Exploring themes of land, control, and resistance, this artist film programme focuses on the impact of perpetual colonial realities and counterinsurgency wars on ecologies in Palestine, Lebanon and beyond. Featuring films by Dala Nasser, Pelin Tan, Kamal Aljafari, Ruba Salameh, Sherko Abbas, Shada Safadi and Manal Mahamid.
From ISSA October School Program Programmed by Odessa Warren, Reem Shadid, Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković
Film Programme: War Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds
Dala Nasser | Red in Tooth
During the Occupation of the South of Lebanon starting in 1983, extraction pipes were established pumping out water from the Wazzani and across the frontier. The river and its surrounding ecology suffered a fate similar to the wildlife and humans of the region, slow violence resulting in complete toxicity. In Red in Tooth (2021, 21’29”) we follow the drive towards the Wazzani River along the UN enforced Blue Line, positioning the environment in an elsewhere realm, in between opposing spaces, occupied by military surveillance and concrete animosity. Becoming an absent witness, or a witness of absence, around which culminates secrecy.
Kamal Aljafari | UNDER
In Kamal Aljafari’s UNDR (2023, 14’ 44”), the camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
Ruba Salameh | Yamm
Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”) is a video work that captures Ruba Salameh’s persistent return to a bus stop in Salah Al-din Street in East Jerusalem – where a huge billboard of the sea of Gaza overlooks the awaiting passengers and passersby. The video captures the heart of everyday life in Jerusalem punctuated by the still Gazan sea, animated by film fragments from the beach at Tantoura, a Palestinian village demolished in 1948. Haunted by the notion of its very disappearance, the fading paper, its wear and tear, the marks of time and human intervention symbolically speak of erasure, separation, memory, impossibility and resistance.
Shada Safadi | Wind Farm
Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”) is part of Shada Safadi’s ongoing research called Birds that no longer want to migrate. The project sheds light on practices of control imposed in the occupied Golan Heights, with new “isolation walls” being built under the guise of green energy. In 2019, an influential Israeli company proposed a plan to build a wind farm of 110 turbines along the ceasefire line, of which 32 occupy around 3,674 dunams of Syrian farmers’ land in the villages of Majdal Shams, Masada, and Buqata. To date, 41 wind turbines have been installed. Located on the bird migration line across the Golan heights, these turbines pose serious threats to ecologies of humans and non-human species including the fertile land, bats, bees and birds, such as the Golan eagle.
Sherko Abbas | Encounters on the Tigris
Encounters on the Tigris (2023, 41’41”) traces Sherko Abbas’ journey along Iraq’s Tigris River in June and October 2022 in search of its mythical past and present ecological reality. The film presents encounters with different communities who live along the river: with farmers, fishermen, scholars and musicians who share oral histories of the river in the form of songs, anecdotes and stories that reveal how the dramatic effects of climate change across the region are interwoven with the country’s ancient culture and unique historical experience.
Pelin Tan | walking – Tigris Phenomenologies I – Çinerya
An assemblage of moving images around and through landscapes of Tigris river with elements of Êzdî cosmologies. A phenomenology of experimenting with female landscaping and its future of the Batman region in Turkiye. The video sceneries were recorded with a cell phone camera between 2021 – 2023 in Çinerîya an Êzdî village in Batman, where most of the inhabitants left in the 1980s for Germany as migrant workers. These local indigenous community occasionally lives in both countries. In the video, the eco-feminist kinship reveal within hymns, roaming around, walking patiently and lost narratives that appear through non-extractivist practices of the protagonist who is the leader of the Êzdî tribe.
Manal Mahamid – From Akka to Gaza
From Akka to Gaza by Manal Mahamid (2024, 4’) metaphorically portrays Palestinian resistance, depicting individuals as mythical creatures overcoming all terrestrial, maritime, and aerial barriers, and other borders imposed by Zionist colonialism. The film draws powerful parallels between the history of displacement and resilience, illustrating transformative journeys that challenge socio-political and physical obstacles.
The programme is part of the multidisciplinary artistic project War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, taking place between London and Beirut in 2024 and 2025.
War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is curated by Odessa Warren, Reem Shadid, Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković.
The programme War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is supported by Art Jameel and British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform.
