Libraries That Span Our Exile
Presentation and workshop on the projects 'Maktabat Sabil' and 'ghiras'
18.00-20.00
Save the Date
For adults
in English
The Palestinian condition is one of exile and erasure; this applies as much to Palestinians themselves as to their knowledge and ecologies. Maktabat Sabil began as a crowdsourced library that sought to overcome this condition by creating a virtual space where people could collectively gather and share knowledge, documents, and resources.
Register here
This workshop presents Sabil as an attempt to build an institution from the ground up, away from the metrics of contemporary academia and its capitalist logic, through voluntary and self-funded labor, and in the face of the colonial erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. It brings Sabil into conversation with ghiras, an initiative that cultivates and preserves Palestinian heirloom seeds in Berlin and Brandenburg, and thinks through ethical ways of storing and digitally documenting these seeds in exile. To this end, it turns to projects such as Barari, an open-science platform for responsibly sharing community-based knowledge about wild food plants in Palestine, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, which recovers old seed varieties along with the stories attached to them.
Facilitated by Hilal Alkan, the workshop opens with presentations by Faiq Mari, Esraa Shaalan, and Nabil Hamdan, the initiator of ghiras. In the interactive segment that follows, participants engage with the platforms through their own documents and experiences of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. The workshop is open to everyone committed to protecting Palestinian knowledge and ecologies from erasure.
If you like, you can bring a document (such as a pamphlet, an archival record, or a personal account) or seeds from Palestine. This is entirely optional, however. We will add anything you bring to Sabil and the seed library and use this shared work to reflect together on the pedagogical, ecological, and practical dimensions of these initiatives at a time of genocide.
This workshop is organized in collaboration with the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and ghiras.
To take part, please register through the online form.
Description provided by event organizers.