Mahmoud Darwish Chair

The land is narrow to us #3

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:30:11 +0000

In support of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Darwich Legacy, the Théâtre de Namur and the Intime Festival are joining forces to invite you to the evening of Saturday 27 April 2024 to share in the music and poetry that Palestinian artists and writers bring to the world. Funds raised during the evening will be donated to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

The series, entitled ‘The Land Is Narrow to Us’, is a series of poetry and music encounters in support of the Palestinian people, against the war and violence that has continued since 1948.

More than ever, the words of Palestinian poets and artists resonate to repair the pain and dream of a true humanity.

The land is narrow to us. It forces us into the last parade and we strip off our limbs to get through. And the earth presses us. Why aren’t we its wheat, to die and rise again. Where will we go after the final frontier? Where will the birds go after the final sky? We will write our names with carmine vapour, we will cut off the hand of the song so that our flesh completes it. Here we will die. Here, in the last procession. Here or here, and an olive tree will rise from our blood.

The earth is narrow to us and other poems (1966-1999)

Translated from Arabic by Elias Sanbar, Ed. Galimard, 2000.

Projection du film Vibrations de Gaza, de Rehab Nazzal.

Directed by Rehab Nazzal • Written by Rehab Nazzal
Palestine, Canada • 2023 • 16 minutes • Color

Vibrations from Gaza offers a glimpse into the experiences of Deaf children in the colonized and confined coastal territory of Gaza, Palestine. Born and raised under Israeli siege and frequent onslaughts, Amani, Musa, Israa, and other Deaf Children, provide vivid accounts of their encounter of bombardment and the constant presence of drones in their sky.

Texts and poetry by Mahmoud Darwich, Farah Barqawi, Mazen Maarouf & Musab Abu Toha.

Readings by Nisma Alaklouk , Jihan Imago, Malika Temoura & Yasmine Yahiètene.

Music by Hussein Rassim (Lute) and Joachim Ségalard (Piano).

Drawing by Moving

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:01:14 +0000

The workshop unites art students and artists from Palestine and Belgium for a collaborative project lasting between six and ten days. Under the guidance of artists Rafat Asad and Emilio Lopez- Manchero, participants create visual artworks using various mediums. The theme of the workshop, chosen to reflect the local community and environment, drives the creative process. At the end of the workshop, the resulting artworks and the creative journey are showcased in an exhibition open to the local community.

“Drawing by Moving,” emphasized the continuous act of drawing while in motion, inspired by the participants’ exploration of the city. Over six days, the workshop facilitated the creation of visual art through active movement and observation, culminating in an exhibition.

Partners:

Al-Studio TBC, Ramallah, Palestine; École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, Belgium; Beaux-Arts de Liège, Liège, Belgium; Mahmoud Darwish Legacy, Brussels.

2 editions of this collaboration in March 2023 and in March 2024.

The land is narrow to us #2

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:30:19 +0000

‘Home Movies Gaza’

Basma Alsharif, 2013, 24′, VO AR ST: EN

Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.

‘Foragers’

Jumana Manna, 2022, 64′, VO AR,HE ST: FR/EN

Foragers moves between documentary and fiction to depict the dramas between the Israeli Nature Protection Authority and Palestinian foragers. With a wry sense of humor, the film captures the inherited love, resilience and knowledge of these traditions, over an eminently political backdrop.

As part of ‘United Screens for Palestine’, Cinéma Galeries and Mahmoud Darwish Legacy offers you a program of 2 Films 4 Palestine.

Ticket Benefit goes to MECA.

The land is narrow to us #1

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:06:43 +0000

On the initiative of : Mahmoud Darwish Legacy – Culture des 2 rives and the Maison poème

« The land is narrow to us. »
Mahmoud Darwish

Music and poetry will weave our solidarity with and for Palestine in the frame of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on the 29 November. Readings and testimonies by and with: Farah Barqawi, Nisma Alaklouk, Taha Adnan, Yasmine Yahiatene, Atta Nasser…

Music by Juliette Lacroix and Hussein Rassim.

Readings of Cie Ashtar’s Monologues de Gaza by Siham Aaddi, Adam Lamarti-Boukhaouch, Imane Oudghiri and Sabir Serroukh.

‘Literature Talk: Writers from Black Arabia’

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 11:31:18 +0000

Writers from a region at the intersection of two cultures. Sudan and South Sudan are home to a number of great writers who are rarely heard here. Bozar brings them together for a special evening. The authors will read from their work and talk to Xavier Luffin, translator and professor of Arabic literature at ULB. Themes they will deal with are the country of origin, exile, Arabic, but above all the universal language of literature.

According to The Guardian, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Sudan, 1963) is one of the most important writers from Sudan. The author had to flee for his life and now lives in exile in France. Although his work is banned in his homeland, it is enormously popular and widely read. In 2015, an English translation of The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth and Birth was published.

Stella Gaitano (Khartoum, 1979) is a writer from South Sudan. She is known for her short stories, which often deal with the harsh living conditions of people from South Sudan. Since the country’s independence in 2011, she also writes about life in her new nation.

Hammour Ziada, a Sudanese writer who lived in exile before the fall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in 2014 for his novel The Longing of the Dervish, which was also shortlisted for the Grand Prix du roman arabe. He is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, one of which, The Drowning, has been adapted for the screen.

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:30:47 +0000

The conference not only celebrates Darwish’s oeuvre and its interaction with its modern literary, intellectual, and political reality, but also explores its global literary impact. It examines the tensions that shaped Darwish’s language and kept fluctuating – in the ear of its listener, as it once fluctuated in the throat of its poet – between meaning and nothingness, tragedy and lyricism, the individual and the collective, and also, between Palestinian particularity and universal humanity. The conference also addresses Darwish’s creativity as a symbolic, patriotic, Arab and national revolutionary figure, and as a basic reference for modernist poetry in general and for committed poetry in particular. Hence, the conference examines how Mahmoud Darwish’s legacy has been employed, represented, and interpreted, in the past and in the present. Attention is turned as well to criticism of the systematic employment of Darwish, his works, and his patriarchal framing, which has led to the marginalization and silencing of other poetical and literary genres, as a drift away from commitment to political action.

Organised by Qattan Foundation in partnership with Darwish Chair Among others.

Dalida as a Cinema Icon and the Face of Egyptian Nostalgia

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:08:44 +0000

Lecture Performance & screening by Amr Kamal (Cairo/New York)

The Egyptian-born Franco-Italian singer Dalida is renowned worldwide for her top-selling musical records. But in Egypt, she was a national symbol. Before emerging on the French stage, Dalida made her debut in Egyptian cinema. In 1986, Dalida returned to her birthplace to reflect on her past and star in the film The Sixth Day by Youssef Chahine. In this talk, we will follow Dalida’s journey from Egypt to France and back again to make her last film. Dalida is a figure of Egyptian nationhood and the diaspora. Her image reflects Egypt’s cosmopolitan and colonial past.

The presentation of this evening is conceived by Amr Kamal. He is Associate Professor of French and Arabic at City College New York and at the Graduate Center. Kamal’s research focuses on the literature and culture of the Arab world and the Mediterranean from the nineteenth century to the present. His recent research is titled, Iconography of Displacement: Deconstructing Colonial Imagery in Contemporary Mediterranean Cinema.

Amr Kamal is one the four grantee of the open call for arts organized by the Mahmoud Darwish Chair, Bozar, A. M. Qattan Foundation, Camargo Foundation and Mucem, with the support of Boghossian Foundation for Brussels residency.

Followed by Q&A , moderated by Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi

‘Literature Talk: ”You Have Not Yet Been Defeated“: Writers from Egypt’

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 11:23:28 +0000

A political and poetic evening about the role of authors under repressive regimes. Egyptian poets and philosophers reflect on the living history of ancient Egypt. Writing serves as an act of resistance and a way to remember oppression, but it also forms the foundation for new ideas for a different future. The evening’s title is based on the book of the same name by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an independent philosopher and political prisoner, who was published in English last year. The line is a lovely metaphor for the fight for justice, as well as a message of hope.

With Lina Attalah, Ahdaf Soueif & Iman Mersal

Lina Attalah is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian online newspaper. Awarded in 2020 by The Times and the Knight Foundation, she is particularly active in the fight for press freedom.

Ahdaf Soueif is the author the bestselling novel The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and numerous outher novels, of which 8 are translated in English. As a journalist she has been a key political commentator on Egypt and Palestine, and throughout the 2011 uprisings in Cairo she reported front the ground for The Guardian and appeared on television and radio. She is also the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, PalFest.

Iman Mersal is generally considered as one of the most important Egyptian poets living today. She is the author of several books of poems and a collection of essays, How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts. This fall the New York publisher Farrar Strauss & Giroux will publish The Treshold, a selection of her poems in English translation. She is Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Raeda Saadeh in residency at Camargo Foundation & Mucem

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 11:08:32 +0000

The project will consist of a series of performative pieces focusing on the formative feminist historio-mythological figures and the way the narratives they have set in motion, are relevant to the Palestinian as well as global feminist cultural identity today. The performances will be taking place in historical locations significant to the narrative of European cultures, while highlighting the way the colonizing cultural orientalism has shaped our own self-perception. The performances will be staged, then documented and presented as large-format photographs, video and holographic media for specific exhibiting spaces.

The rationale for the project is to show the possibilities for an extended mythological basis for the Palestinian and regional women’s historical narrative, beyond the constraints of present conflicts, patriarchy, orientalist and folkloric views, class and domestic struggles. The emancipatory potential of the heroines chosen will be wide and universal, showing the way for a potentially independent, yet a globally and culturally relevant and authentic feminine/feminist-Palestinian narrative. These “performed heroines” will still share some common traits, opposing the constraints we have willingly accepted as women in Palestinian society with the accompanying weight of the expectations that are upon us daily – the bearers, the feeders and mourners of men. We share their economies, beliefs, mythologies, histories and struggles. But it is the contribution to the history and culture which is something we are also willing to fight for, as it is the part of our “muqāwamah” – our duty to the daily struggle for freedom, as well as for our independence and emancipation. The narrative of mythologies and heroism is forced upon us, so my position is that as an artist, i have the right the will and means to change it, shape it, and through a work of mythological fantasy create a fairer, more realistic, and inclusive history of women in struggle.

The underlying question common to all neo-historic art is not the alternative lines, revisionism or the narrative control, but the induction of empathy through the common bond between the artist and the participative society. The obligation to emancipation and freedom is not part of the oppressive limitations, if it is willingly accepted and I am happy to take that position. It opens so many possibilities, as the choices taken by artists today become the politics and education of tomorrow.

Raeda Sa’adeh

Sa’adeh was born in Umm al-Fahm in 1977. She received her BFA and MFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She was the winner of the first Young Artist of the Year Award organized by the A M Qattan Foundation in 2000. Her work is mainly in photography, performance and video, where Sa’adeh uses her body as the core subject of most of her work. She describes her themes as such: “In my artwork, the woman I represent lives in a world that attacks her values, her love, her spirit on a daily basis, and for this reason, she is in a state of occupation – and her world could be here in Palestine or elsewhere; and despite all, she looks towards her future with a smile.” Living in Jerusalem, Sa’adeh has extensively exhibited her work internationally, including at the European Parliament, the GEMAK Museum, The Hague, the House of World Culture, the Sydney Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, as well as at exhibitions in Austria, France, Denmark, and others. In 2015, Al-Monitor considered her among 50 people shaping the culture of the Middle East.

Camargo Foundation

Mucem

Beirut Diaries – Mai Masri

Nedjma HBenchelabi — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 20:55:31 +0000

Through the experiences of 25-year-old Nadine Zaidan who was one of the thousands of activists who gathered in Beirut’s Martyr’s square in the chaotic days immediately following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February of 2005, Beirut Diaries explores the critical transformations and crucial questions facing Lebanon at that moment of history.

Mai Masri is a Beirut-based Palestinian filmmaker who studied film at San Francisco State University, USA. She reached international acclaim with her debut feature film, 3000 Nights (2015). She is also known for her humanistic and poetic documentaries such as Children of Fire (1990) and Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001). Her films were screened worldwide and won over 90 international awards.

In the framework of L’heure d’hiver Beirut