Categories
Critical Speculation

Re:LIFTA, Within the Right to Plan is the Right to Imagine Return

By Mahdi Sabbagh Lifta digital art exhibition poster (Collective MIP) A picturesque ascent overlooking Wadi el-Shami greets every car driving from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem. The valley is dotted with trees and shrubbery, adorned with a family of stone houses. Those familiar with Palestine’s history instantly recognize the ghostly presence of the deserted village […]

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Spatial Analysis

Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury

By Aimee Shalan This article, a reflection on the 2009 film “Videomappings: Aida, Palestine” by Till Roeskens, was originally published on Jadaliyya. It is featured on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from the author. The struggle over Palestine—a struggle in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images are all fiercely contested—has been so overexposed in mainstream media […]

Categories
Critical Speculation Spatial Analysis

Playing in a Landscape of Separation Lines and Practices

By Idit Elia Nathan ‘Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.’ -Edward Said ‘Perception Requires Involvement’ […]

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Advocacy Critical Speculation

Palestine: Between Spatial Realities and Engaging the Imagination

by Ahmad Barclay and Dena Qaddumi This article was originally published on Jadaliyya as a part of the recent roundtable in response to ‘Occupation Law and the One State Reality’ by Darryl Li, which was featured on this site last month. You can read the full roundtable on the Jadaliyya site, including contributions from Noura […]

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Advocacy Critical Speculation

Why not Return? Towards Return of Palestinian Refugees

by Eitan Bronstein This Thursday, 15th September, a remarkable exhibition will open in Tel-Aviv, seeking to engage head-on with the legacy of the Palestinian Nakba. Curated by Zochrot and entitled ‘Towards return of Palestinian refugees’, the exhibition brings together a collection of projects that engage in concrete and propositive ways with the challenges of realising […]

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Spatial Analysis

Occupation Law and the One-State Reality

by Darryl Li This essay is based on a lecture delivered at the University of Palestine Law Faculty in Gaza, 2 July 2011. It was originally posted on Jadaliyya, and is re-posted on arenaofspeculation.org with permission from the author. Darryl Li is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and […]

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Spatial Analysis

Maps and the Question of Palestine: An interview with Denis Wood

Exclusive to arenaofspeculation.org, Linda Quiquivix shares her recent interview with independent scholar and author Denis Wood. Follow link below for the full interview: Interview: “Maps and the Question of Palestine” Denis Wood has been writing critically about maps for the past four decades. His recently published Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford Press, 2010) argues […]

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Advocacy Critical Speculation

Counter-Mapping Return: Towards Transforming Imagined Geographies into Reality

Following the events of May 15th, grassroots activists and community organisations have chosen June 5th – Naksa Day, the anniversary commemorating the displacement of thousands of Palestinians during the 1967 War – as an occasion for further mobilisation towards actively asserting the Palestinan right to return. In the context of our recent feature, we wanted […]

Categories
Critical Speculation Spatial Analysis

Subjective Atlas of Palestine: Asserting the Right to Narrate

The right to history, to individual and collective memories of the past, and to a self-determined perspective on the future were at the core of the Nakba commemorations across the world on 15th May. The Subjective Atlas of Palestine, edited by Annelys de Vet and published by 010 Publishers, seems to offer an embodiment of […]

Categories
Critical Speculation Physical Intervention

TEDxRamallah: Voices from Free Palestine

On Saturday 16th April, TEDxRamallah, a remarkable transnational event will be taking place in Bethlehem, Amman and Beirut, to be streamed on the same day to venues in more than 20 cities across the world, from Cairo to New York. Asserting “the power of culture over the culture of power”,(1) in the words of the […]

Categories
Spatial Analysis

Atlas of the Conflict: Israel-Palestine

Now on sale, the Atlas of the Conflict represents the most comprehensive effort yet to offer a spatial mapping of the contemporary geography of Israel-Palestine and the history of its shaping. Architect Malkit Shoshan (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory) has produced a wide ranging and graphically rich publication likely to become an essential primer for […]