Considerations for the walk:
Today was Qais's talk. I sat next to Sitara. He only got to briefly touch on all his pieces which is very powerful really. The images below are two I thought were interesting. The billboard in English in the middle of Palestine and the picture of Qais next to his picture of himself as a kid.
Today we started class at the Broad Museum watching a film by Jumana Manna about seed saving. It really hit a lot of areas of interest for me. It talked about seed saving and farming in Palestine. It was beautifully filmed and very important.
Today we went to a discussion on the new Green Lantern series which includes two new POC characters. We discussed how men who complain about the change of
We met in the 360 room in the library today. It was interesting to see images taken from Google Maps shown all around us, especially because of Google Maps not considering Palestine a country. I also thought the layout of the roads was interesting, they aren't built like cities in the U.S., they're very curved and winding. It could make an interesting textile.
Walk Idea: a walk through the lens of a researcher learning about the occupation. Following the ways propaganda directs and navigates you through various topics and leads you to a situation where your vview point is tailored by those who want you to think a certain way.
If I could work out a program through RenPy which acts somewhat as a simulation of research and how people interact with data and information, I could track the ways people respond to that propaganda through how they interact with the program. Questions:
Today we were supposed to watch May Marei's video "The Girl Who is Living in The Martyred Guy's House 'The Bordom of Defeat.'" It was a beautiful piece and it was interesting how she spoke to the former person who lived in the house like a former partner. It reminded me of all the high school poetry I heard that used the pronoun "you" for the whole piece. I included a few screenshots below of moments I found particularly interesting/potent.
We also looked at the piece we created in response to a poster in the Palestine Poster Project. I chose this piece about Vietnam and Palestine because the poses they were in seemed like they could easily be manipulated into a poster about the deadly exchange. We met again over Skype today. We talked about the Subjective Atlas of Palestine and the images we drew of Ablie Sachs. I shared my confusion with the Daily Reflections on The News on pages 46-49, below I put some of the images I didn't understand. I'm sure they're pretty specific to a time and place.
We had class over Skype today because it was very cold. We discussed the pieces by Nina Katchadourian that we chose to look into. I read the assignment wrong and chose a piece from Uninvited Collaborations
with Nature. I loved the mended spiderwebs and how intricate those pieces were. I think it's also really interesting how strong the spiderwebs are to be able to be mended. It isn't a map but it is a reaction to a destructive force which interacted with this web, a different form of mapping which seems relevant. For the QCQ we listened to the video "Cases for Political Art." I took a screen shot of a piece of the video I thought was interesting. I like the phrase, "political art is uncomfortable knowledge." Today was a field trip to the library to meet up with a Maps librarian as well as Albie Sachs. His fight against apartheid in South Africa is something that was very helpful to hear as someone fighting the apartheid in Palestine. One thing he said that I thought was really interesting was about an image that was circulated during the movement of a woman holding a gun with a baby on her back. He said something like, "at first it was effective, then it became tedious, and eventually it was just cruel." I think this observation is important and it is relevant to the work I do with MSU Students United for Palestinian Rights. Most of the time, making posters for this group is difficult because so many images are used so frequently that it becomes hard to illustrate the fight against the occupation without becoming tedious or cruel.
The video of the courthouse Albie showed the class was refreshing and helpful. It showed collaborative art pieces that came together to display an act of defiance: the existence of the building. The imagery was interesting and touched on the occupation and cultural aspects of South Africa without reusing the symbols from the fight. It was more about the future of South Africa than a reminder of a traumatic past. It reminds me of the poster that says, "the (hi)story is not finished," I will attach it below. Contestation of Space was an interesting project that outlined a very simple way in which Israeli governments control the movements of Palestinians. In a public park created by an educator in the area for the benefit of the children and mothers in the area,
Quotes from Citizenship:
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