![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019. Museo Reina](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestina_1.jpg.webp)
Held on 05 Jun 2024
Palestine Is Everywhere is the international slogan of solidarity with the Palestinian people and also the title of a global debate that situates Palestine at the centre of our historical time, understanding the war in Gaza as the start of a new cycle shaped by colonial expansion. Under this title, the Museo organises an encounter that opens with a video recital by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the best-known poetic voices in the Arab language. Following his intervention, artists and theorists Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, part of the Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement, philosopher Marina Garcés and anthropologist Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona will exchange reflections, experiences and viewpoints on the Palestinian situation and cause in a round-table discussion. As a coda to the session, there will be a viewing of Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019), a work by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme which has recently been incorporated into the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation by Mercedes Vilardell in 2024. The eleven-minute video piece sets up a dialogue between the writings of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said (1935–2003) and AI-created images of protests at the wall that runs along the Gaza Strip.
With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau. With their resistance and demands, these territories are crying out for a new world-system that is more just, diverse and equal. What does it mean to be part of the planetary anti-colonial struggle? How to reorient ourselves towards fresh global movements that question the hegemony of the nation state? How to relate images of global freedom, those considered from desire, not pain, in this new temporal framework?
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Cinema as Assembly
Inside the framework of
The Museum of the Commons project is organised by the L’Internationale museum confederation and co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme. L’Internationale comprises fourteen major European art institutions: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), M HKA (Antwerp, Belgium), MSN (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), MSU (Zagreb, Croatia), HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), NCAD (Dublin, Ireland), ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia), IRI (Italy), Tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iași, Romania) and VCRC (Kiev, Ukraine), as well as two associate organisations: IMMA (Dublin, Ireland) and WIELS (Brussels, Belgium).
Participants
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are Palestinian-born artists who live between Ramallah and New York. Through sound, image, text, installation and performance they examine themes such as the intersections between political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. They have shown their work at institutions that include the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2024), MoMA (New York, 2022), the Centraal Museum Utrecht (2021) and the Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and have participated in collective shows such as the Sharjah (2023) and Berlin (2022) biennales and at Appel Amsterdam (2018) and CCA Wattis in San Francisco (2018). Their work At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019) is now part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation made by Mercedes Villaroel in 2024.
Nitasha Dhillon is an artist, teacher and researcher specialised in journalism. With Amin Husain, she is part of the MTL Collective, which joins research, artistic practice and activism. She also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. She is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She is an undergraduate and MA professor in Arts and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and has aligned much of her career towards practical, critical and collective thought that she propels from Espai en Blanc. Her publications most notably include En las prisiones de lo posible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and Escola d’aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).
Amin Husain is an artist, teacher and researcher who specialises in philosophy and political science. Of Palestinian-US origin, he is part of the MTL Collective with Nitasha Dhillon, an initiative that joins research, artistic practice and activism. He also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. He is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a theorist and anthropologist. With interdisciplinary training in economy and anthropology, his work is centred on the relationships between art and political economy. He has conducted far-reaching fieldwork in Italy, the UK, Norway and Brazil, primarily in economic institutions, analysing the relationships between economic development and political identity through participatory and experimental film projects. His practice is situated at the crossroads between pedagogy, art and activism, and he is a co-founder of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet, novelist, teacher and journalist. He was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and was educated in one of the UN Agency’s schools for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Following a long career as a teacher and journalist in Saudi Arabia, he returned to Jordan in 1996 and since then has devoted his work to literature. His prolific output, spanning poetry, prose and essay, is shaped by exile and the Palestinian conflict. Some of his most recent works include Gaza Weddings (Hoopoe, 2017), Prairies of Fever (Interlink Books, 1998) and Time of White Horses (Hoopoe, 2016). He has been honoured with the Award for Best Poetry Collection Published in Jordan and the Arab Literary Award.
![Shuruq Harb. The Jump [El salto], Palestina, 2021. Cortesía de la artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/narrativas_desde_palestina._una_poetica_del_territorio_0.jpg.webp)
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Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
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Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.
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Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
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In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.
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