Unlearning Maps: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark

You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising at de Appel (9 July) and Lola Lieven (10–12 July), in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. The programme brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Rojava, Artsakh, Iran and Turkey.

When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice is co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also captures the future, closes the horizon, and makes us believe there is no outside to the binaries imposed on us, no other possible future. Imperial powers, authoritarian governments, nationalist projects, media systems, and even oppositional narratives can all become entangled in reproducing domination and narrowing political imagination. The histories of marginalised peoples are often folded into these frameworks, but this does not delegitimise their struggles. It makes it more urgent to hold them carefully, and to build forms of relation, language, and solidarity that cannot be returned to imperial powers and narratives.

This gathering centers situated knowledge. Solidarity cannot flatten different struggles into one language. It must begin from where people stand, their histories, lands, wounds, survival, and limits of vision. Every community sees from somewhere. No position holds the full picture. Listening, then, is not distant sympathy, but a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may become visible.

14:00–16:30 Collective Reading with Reading Counterpower
16:30–17:00 Book Launch Stories of Resilience: Salah and People of Gaza Between Life and Death by Salah Akram
17:00–17:45 Dialogue Performance: The Winter We Couldn't Cross by Ehsan Fardjadniya
18:00–19:30 Film Screening and discussion: THE MELANCHOLY OF THIS USELESS AFTERNOON Chapter I and II (2022) by Dina Mimi
 

Programmes on July 10,11 and 12 are at Lola Lieven