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Attend this live programme as part of the London iteration of War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, unfolding from 11am-7.30pm at The Mosaic Rooms.

The project is inspired by the book War-Torn ecologies, Anarchic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East (2023) by Umut Yildirim. Extending from this, the programme focuses on the impact of perpetual colonial realities and counterinsurgency wars on ecologies in the Middle East. By engaging with artistic and ecological practices, it emphasises the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds as a methodology to counter ongoing colonial and imperialist systems of mass violence. Unfolding across multiple geographies, in physical and digital space, this programme brings together experimental and artistic practices which embody vital active solidarities. In turn, these create openings which resist and push back against the incapacitating effects of this violence.

Details of talks and times:

Welcome and Introduction
11:00-11:30

Shourideh C. Molavi | The Disappearing Trees of Gaza: Environmental Violence and Genocide
11.30am-12.15pm

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, one year into the Palestinian Nakba, the occupied Gaza Strip has been slowly isolated from the rest of Palestine and the outside world and subjected to repeated military onslaughts. This talk will discuss the author’s recent book on the topic, linking the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza to the longer history of Israeli eco-colonial imaginaries in Gaza and Palestine more broadly.

Tareq Khalaf | Sakiya: Maintaining a Creative Presence on the Land
12.15pm-1pm

Located in the agricultural village of Ein Qinya north-west of Ramallah, Sakiya is an experimental academy and cultural space, operating at the confluence of settler colonial expansion and the polluting effects of modern developments. By shifting cultural life to rural Palestine, Sakiya grafts agriculture with pedagogical, artistic and cultural activities, as a means to maintain a creative presence on the land. In the context of a militarised landscape and the alienating effects of a colonial spatial regime, Sakiya summons rituals of connection to land, memory and place through communal practices that insist on life.

LUNCH BREAK | 13:00-13:45

Listening with Umut Yıldırım and Gascia Ouzounian | Mulberry Affects and Sonic Memories of the Armenian Genocide
1.45pm-3.05pm

This conversation, which includes moments of collective listening, weaves together Umut Yıldırım and Gascia Ouzounian’s respective research on the genocidal erasure of Armenians. Yıldırım’s research posits mulberry trees on the banks of the Tigris River in the Armeno/Kurdish region of Turkey as ‘an-archic archives’ that raise questions about unrecognised massacre sites. Ouzounian draws from earwitness testimonies to explore sonic memory as a form of ‘counter-listening’. Both speakers employ these methodologies against the narrative of genocide denial that continues to be maintained by the Turkish state.

Ameneh Solati | Wetlands of Resistance
3.25pm-4.10pm

The only uprising that occurred in Iraq during the thirty-five-year dictatorial rule of the Ba’ath party led by Saddam Hussein (1979–2003) started in the marshes in southern Iraq. It was the largest insurrection in the region until the Arab Spring in 2010. In this talk based on her essay ‘Wetlands of Resistance,’ Solati discusses the marshes as far more than mere zones of ecological and cultural richness or biological diversity, but also a political arena where power, autonomy, and resistance are articulated.

Kali Rubaii | You Can’t Measure War in Parts per Million
4.10pm-4.55pm

Even as Rubaii’s environmental health research aims to measure weapons residue in the air, soil, and water of Iraq’s Anbar province, the landscape cannot be reduced to quantified evidence. A breath emitting Co2 and inhaling particulate matter, is also a scream, a last word. Food that is a vector for radiation is also kinship, endurance. Soil that is a sample is also a whiff of the homeland, a sacred relic. This series of ethnographic vignettes and creative nonfiction depicts the toxic, ghostly, fleshy, or nascent residents of Iraq’s war-injured ecologies and reflects upon the responsibilities to witness them.

Al-Block – Areej Ashhab & Sireen Alawi | Diaries as Counter-Maps: Reclaiming Narratives from Wadi Al-Sarar
5.15pm-6.25pm

In this talk, Areej Ashhab and Sireen Alawi from Al-Block will present their recent work on Wadi Al-Sarar, a valley extending from Palestine’s Central Mountains westwards to the Mediterranean Sea. They trace its role as a route connecting Palestinian villages, communities, and their remains while traversing the separation wall and Israeli settlements, blurring the geopolitical boundaries that divide historical Palestine into separate jurisdictions. They will showcase an introductory video and read excerpts from their “Walker’s Logs” book series, sharing insights into their methodologies and highlighting walking as a tool for counter-mapping the contemporary Palestinian landscape.
Some parts will be presented in Palestinian Arabic, with English translation/subtitles available

Basma | Sonic Response
6.30pm-7.30pm

War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is curated by Odessa Warren, Umut Yildirim, Reem Shadid (Beirut Art Center), Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms). The programme will resume at Beirut Art Centre in September 2024.

About the participants

Al-Block is a Jerusalem-based artist-research collective led by Palestinian architects Areej Ashhab and Sireen Alawi. Founded in 2020, the collective focuses on documenting lost narratives of the Palestinian landscape through collective walking. Employing a range of documentation methods such as journaling, audio capture, 3D scanning, and path tracing, Al-Block produces counter-maps of the sites they traverse in the form of printed “Walker’s Logs”. Their publications include Diaries from Wadi Beit-Hanina (2022) and Diaries from Wadi Al-Sarar (2024).

Basma is the host of Khartoum Arrivals on NTS Radio and the co-host of radio show and record label Hear, Sense and Feel. She plays music inspired by the long road, drawing from the wedding anthems and eclectic folk of Sudan, the Sahel, the Horn and beyond.

Tareq Khalaf is a design educator, filmmaker, and cultural activist based in Ramallah, Palestine. Tareq’s work and studies have taken him across Palestine and South Africa, grounding himself in restorative land practices in settler colonial geographies. Tareq works with film to explore the sensibilities of living found in agrarian landscapes and habitations and seeks new narrative forms to express the interlinks between political and environmental crises. At the moment, he is the head of programming at Sakiya and the recipient of the Prince Claus mentorship award in 2023.

Shourideh C. Molavi is the dedicated Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, linking their investigations to the work and research of civil society, grassroots groups and human rights defenders in the country. Shourideh has over two decades of extensive academic, legal research, and fieldwork experience in Palestine, of which a decade has been the occupied Gaza Strip. She is Senior Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in NYC.

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist and practitioner whose work explores sound in relation to space, urbanism, and violence. She is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press 2021) and the forthcoming The Trembling City, which investigates cities as sites of vibrational force, including in the contexts of occupation, warfare, and genocide. Ouzounian leads the project Sonorous Cities at the University of Oxford, where she is associate professor of music. She hosts the conversation series Countersonics: Radical Sonic Imaginaries, which asks how sonic practices can operate as modes of resistance and repair in times of conflict and crisis.

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Purdue University. Her work focuses on displacement, health justice, and the environmental impacts of war. Through forensic ethnography along the supply chains of war, Rubaii documents the long-term material impacts of extractive industry and military violence on people’s lives. She is leading three projects on 1) how Iraq’s concrete industry is instrumental to militarized privatization in post-war reconstruction, 2) how displaced communities travel to and from their land during episodes of military violence, and 3) how the epidemic of congenital anomalies in Fallujah is understood as a figure of long-term, intergenerational toxification.

Ameneh Solati  is a research-based artist and architect. Her practice explores notions of power and resistance within overlooked and marginalized spaces, practices, and environments. She employs architectural tools and methods in combination with other visual media to challenge dominant historical narratives that shape collective subjectivity. Ameneh was born in 1988 in Iran to Iraqi-Iranian parents, raised in Sharjah, and currently lives in Rotterdam.

Umut Yıldırım is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research centers on war, extraction, and political and cultural mobilization with an ethnographic perspective from the Armenian-Kurdish region in Turkey. Her work is available in platforms including MERIP, Current Anthropology, and Anthropological Theory. She edited the book volume, War-Torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East by ICI Berlin Press (2023). Previously, she held research fellowships in various academic institutions in the US and Germany; worked as an independent researcher in Palermo, Sicily; and taught political anthropology at several universities in Istanbul, Turkey. A manuscript for her first monograph, Low Intensities: War, Extraction, and Resistance in a Middle Eastern Capital, is in the works.

The programme War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is supported by Art Jameel and British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform.

With support from Delfina Foundation.

Design by Rand Hamdallah.