Research programme

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Palestinian Museum announced the launch of 17 research grants on Palestinian culture.

This initiative comes in fulfilment of one of the key components of the museum’s 2019–2023 strategic plan and is run by its newly-established Knowledge and Research Department.

Objectives include stimulating intellectual civic engagement, producing and disseminating knowledge about Palestine, and addressing knowledge gaps in Palestinian history and culture.

Accordingly, the Palestinian Museum issued an open call to academic and field researchers to submit papers on 4 main themes: History of Art in Palestine and its Discourses from the Nineteenth Century until the 1990s; The Palestinian Coast: From the End of the Ottoman Period to the Present; The History of Printing in Jerusalem; and New Perspectives on Contemporary Palestinian Culture.

Stories from Palestine

The song that inspired the Arab world

Ibrahim Tuqan and the making of "Mawtini"

Death of the storyteller, birth of the theater (need review)

The dramatic arts in Palestine, 1900 to 1948

From Acre prison, with love (need review

The life and times of Nuh Ibrahim, poet of the 1936 Revolt

How a people funded their revolution

Popular resistance during the 1936 Great Arab Revolt

Revolutionizing hunger

Revolutionary education for a revolutionary phase

The experience of popular education during the Intifada

How to set the earth on fire

Popular protection during the First Intifada

A purse, a song, and a gun

The struggle of Palestinian women in the 1920s and 1930s

Drawing outside the frames

Resistance art during the First Intifada

When pickles become a weapon

Economy of the First Intifada

A legend in the mountains

Revolutionaries in popular tales and the 1936 Palestinian Revolution

Guerrilla warfare and the mass strike in the 1936 Revolt

Armed Struggle in the 1936 Great Arab Revolt

The road to the 1936 revolt

Armed struggle in the 1936 revolt

No laughing matter

Caricaturing colonialism in British Mandate Palestine

Land Rights in Palestine and South Africa (1880 – 2022): between Ideological Imaginaries and Creative Reclamation

An ongoing creative research project between the Palestinian Museum’s Research Program and the University of Cape Town, considers the historical similarities and peculiarities of the systematic regime of human rights violations and land confiscation of the segregationist policies in South Africa and the Israeli Occupation of the Palestine Territory.

Through workshops, mobility exchange and creative transfer, the objective is to bridge between a museographic approach on preserving, documenting and exhibiting the history of spoliation of the landscape, and a design-based approach on how to conceptualise and exhibit the transformation of the topography of occupation. The project aims to support the production of creative research and interventions that promote intercultural dialogue in public space, facilitate opportunities for exchange in museum and institutional environments, with the eventual publication and production of research findings and interventions made accessible to a diverse audience interested in the conflictual relationship between ideological authority, political power and land as a human right.

As a first public step of the research project, the workshop “Land Rights between Ideological Imaginaries and Creative Reclamation” invites contributions from artists, students, researchers, cultural practitioners and institutions in Palestine, South Africa and their diasporas, to assist in framing focuses on reclaiming the collective landscape of Palestine by overcoming colonial boundaries that fragment the map through artistic practices and research. We are interested in surfacing the complex layering of memory, belonging and identity embedded in land and how these are entangled with ideological inscriptions of territory. More specifically, and in light of the continuing land violations, how Palestinians overcome political and geographical fragmentation on metaphorical and tangible levels vis-à-vis the ideologies which hold the land hostage to zero-sum prophecies and violently transform maps into multi-layered projections of historical violence.

Voices

Tshepo Madlingozi

Tshepo Madlingozi is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at WITS University. He has master’s degrees in both law and sociology and received his PhD degree from Birkbeck, University of London. He sits on the boards of the following civil society organisations: amandla.mobi; Centre for Human Rights, University of Free State; the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution; and the Rural Democracy Trust. For thirteen years he worked with and for Khulumani Support Group, a 120,000-strong social movement of victims and survivors of Apartheid. (page 9)

Sumayya Vally

Vally’s design, research, and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and contested territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions - both rooted and diasporic. Her process is often forensic and draws on the oral, aural, sound, ritual, supernatural, and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. In 2019, Counterspace was invited to design the 20th Serpentine Pavilion in London, making Vally the youngest architect ever to win this internationally renowned commission. With the Serpentine, she has initiated and developed a new fellowship program, Support Structures for Support Structures, which assists artists and collectives working at the intersection of art with social justice, the archive, and ecology. As Artistic Director, Vally is currently working on curating the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023. She is currently collaborating on the design of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center in Monrovia, Liberia, and is working on a garden and gathering place commemorating the 5th Pan-African Congress. In 2022, Vally was selected by the WEF to be one of its Young Global Leaders, and, as a TIME100 Next list honoree, has been identified as someone who will shape the future of architectural practice and canon. (page 83)

Hala Barakat

Hala Barakat, originally from Anabta, Palestine and raised in Amman, Jordan, graduated from the University of South Florida where she received her M.Arch (2016) and MUCD (2019) degrees. She is an assistant professor of architecture and covers architectural design in her courses. She believes in architecture’s ability to tell stories of civilisations, including narratives about displacement. She resists the use of architecture to serve any political agenda and feels strongly about the creation of space as an act of advocacy. (page 59)

Mette Loulou von Kohl

Mette Loulou von Kohl is a performer, facilitator, organiser, and wanderer. She is committed to breaking cycles of harm through cultivating collective spaces for creative expression and self-exploration. Mette Loulou employs her art as a tool in the struggle to end the colonisation of Palestine. She exists in two places at once. (page 51)

Tanzeem Razak

Tanzeem Razak is the director and co-founder of Lemon Pebble Architects and Urban Designers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tanzeem graduated from the University of Witwatersrand and Katholieke Universiteit in Urban Design and remains a passionate advocate for spatial transformation in South African cities through her research and built work. They continue to teach and lecture in this regard. (page 25)

Tareq Khalaf

Tareq Khalaf is an artist, design educator, and cultural activist. His work centres ‘southern’ connectivity as a key methodology for a joint decolonial project and imagination. His current work focuses on lived legacies of settler ecologies in Palestine and South Africa. With an understanding of colonial disruptions to native people’s relation to land and soil, Tareq is interested in the rise of land-based pedagogies, food sovereignty movements, and ecological consciousness as modes of decolonial practice in settler-colonial and postcolonial worlds. Through multiform artistic practice including poetry, film, and sculpture, Tareq’s work aspires to bridge ecological struggles and amplify the voices of those on the frontlines. (page 67)

Rasha Saffarini

Rasha Saffarini is an architect with an interest in critical practice as a creative approach in architecture design, research, and writing centered on the inevitable socio-political and religious qualities of the urban fabric in the current -yet not- Middle East and its ecologies and dwellers. (page 17)

Nisreen Zahda

Nisreen Zahda is an urban planner and architect currently working at Machizukuri Company Sheep Network, Tokyo. She holds a PhD in urban planning and a Master’s degree in Architecture from Chiba University, Japan as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University, Palestine. (page 33)

Zara Julius

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and vinyl selector. Her work is concerned with the relationship between performativity, frequency, and fugitivity in the settler (post)colony. Working with sound, video, performance, and installation, Zara’s practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined, and embodied) through extensive research projects. She holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town and a MAFA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand. (page 41)

Samia Kayyali

Samia Kayyali is a Palestinian-Jordanian architect and landscape architect. She has a bachelor’s degree in history of art and architecture and a dual master’s degree in architecture and landscape architecture. She has previously worked as a researcher for the Center for the Study of the Built Environment and as a designer for Lara Zureikat Landscape Architects in Jordan. (page 75)

Book

Book description (research)

Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa

First published in 2022 by the University of Cape Town, South Africa and The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa was made possible through Sharjah Art Foundation's FOCAL POINT Publishing Grant 2021 presented to Tomà Berlanda and Meghan Ho-Tong. Organised as an annual open call, the Grant supports experimental and interdisciplinary publishing projects which stand out for their intellectual, graphic and material qualities.

The book presents research work developed within a partnership between the editors, based at the School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Occupied Palestinian Territory. The project is funded by a UCT grant for collaborations with institutions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Sound Archive

Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa

Sound Description block

Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa was launched in Sharjah, Cape Town and Johannesburg, as well as in Bir Zeit, Palestine between 2022 - 2023. The launch events were recorded and edited into a curated sound archive delving into the responses to the authored texts and readings. Some sound clips were recorded on walks that took place during two field trips to Palestine by the project team from the University of Cape Town. The sound archive invites the listener on a metaphoric walk through the book’s ambient content and context.

Partners

Education institute: Birzeit University, Arab Culture Association, Mada al-Carmel — Arab Center for Applied Social Research, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town.

Academics and researchers: Abaher Alsaqqa, Abbad Yahya, Abdul Ra’oof Arnaout, Abdulla Ghassan, Abdel-Rahman Shabane, Adele Jarrar, Adey Mohsen, Ahmad Amara, Ahmad Aqraa, Ahmad Assad, Ahmad Atrash, Ahmad Fteiha, Ahmad Sadi, Alaa’ Alazzeh, Ali Habibullah, Ali Muwasi, Amer Helehel, Anas Ibrahim, Anwar AlQadah, Areen Howari, Arij Sabbagh - Khouri, Arpan Roy, Ayham Ayyash, Bilal Shalash Bishara Doumani, Camilo Boano, Clarissa Fonseca, Dalia Taha, Dana Abbas Daood Al-Ghoul, Dean Sharp, Dennis Sobeh, Emile Badarine, Faiha’ Abdulhadi, Fairuz Sharkawi, Fares Sabaaneh, Faten Mitwasi, Gary Fields, Hala Naji, Helga Tawil-Souri, Himmat Zubi, Honaida Ghanim, Hussein Rimawi, Hussini Miletat, Inas Yassin, Islah Jad, Jamal Nabulsi, Jaweda Mansour, Jihad Shuaibi, Jonny Mansour, Khaila’ Jumaa, Khalid Bashir, Khalid Forarni, Kirsten Scheid, Laura Tibi, Leila Abdulrazeq, Lena Meari, Maha Al-Samman, Mai Buzoor, Maisoon Sharkawi, Majd Abu Amer, Mansour Nasasra, Mazen Qumsiyeh, Mohannad Mustafa, Munir Fakher Eldin, Nadi Abu Saada, Nadim Karkabi, Nahed Habibullah, Nasab Hussien, Nasab Hussuen, Nasser Golzari, Obada Darwish, Rabie Eid, Raeda Saadeh, Ramez Eid, Rana Barakat, Rana Barakat, Rania Jawad, Rasha Hilweh, Razan Zubi, Salem Qudweh, Salim Abu Thaher, Salim Al Beik, Salim Zogbi, Salman Abu Sitta, Shadi Warasneh, Sheikha Hussein Helewah, Sheiren Seikaly, Sophie Richter- Devrroe, Suad Amiry, Tania Naser, Yara Sharif, Yasser Qous.

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