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AFAC
© Osama Ghanam
What to do now? Amid ongoing genocide, 2024 Training and Regional Events Projects revisit history, organize knowledge production anew
19 / 11 / 2024

The historical stakes for organizing how we interact, think, produce feel like they have never been higher.

Amid the unrelenting colonial violence unleashed on Gaza over the last year, which is slowly escalating in the West Bank, and is now expanded into Lebanon, the thinkers, practitioners, artists, researchers in the region who have been selected to receive support through AFAC’s 2024 Training and Regional Events Projects have ventured politically forceful ways to continue to think the now.

The 15 projects in this cycle were selected by a jury composed of Layal Ftouni, Nour Al-Safoury, Belhassen Handous. Together, the jury brought their thinking and practical experience around knowledge production, publishing, program management and filmmaking to bear on the selection process. You can read their approach and thoughts behind their selection in their statement below:

    “It’s been an honor and a challenge to be tasked with the responsibility of selecting the grantees for the 2024 AFAC Training and Regional Events grant program. The wealth of knowledge, expertise, critical thinking and innovation reflected in the proposals have been inspiring and enriching. They also undoubtedly made the jury’s decisions harder. The jury members rigorously read and discussed a significant number of proposals and have selected a diverse pool of projects that varied in terms of their subjects of inquiry, methods, media, and disciplines. We believe these projects contribute to the development of the arts and cultural sector in the Arab region at our current socio-political conjuncture.

    The practice and method of revisiting and rewriting “histories from below” has been a recurrent theme throughout the proposals submitted. A few of the selected projects focus on developing critical tools and historical methodologies to resuscitate repressed histories in colonial and national archives. Through workshops, the training and event programs offer new ways of engaging the archive, exposing the cracks and erasures in dominant historical narratives. Projects range from research workshops tracing workers movements struggles in Egypt and Morocco in the imperial armies of WWI, to mapping a genealogy of children’s literature over a period of 100 years in Lebanon, as well as reviving the songs of satire from the 1920-1940 in Bilad al-Sham, a period that witnessed tumultuous political and social transformations. The modernity-coloniality nexus in Bilad al-Sham during that period is further explored in one of the grantee’s theater training, taking Saadallah Wannous’s play Drunken Days as a foundation to teach and rethink theatrical writing and performance.

    The legacies of colonial violence and anti-colonial struggle in our region are not merely hidden in the archives. Colonialism as a violent system of dispossession and destruction structures the everyday life in Palestine since the Nakba. As we write, and for over a year now, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, are being subjected to the cruelest and bloodiest acts of killing and destruction in recent history. In Europe and the US, pro-Palestinian cultural and activist initiatives have faced crack-downs, cancellations, intimidations and shut-downs in an attempt to silence critical stances of the Israeli settler state’s violations of life in all its forms in Palestine.

    As the genocidal onslaught escalates, and the crackdowns intensify, we are faced with the question of what it means to write, make films, or to be creative amid this senseless violence? How do we convey the non-conveyable? How do we forge networks of solidarity and knowledge production that emerge from but also surpass and outlive the current political predicament? In the midst of the rampant silencing and censorship practices, the jury members agreed that it is urgent today to support initiatives that center critical conversations, writings, and film programs in places where speech is becoming more restricted, both in the Arab region and the diaspora. Selected projects include a writing fellowship that brings together established Palestinian writers with young writers to think together, share expertise and work through the impossibility of writing in times of genocide, in and through writing. Others include film screening programs, as well as film training for young palestinian filmmakers, and filmmaking for and about children. At a time when wars are being waged against our children, supporting works that nurture our children’s creative capacities to imagine another world is of vital importance. This is evident in selected training programs that focus on developing the scriptwriting and production of children’s films, directing child actors, as well as introducing children to literature (fictional, educational, fantasy), animation and comics.

    Ongoing genocides have exposed the ineptitude of legal systems. Yet, in the cultural field, we find ourselves forced to reckon with restricting local and international legal and administrative frameworks. From the selected projects, some create new infrastructures for the production of culture which nurture collaborations among practitioners from the majority Arabic-speaking region and with peers on the African continent. Others address a perceived lack in the existing arts and culture infrastructure by providing legal support. This engagement with the conditions of cultural work is admirable for it allows us to orient the cultural field toward values of justice, equality and self-reflexivity.

    Access to knowledge whether technical or theoretical outside the confines of universities is one way to create a diverse and socially-engaged cultural field. Some of the projects set up alternative learning programs or offer opportunities to get introduced to new skills. We wonder, nonetheless, if there is a need to rethink the workshop dynamic in order to facilitate non-hierarchical skill and knowledge transfer. We also ask, when do training programs directed at artists and cultural workers to professionalize their practice function as grooming for entry into the art market and when are they meant to create sustainable possibilities for artists in precarious environments. Where is the line between the skill-development concerns of cultural management and training programs that provide resources to critically engage with the existing job market and sustain livelihoods?

    We want to congratulate all the grantees again and wish them all the best in pursuing their projects.”

AFAC would like to congratulate the projects, but moveover, we are proud to support such important work at the present time. You can find a list of the project titles below, and read more about each of them by clicking through the hyperlinks below.