Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s 2024 double-film projection, Until we became fire and fire us, dominates the ongoing exhibition, Unsettled Earth, currently showing at the Spore Initiative. Interspersing shots of an empty, desolate landscape with chanting, buffeted figures, its heavy, percussive soundscape reverberates around the windowless, single-room gallery space, conjuring up a horrible, visceral sense of hopelessness and loss. “The work focuses on the Tantura massacre in Palestine and the destruction of the village in 1948,” says Lama El Khatib, the co-curator. “Even in the absence of its people,” she continues, “the land continues to testify to the violence.”
The exhibition’s dense, tonally varied selection of works places the violence in Palestine within longer histories of colonisation and ecological destruction. In one of the first artworks you come across, Sliman Mansour’s ‘The Village Awakens’ (1987), also one of the exhibition’s rare paintings, workers picking fruit and tending the soil are captured in soft-hued, idealistic intensity. “We chose that painting,” co-curator Joud Al-Tamimi says, because “it connects the present moment to a longer history of Palestinian anti-colonial struggle – particularly the ongoing importance of land and the figure of the peasant as revolutionary.”
In the centre of the gallery, loaded with books and journals for anyone to read, a small library installation, the Mashaa’t, connects Palestinian agrarian practices with urgent forms of contemporary solidarity. ‘The Carob Tree Was the Border’ by Linda Quiquivix recounts the experience of Palestinian herders who marked land borders with trees and natural landmarks, which proved hopelessly ineffectual in the face of legal systems. “There’s an Israeli law that allows for land confiscation if it’s left uncultivated,” says Al-Tamimi. “So cooperative farming becomes a strategy for defending land against settler expansion. Starvation has long been weaponised as a tool of displacement. Growing food means being able to remain on the land.”
The exhibition is also an attempt to cultivate solidarity work that goes beyond a politics of appeal.
“The exhibition is also an attempt to cultivate solidarity work that goes beyond a politics of appeal,” Al-Tamimi continues. “There’s been a deliberate annihilation of Palestinian political subjectivity that directly connects to the violence taking place in Palestine.” With international journalists still barred from entering Gaza, exhibitions like Unsettled Earth become vital spaces for sharing Palestinian experiences that remain blocked from direct coverage. In one series of black-and-white photographs by Abu Ammouna, Palestinians are seen returning to Northern Gaza after the January ceasefire earlier this year. Even before Israel’s more recent campaigns in Gaza, you can see a land destroyed, with barely a single building still standing. “Acts of collective defiance embody an unyielding spirit: a relationship to the land that persists against a planetary war machine,” adds Al-Tamimi.
Alongside the artworks, extensive programming and events bring Palestinian agricultural cooperatives into dialogue with farming initiatives from the Global South, connecting the ongoing struggle of Palestinians with those in South Africa, Sudan and the Philippines. “The idea is to create space for Palestinians from different contexts to share resources and experiences, and to develop proposals for transnational collaboration,” Al-Tamimi explains. “We’ve had university students and grassroots collectives reaching out to organise study sessions around the works and reading material. Cultural work during a moment like this can only be meaningful if it opens up spaces where people gather and think collectively about how to intervene in this historical conjuncture.”
Through Feb 28, Spore Initiative, Neukölln
