Paper Short Abstract:

This paper is an attempt to show how Palestinian liberation is thought of and practised in artistic and heritage-based crafts as a futuristic project with elements that challenge the nation-state linear world-making project. Through studying the experiences of young craftspeople, the paper tracks and analyses counter-imaginaries shaping the contemporary craftculture in settler colonial contexts like Palestine.

Paper Abstract:

This paper investigates how slow activism, Sumud, and visual resistance function in settler colonial contexts by focusing on actors in the contemporary handcrafts scene in Palestine who locate independence and decolonization as futuristic endeavours in their world-making projects.

The research is based on interviews with seven craftspeople from Ramallah and Jerusalem who practice artistic forms of reproducing and rethinking heritage. The paper focuses on their treatment of space, materials, and time, as well as the narratives they share through their craftworks.

In their daily practices, young artisans are challenging the colonial time-space conditionality and management. They rework the heritage by preserving the generational knowledge of making and living in Palestine through centralizing values of slow heavy being, and rootedness in their land. The political activism materialized in crafts turns crafts into powerful objects capable of voicing and resisting the Zionist colonial narrative and the silencing of Palestinians.

They approach time and space in an anti-colonial way with Sumud embedded in their daily lives and practices. The fluid term informs the formation of networks of actors they cooperate with, the raw material they use, their openness to sharing knowledge and spaces, and their ethnographic methodologies for collecting stories and archiving the Palestinian circular time in which the past moment is heavily informing the present and the imagination of the future of liberation.