immigrants, there is still much to unpack when navigating the German punk scene, especially in the wake of the ongoing Israeli war on Palestine and Germany’s role in it, and how that trickles down into the country’s punk scene and its connections to the Antideutsche movement.

Things have been politically charged across Germany, especially with the recent local elections and the rise of the right-wing AfD, gaining popularity even among Gen Z voters. However, the punk scene has historically had a connection with the left, making the presence of the Antideutsche movement difficult for immigrants in the scene to understand.

“The automatic connection between punk and the political left has been an ongoing debate since punk has existed,” says Steve. “Some people take an internationalist solidarity stance, while for others, it’s more about personal autonomy and freedom of expression—not that these are mutually exclusive camps, of course.”

Because of the connection between punk and the political left, at some point, the Antideutsche movement became intertwined with parts of the German punk scene. However, over the past year, it has become increasingly clear that Antideutsche continues to be a harmful movement with less relevance over the years in left-wing politics.

Confronting the Antideutsche

Both Steve and Dozakhi have had run-ins with people in the music scene who share Antideutsche ideology. “I found it incredibly strange, almost offensive. The existence of this sect came as a big surprise to a lot of the international punk community post-October 7, 2023,” shares Steve. “But personally, I had been waiting for something like this to happen so that all these pro-military, pro-colonialist, pro-genocide ‘punks’ could start coming out of the woodwork.”

For Steve and Dozakhi, it is particularly insidious that this movement uses the historical context of Nazi genocide to display their sentiments against German heritage while being entitled to use it to preach what they believe is morally correct and justified.

“They aren’t consulting Jewish leftists or Israeli punks, or indeed anyone in the Middle East, when coming up with these arguments—just their own white German pseudo-intellectual circles,” says Steve. “We have connections with punk bands in Israel, and they can’t stand these Germans who feel entitled to speak on their behalf because of what their grandparents did or whatever. It’s totally messed up and sick.”

 

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Dozakhi adds: “I have even seen them cancel Israeli punk bands like Holocausts, labelling them anti-Semitic. As far as I know, they [Antideutsche] were not really the norm among German punks once, and I believe it will change eventually. There is already resistance to their ideas. Even Israeli punks, including some of my dear friends, really find them ridiculous.”

A punk community

Being an immigrant in a punk band in Germany, singing on stage while sporting a (banned) keffiyeh, and navigating the political stance of a country you want to turn into a home is excruciating in the current atmosphere if you want to have a voice. But for Zanjeer, the support for their music, not just in Germany but from international diasporas of Iranians, Pakistanis, and other European punks, has been a tremendous encouragement.

Dozakhi has been told by people from Los Angeles to New York that they feel inspired to make punk music in Farsi, as well as Urdu and Punjabi speakers who listen to Zanjeer. For Dozakhi, the mission of the band feels like a success, and he hopes that in his lifetime, he will be able to listen to punk in countless South Asian and West Asian languages.

“Honestly, I have only ever been humbled by the response of people whenever we play. They’re so happy to see people singing in different languages and coming from different places,” says Dozakhi. “I think that’s fucking beautiful and a testament to the internationalism of punk!”

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“It becomes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status quo. The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order. It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon ideal.” [1]

Labor and capital are crucial for all industries. This includes the cultural and artistic industry. In the case of Berlin, having been marketed as a globally diverse and artistic city, artists became crucial to maintain such an image to keep its central position in the “art world” as well as uphold its economic proliferation through the music and cultural industry[2]. 

Labeling and categorization as well as commodification processes are key for prolonging this constructed image of a “cultural center”. But how did it reach this point? Why has it become attractive to this high number of artists from all over the world?

After the Berlin wall fell, Germany entered a new phase that fostered new challenges. During the 1990’s Berlin policies adopted were meant to achieve rapid economic growth in a short period of time. However, this was based on a groundless optimistic boom scenario, and many real economic and social problems were ignored. Unemployment was at 20%, while the unemployment rate of the second generation of most immigrant groups, who had come mostly as “low-skilled” industrial workers, reached 40%[3]. Moreover, the rapid unification, led to a top-down strategy to integrate German refugees and expellees, which was a one-way process based on West German terms[4]. Germany and more specifically Berlin, was in desperate need for economic revival, to be able to integrate expellees, refugees, as well as immigrants from other countries. This crisis had turned Berlin into a fertile ground for dynamic urban cultures and a rise of subcultures took place which attracted international attention. Lanz (2010) plainly explains the situation and what followed,

“In the space of a decade, they ((sub)cultures) had developed into one of the few instances of economic potential in the city. In addition to the media and music industry, tourism was regarded as another hope for economic growth. By the end of the 1990s, crisis-ridden Berlin and its establishment began to lay claim to urban (sub)cultures as one of the few marketing opportunities for the city. Multicultural facets of the urban landscape of cultures were an important part of this strategy. Efforts to style Berlin as a cosmopolitan metropolis and the growing ‘festivalization’ of urban policy began to incorporate specific elements of immigrant cultures. Public discourse henceforth increasingly distinguished ‘good’ (utilizable) from ‘bad’ (potentially disturbing) cultures. In particular, the ‘Carnival of Cultures’ evolved into a symbol for the economic and social potential of the multicultural metropolis: for the first time, in May 1996, this street parade took place in Berlin–Kreuzberg”[5].

It was cultural diversity that was about to save the reunified German capital; the entry point to economic revival, where for the first time “outsiders” were the ones who would save the city. The carnival was a “workshop of cultures”, a “metaphor for a peaceful display of multiculturalism”[6]. However, the multicultural essence of the carnival was still under the German notion of clear cultural distinction. Opposing views are easily delegitimized, where those who did not participate were perceived as inferior in some way or another. There is selectivity in participation and representation of different cultures. For example, “rather limited participation of ‘Turks’ or ‘Arabs’ – that is, Muslims – receives critical attention. These are perceived not as musicians but rather as representatives of their religion or their nation, being too traditionalistic and lacking in the happy-go-lucky required of a carnival”[7].  This approach to “diversity” creates a hierarchy of cultures, depending on how significant it is for German society, if given a status or position. Here, the significance is economic.

To further clarify, the “Carnival of Cultures” that was held in 1996 (and the cultural policies that followed) adopts a policy of “culturalization,” which leads to the classification of cultural diversity. This favors certain practices, while others remain invisible. This success that we see stems from its ability to serve two dominant principles of ethnic and cultural representation in Berlin, the first is the principle of “consumption of ethnic cultures” and the other is the “integrating space” that transforms ethnic culture into a social culture (socio-cultural) to cover up social problems. The first law concerns the exoticism of immigrants, while the other leads to the use of culture as an instrument for social and political goals. Culture, on the one hand, is politically charged with somewhat utopian expectations in this case, and on the other hand, it is symbolically relegated to a secondary or worldly status by virtue of its use as a means of integration into social and cultural action[8]. This cultural view is based on the interest of the German economy and is a romantic and unrealistic idea. It is not sufficient to include the differences that exist within German society[9]. The cultural diversity present in the city becomes a tool for decision makers and those who dominate the cultural field to use as needed, politically, socially, or economically. This is currently being put into use within the field culture and art given the genocide in Gaza. The stronger the position of the “culture industry” in a certain society, the more it can control and tame the needs of consumers. It turns into a tool of control and domination, while embodying the statements and trends of the prevailing political regime[10].

This is where selectivity, and the role of labeling and categorization is important.  Giving the ability to choose who is part of this culture/carnival, or who is supported and highlighted to be part of the global and multicultural image of Berlin and who is not. Who is part of the brand image that is to be marketed to keep the economy of Berlin running after it has been revitalized as we mentioned. The musicians who are “accepted” and given spaces, venues, support, opportunities and considered part of Berlin’s musical space, are selectively chosen based on what is considered “suitable” or what fits the German “model.” This was evident with the arrival of Syrian artists and musicians to Berlin (2015-2016). There were always attempts to classify them on a legal or ethnic basis, labels such as “refugee music” or “oriental music”, changing band names on flyers into “refugee rockers” or “refugee musicians”. In this way, new markets are created, and certain aspects of cultures can be commodified (disassociated from their social, political, and historical significance) and marketed for consumption by Berliners becoming profitable for the city. This is a relation of coloniality, that is the “patterns of power in the sphere of knowledge production and culture” rather than politics[11], these power dynamics create monopolies and relations of dependency that guarantee capital flow towards a city such as Berlin (in this case musicians or artists).

For example, when talking about the Asian diaspora in London, Banerjea (2000) explains how one of the functions of the capitalist system is to transform different cultures and works of art into commodities as neoliberal consumer markets need to be constantly fed with new “products” through marketing and advertising in order to benefit from specific productions while disassociating them from any political, cultural or social contexts or significance, which were the circumstances that led to these productions. This is usually done through labelling and categorization processes, which depend on identities or legal status. In this way, new subcultures or genres can emerge in the context of music leading to new consumer markets, where related ‘products’ can be advertised and thus profited from[12]. This also occurred with Rai music in France, where it was transformed from music for the populus in Algeria and other countries into an entertainment commodity that reproduces societal and class hierarchies against Algerians and Moroccans in Paris[13]. This exploitive relation can also be seen in western club culture and specifically Paris, as stated in an important article entitled “Negrophilia in Club Culture”[14], highlighting how “modern-day clubs in the West are venues in which white people get to interact for a night with Black performers, and develop parasocial relationships with the very same Black patrons and entertainers who are denied housing, jobs, and so on, outside of the dancefloor”.

Going back to Berlin and the arrival of Syrian artists[15], which was after the borders were opened in 2015 while Angela Merkel was the head of the German government. It is important to stress that this decision was not humanitarian or caused by “refugees” stranded on the borders of Europe. Rather, it was an economic decision due to the need for labor. According to German figures, by the year 2050 there will be no German labor force due to low birth rates and an aging population. It was a strategic political-economic move; the German society needed labor. Here lies the importance of processes of classification and commodification of cultures, as well as artistic productions, and artists themselves, in the field of culture and art. Typically, border and immigration authorities control who enters the country, through issuing visas, skilled migration initiatives etc. However, the adoption of an open-door policy hampered this process, people arriving to Germany could not be “filtered” by immigration agents and authorities. This leads dominant actors who hold dominant positions within the field of culture and arts to feel insecure about their social positions (and markets) because they might be at stake. This is due to the presence of newcomers to the musical space, who may be able to “transcend the dominant mode of thought and expression” or change the dominant narrative of the cultural field or even alter the or expand the opportunities available[16]. In that way newcomers (Syrian musicians in this example) are labelled and limited to specific categories that restricts them to specific types of music, specific venues, and specific concerts, consequently specific markets related to the classification in which they are placed.

These labelling processes provide a way to limit access to different markets and consumers, and those who hold dominant positions in Berlin in this field can maintain and strengthen their positions by confining newcomers within a specific label that is unrelated to their own and thus keeping them out of their own markets and creating new ones. This is also an attempt to relegate such cultural productions to a certain level (high/low art, underground, alternative) limiting its influence or participation in the “dominant” culture, maintaining the cultural hierarchy as mentioned above. Certainly, this is not a fixed process, there are exceptions and, to some extent this could be countered through collective efforts. This could be seen as a process of “negotiation”, in this case, Syrian musicians did not submit to the classification process, rather resisted it in multiple ways. Boycotting events that place them under a specific label such as refugees or Easterners was one way. Building independent platforms through which they can produce and release music, in addition to artistic collectives and platforms that address and oppose identitarian and racial classifications. We are also currently witnessing this, with the genocide in Gaza, even though challenging, platforms and collectives emerging through artist organizations have an impact through collective organizational efforts. If not on the short, on the long run.

Upon arrival to Berlin, labelling and categorization processes have another role other than limiting newcomers to specific markets, commodification, and profit. Standardization and conformity are another function. Many musicians who arrive in Berlin are pushed towards becoming DJs despite their ability to produce and compose (the same happens with non-artist immigrants who are pushed into manual labor by not recognizing their degrees or not creating a talent or skill pool, like they did for Ukrainians for instance). This is an understandable path for musicians because the market is massive and those arriving need financial stability and to make ends meet, not forgetting the heaviness of the migration process itself. In the context of Berlin’s current cultural structure, this is a way to keep this market and the nightlife economy alive and running in the city. This is how capital and labor are provided for this industry, and even if the musicians while DJing can include inspiration from their own culture or identities which they want to represent, they will end up combining it with local sounds that are mostly Western sounds, samples, and notes. In this way, the structure (if not directly) within the music industry creates standardization and conformity of artists to keep the market going and the cultural economy well-fed.

Once an artist or group of artists begin to differentiate themselves through their music and based on their own culture, identity, or even begin a process of constructing/creating a new musical/cultural identity, given their experiences, creating a new narrative that challenges the “dominant,” “national,” or “Berliner” narrative, is going to be seen as disruptive due to influencing the current environment, and with time might transcend the dominant pattern of artistic or cultural production, changing the power dynamics within the cultural field. There are certain types of cultural capital that are seen as valuable and legitimate, that are used to reproduce and reinvent the existing culture as well as structure, while another is seen as disruptive.

In other words, within a capitalistic system and neoliberal consumer markets, along with western monopolies over cultural resources and means of production as well as the post-colonial and inferior outlook towards the rest of the world, not forgetting oppressive post-colonial regimes established in many countries around the globe, artistic and cultural production is dealt with either as a political tool or an industry made up of capital, labor, and profit. The current structure devastated (not all of course but to a certain extent) cultural and artistic productions that are genuine, critical, or constructive which could influence or critique. At any instance that a certain production could break or change the dominant narrative or deal with political, social, and cultural issues, it is not supported and relegated to underground music, or limited to a certain market or space within the cultural field. It is contained.

We see this in core European cities, which does not only apply to the arts but all types of capital. In the end, they see us as nothing more than capital that can be exploited to consolidate their positions and reproduce the hegemony stemming from colonial and economic history. Funding opportunities, artistic residencies, performances, support programs, and different spaces that are attractive for artists and most people, are available, but we must speak their language, and stay within their narrative. We have freedom here, but with a ceiling. If we break this ceiling, we become an obstacle to them, or more accurately, enemies. Because we appeared as we are, not as they see us. This is what we see very clearly with the Palestinian issue given the genocide in Gaza (and certainly the rest of Palestine). From the state and cultural organizations to concert venues and artistic platforms that claimed justice and openness, have attacked, criminalized, banned, and canceled artists who support this cause.

Similar to dealing with the Palestinians in Germany, where it is possible to live in Berlin, if we conform to the German perspective, their narrative, and outlook. If Palestinians appear in Berlin with their own narrative, perspective, and outlook, they will be suppressed. If they are invisible and produce for the German economy and do not disturb the regime, it is acceptable (and the Palestinians are truly hidden, even in the state numbers it says “unknown” or “stateless”), otherwise you are not welcome. This applies to art and artists. If art can be commodified and promoted in the cultural market and does not disturb the mainstream approach, it is accepted and highlighted. This is the distinction between “good” (usable) cultures and “bad” (unusable) cultures, which contradict the narrative and consequently becomes an obstacle to this society, its policies, and institutions.

[1] Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (Verso, 1997), p. 147.

[2] Berlin’s cultural budget for 2024 is 947m Euros. Berlin’s new culture budget more than double England’s arts funding | Euronews

[3] Stephan Lanz, “The German Sonderweg: multiculturalism as racism in distance,” in: Sili Alessando, European Multiculturalism revisited (UK: Zed Books, 2010), p. 128.

[4] Douglas Klusmeyer, “A ‘guiding culture’ for immigrants? Integration and diversity in Germany,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (2001), p. 528.

[5] Lanz, p. 129.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 130.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Klusmeyer, “A ‘guiding culture’ for immigrants.”

[10] Adorno & Horkheimer, pp. 144, 147.

[11] Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa (Verso, 2023), p. 12.

[12] Koushik Banerjea (2000), “Sound of Whose Underground? The Fine Tuning of Diaspora in the Age of Mechanical Production,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 64-79.

[13] Joan Gross, David McMurray & Ted Swedenburg, “Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco-Maghrebi Identity,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 3, no 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 3-39.

[14] Negrophilia in club culture – Technomaterialism.

[15] Perhaps it is beneficial to highlight the cultural importance of Syria and the region. The region’s (Levant) history is culturally and musically wealthy across centuries. Syria is considered a cultural container holding more than 38 civilizations that have either originated or passed through the region leaving some kind of cultural impact. For example, the “first” musical piece found was in Syria in Ugarit (Latakia presently), as well as the first singer in written history, Ornina, found in kingdom of Mari (close to Deir El Zour presently). Germans are fully aware of this cultural richness this is why there are always excavation teams sent to the region (as well as Egypt and other regions for example), this is also why German museums are packed with artifacts originating from the Levant, Africa, and many other previously colonized regions.

[16] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 1994), p.  31.

*The article was originally published in Arabic in Fus7a Magazine. 

The post On Berlin’s cultural industry: Exploitation and selective inclusion appeared first on Untold.

This conversation was initially held as part of MECAM workshop Cities in the Arab Imagination: Fiction, Reality, and Futurescapes, that took place in May 2024 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. It is simultaneously published on Trafo blog. 

Diana Abbani: Rasha, reflecting back to your 2019 short story, The Intruders and the City, translated and published in 2022 in The Markaz Review, you explored the complexities Arab writers face in articulating how exile impacts their work, amidst the challenges of personal change and adapting to new environments while reflecting on their past. Starting from that perspective, could you take us back to your initial experiences upon arriving in Berlin? How did these experiences shape your view of the city as a potential “cultural hub” for Arab artists and writers?

Rasha Abbas: When I arrived in Berlin in 2014, the city was different—I was different, and the city was welcoming amidst the influx of Syrian refugees. It truly felt like a free and safe haven, and it was where my work was first translated. That recognition was something big for me; I was genuinely happy about it.

However, as time passed, my perspective changed. Initially, I might have been a bit naive, happily accepting all invitations. However, I soon became more critical, particularly of how I was being represented. Despite there being no shame in being labeled a refugee, I noticed at literary events that our presence was sometimes treated like a charity case, which was unsettling.

 Additionally, I observed that the host community’s well-intentioned initiatives did not always align with our literary concerns. At many events, the focus was predominantly on the impact of the refugee wave in Europe—questioning whether we were a risk or a benefit to the community. While these questions are valid, they often overlook the unique issues and narratives that we, as Arab intellectuals in the diaspora, bring to the table.

DA: Muhammad, since you first arrived in Berlin and co-founded the cultural collective of Al.Berlin, you’ve been an active part of the city’s cultural scene. How do you see your place in the city back then and now? How do you see the current political and cultural repressions in Berlin affecting you, your work, Berlin’s cultural scene and the Arab community and its artistic expressions?

Muhammad Jabali: I originally decided not to live in Berlin in 2012, feeling it was not the right place for a Palestinian. That was my stance until fate brought me back. From 2006 to 2012, I engaged in numerous activities in Germany, such as activist exchanges, poetry readings, DJing, and political conferences. By the end of 2012, I was living in Neukölln, after being invited to a municipal festival and a parallel political conference. I left Berlin with two starkly contrasting impressions: the vibrant atmosphere of the Arab street, Sonnenallee, which was strangely more authentic than Jaffa, where I lived, and the stifling experiences at a conference in Mitte, which, as a Palestinian, felt exclusive and impenetrable unless accompanied by an Israeli friend.

These contrasting experiences gave me a sense of schizophrenia, compelling me to decide that I did not want to live in a place that made me feel this way. However, when I returned in 2018, Berlin felt different, largely due to the influx of Syrian refugees which had fostered a welcoming culture. The city seemed to be evolving, with debates on German ethno-nationalism and a noticeable increase in the Arab population contributing to a changed atmosphere.

Nevertheless, conflict reemerged quickly. By 2019, while planning the first Al.Berlin music festival, the anti-BDS resolution passed in parliament. I was in Austria for an exhibition when I heard that the venue we were supposed to use for our festival had canceled one of our performers due to his BDS support. I was outraged—I had not left Tel Aviv for this.

My aim here is to frame these experiences within a broader historical context. The cycles of hope and disillusionment in Berlin have been ongoing for over a decade. This ongoing fluctuation in what Berlin represents isn’t new to me. Thus, it’s essential to view our situations and the city through a long-term lens, acknowledging that while current events influence us, they are not confined to a single moment; they are part of a continuous flow of time, affecting both our past and our future. 

DA: Rasha, following your withdrawal from the Frankfurt Book Fair in solidarity with the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, and considering the broader themes of silence and language in catastrophic times, could you share your thoughts on the absence of words and the role of literature in such periods? Do you see language capable of capturing the tragedy, and what drives the narratives we create in these times? 

RA: I have come to understand, and perhaps embrace, the solution of silence, especially after the Frankfurt Book Fair incident. We published a statement, written by Mohammad al-Attar, about our withdrawal. In that context, silence seemed almost a literal necessity. However, I don’t always believe it’s the best solution, but sometimes it feels like the only one we have.

At the Fair, despite suggestions to voice our concerns, I reconsidered our withdrawal after seeing Slavoj Žižek’s speech, even though I don’t share his views on Palestine. This made me wonder about more confrontational approaches. But, at that moment, I didn’t see myself there. Language was a barrier. I don’t fully command German, and I didn’t find the power in me to engage in a heated debate, in English or German, on such a significant platform. 

After 10–12 years of being forced to be an activist for the Syrian cause—because even if you don’t want to, it’s not a choice—I’ve learned the challenges of such a role. If you can’t engage, don’t force it; sometimes writing and reflecting from a distance suits better. Circumstances sometimes dictate a slower pace, and not everyone is cut out for public debate.

Though I’m not fully convinced that silence is always the best approach, I see value in all forms of expression. Some thrive in public discussions, while others, including myself, contribute best through quiet reflection, documenting, and creating works that might only be recognized years later.

DA: Muhammad, in your book published last year, The Entrapment of the Place: A Critical Study of Fine Arts in Israel, you critically examine whether art created in a colonial setting like Israel can represent beauty without reinforcing colonial narratives. Is it possible for art to exist within a colonial framework without being complicit in these dynamics? Further, how does Western art influence and reshape societal standards of what is aesthetically considered as “beautiful” and “ugly”, and how might it reflect and perpetuate colonial narratives and power dynamics?

MJ: This is a complex issue without a straightforward answer. Yes, beautiful art can emerge in a colonial context, but beauty does not dictate moral value. Israeli art, for example, includes truly remarkable pieces, yet beauty can also serve darker purposes. The Arabic term رائع، روعة، مريع, akin to the English ‘terrific,’ embodies the dual nature of beauty and fear, illustrating how closely they are intertwined in language.

However, good art isn’t necessarily peaceful. Recent Western art, particularly from the latter half of the 20th century, sometimes misaligns with our experiences and distorts our perceptions.

In moments of catastrophe, victims don’t think about creating beautiful art, victims scream. That’s not art—you need distance from the moment, art is about creating a metaphor, and if you’re not distanced from it, it can barely be art.

This creates a crucial problem with the poetics of tragedy. At the heat of the tragedy, it is hard to be poetic; there is an inherent contradiction in trying to represent tragedies beautifully. Like Adorno said, writing poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric. Sometimes, going back to silence or being silenced is the solution. It is expected that artists lead the way in times of crisis, but actually, most of the time, poetry after catastrophes is “barbarism”. 

There is a time for silence, and that makes cultural work really difficult to always be at the front line of confrontation. Either it produces bad art, or needing this distance makes it complex. 

DA: Reflecting on your experiences in Berlin and the dual roles imposed on refugee and exiled writers and artists—where on one hand there’s a desire to translate and understand their works better, and on the other, they are categorized into roles that demand testimonial or sociological narratives—how do you both navigate these expectations? Additionally, within the Arab community, do you feel a responsibility to represent them, or do you prioritize individual expression?

RA: Navigating these expectations starts with personal reflection. Often, it seems that my public profile overshadows my actual writing. While part of me resists being pigeonholed as just a ‘Syrian writer,’ wanting instead to explore universal themes like love or science fiction, I inevitably gravitate back to the issues that have shaped me: my Syrian upbringing and the experiences of oppression, war, and displacement. These elements deeply influence what I write, regardless of how I wish to be perceived. In Berlin, despite its challenges, I find it one of the best places for Arab writers and activists to congregate. However, the expectation to represent the Arab community complicates things. The cultural scene can feel imposing, and there are times when you simply want your space. This need isn’t about isolation, but about managing the trauma and complexities that come with diaspora experiences.

MJ: Indeed, Rasha captures the struggle well. The main issue for refugee and exiled artists is exclusion from the collective due to institutional dynamics that do not recognize our experiences as universally human. We often find ourselves fighting for a voice within these structures. A few years back, I was optimistic about our role in shaping a new Berlin collective, but the reality is more complex. Despite this, the Arab community in Berlin is smaller and more fragmented than many realize, with varying desires on how they wish to engage with the city. Events like concerts or art shows play a crucial role, allowing individuals to connect over shared interests without the pressure of collective identity, enriching the cultural landscape of the city.

DA: To conclude and reflect on the future, how can we make the cities we inhabit more livable? What role does imagination play in shaping our perception of these cities? And how can we use it to envision new possibilities for the future?

RA: I believe imagination is crucial to envision what comes tomorrow. What we prepare for today lays the groundwork for tomorrow. But then, there’s the question of making Berlin a more livable city. How crucial is our imagination in this process? Is it really what we need? I believe that while imagination is essential, but alone, it may not be sufficient.

Especially considering recent events and the cruelty witnessed, our challenges are not solely due to a lack of imagination. In fact, I have begun to think that what we really need to address in today’s world is more awareness, a more realistic approach, and fact-gathering—exactly the kind of things we often avoid, like forced activism.

MJ: I’m currently working and studying German intensely because I blame myself for everyday I’ve lived here without mastering the language. There is definitely a communication problem in Germany, which relates to a broader issue in the cultural sector and the lack of communication with Germans. I think part of the blame lies with Arab artists and cultural activists, but it’s not solely their responsibility. The cultural sector often grapples with competing for resources and dealing with issues that clash with German societal norms, such as the sensitive topics of Palestine and Israel.

However, the question remains: should we make Berlin bloom? This ties back to our relationship with our community back home. There is a role here, not just to debate with Germans as fixed entities, but also to revitalize Berlin, leveraging this space to foster a new Arab or Mediterranean influence.

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