Recipients of the “Ways of Traveling” Residency, 2020

A. M. Qattan Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2020 residency, “Ways of Traveling”. The three selected participants are: Andrea Zimmerman (Germany); Pablo Rasgado (Mexico); Aron Rossman-Kiss (Switzerland).

Over a lifetime John Berger produced works that always broke through the boundaries that separate high and low culture, fact or fiction, art and politics while constantly travelling across multiple genres. Though often described as an art critic or novelist he preferred to be called a storyteller. As a committed artist, he saw his role in the world as a transmitter of the stories that urgently needed telling. He said, “If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen. For me, a storyteller is like a smuggler who gets contraband across a frontier.” Thus, he approached writing, largely as a process of making a story travel: of gently guiding it from its source and delivering it out into the world.

We have chosen to call the residency in tribute to John Berger “Ways of Travelling,” in order to capture the very unique way in which particular ways of traveling were a central to his philosophy and creative process especially in his visits to Palestine. John Berger famously disliked conventional forms of travel; he hated airplanes and cars. When he arrived in a different country, he avoided major tourist sites and refused to cover a series of itineraries. The only physical means of travel that he liked was by motorbike, because as he explained it involved a particular way of seeing that was similar to drawing—bringing together the experiences of displacement and vision. But his preference for the motorbike was also about how he wanted to travel in ways that involved a particular way of being in the world. 

Following an open call for the “Ways of Traveling” Residency, the Foundation received 95 applications from a number of countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Costa Rica, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, and USA. 

Shortlisting and final selection were juried by Rema Hammami, Tania Tamari Nasser, Yazid Anani, Johnny Kort and Yves Berger.

Recipients’ Projects

Andrea Zimmerman (Germany)
Project Proposal: Untitled, is a film project that tells the story of Palestinian women from all generations, in an attempt to portray their lives through asking three questions: Who are you? What does this place mean to you? What do you most wish for? This approach is inspired by the work of the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski in his short film “Talking Heads”. 

Pablo Rasgado (Mexico)
Project Proposal: Reading Walls, is the title of the project that aims at the construction of a new series of drawings, sculptures, and architectural interventions that consider what it means to inhabit a place, and the impact of local stories that surround a location have on the  understanding of the lived environment. The project attempts to establish relationships between the architectural materials, their shapes, and those specific historical moments that delineated them, thus allowing a new understanding of the studied spaces and the messages they carry. 

Aron Rossman-Kiss (Switzerland)
Project Proposal: Postcards Inverted, is a project that investigates the visual depictions of Palestine by Western travelers in their diaries and journals from the 19th century. The project manifests itself through walks and technical explorations in Palestinian landscape, aimed at identifying visual material and stories about people and their everyday life. The project takes postcards and their representations as a starting point to explore if their narratives can be subverted through a series of artistic collaboration with locals.