Erasure of Past and Present. The Palestinian Case

Berlin is home to the biggest diaspora community of Palestinians outside the Middle East. Yet, their stories, struggles and demands are suppressed in public discourse. This presentation will walk through methods of erasure to push Palestinians outside of the public sphere, and infringing on fundamental rights to freedom of expression, protest, school law, citizenship, and deportation. Erasure is also prevalent in archival knowledge that is stored “about Palestinians” in the German Federal Archive. Here, law and the imaginary will be probed in addressing the Palestinian as unequal and unfree, one that needs to be tamed and disciplined. (Nahed Samour & Pary El-Qalqili)

Gaza on the Wall is a selection of drawings made by Berlin-based Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj in response to the ongoing genocidal campaign on Gaza. As early as the 9th of October 2023, Kerbaj started drawing in reaction to the horrors that all of us were – and still are – seeing daily on our screens, and posting the images on his Instagram page. On the one hand, he draws to bear witness and raise awareness; on the other, as a coping mechanism, in an attempt to remain sane amidst the unfolding madness. The straight-to-the-point, high-contrast black and white images are often accompanied by striking slogans. The works have been widely shared on social media, allowing tens of thousands of people worldwide to express their own solidarity and to identify with the artist’s feelings and positions. (Racha Gharbieh)
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Pary El-Qalqili is a writer and director based in Berlin. She works at the intersection of film, curation and teaching. In her cinematic work, she explores non-linear narratives that challenge hegemonic storytelling. Looking at life that has been disrupted, uprooted, colonised and marginalised, she understands fragmentary narrative forms that embrace ruptures, gaps, and irritation as key to decolonising not only our gaze, but also our minds. At the core of her cinematic research is the urge for liberation from rigid forms of story-telling and production. Her first feature film, The Turtle’s Rage premiered at Visions du Réel Festival and received several awards from international film festivals. It was released in German cinema in 2012. Her short film NEIGHBOURS (2019), co-directed with Christiane Schmidt, was nominated for the Award of the German Film Critics. In her teaching she focuses on feminist and decolonial film history, theory and practice.

Nahed Samour is Research Associate at Radboud University, Nijmegen in the Race-Religion Constellations research project. She studied Law and Islamic Studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, SOAS, Humboldt University Berlin, Harvard University, and Damascus University. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy. From 2019-2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society, Humboldt University Berlin.

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics author, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. In 2015, he was the recipient of a DAAD one-year artist in residency in Berlin and has been living and working in the German capital since. He is the author of 15 books translated into more than ten languages and his work has been shown in galleries, museums and art fairs around the world.
As a trumpet player, he pushes the boundaries of the instrument beyond recognition. His visual art is heavily influenced by his musical improvisation practice.

Khomasi (five in Arabic) is a collective of five people committed to sparking change and fostering open dialogue in a time where censorship in Germany, and especially in Berlin, is becoming the norm. 

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