Roots and Resistance: Cultivating Commons through Art and Ecology in Palestine
Artist Nida Sinnokrot and architect Sahar Qawasmi share their grafting of local agrarian traditions and art as a means of survival. They describe the conditions responsible for originating their completely off-the-grid residency, Sakiya—Art/Science/Agriculture.
By Nida Sinnokrot with contributions from Sahar Qawasmi, based on the collaborative project Sakiya.
Colonial policies of extraction and land annexation in Palestine forced people out of their lands, resulting in new labor trends. Since the 1970s, many Palestinians have replaced careers in agriculture with manual labor, mostly construction, and service in Israeli factories, projects, and settlements. A major wave of rural migration began in 2002 with the erection of Israel’s apartheid wall which separated villages from their arable lands in the West Bank. This marked an increase in the exodus to West Bank cities, fueled by foreign aid, cultural funding, and Palestinian Authority jobs. There are 150,000 documented workers from the West Bank and Gaza in Israeli projects conditioned to precarity. Since October 2023, Israel stopped issuing worker permits to Palestinians. Workers from Gaza have been sent to the West Bank or back to Gaza, or have been jailed.
With our shared interest in Indigenous farming practices and cultural histories, we established Sakiya—Art/Science/Agriculture. The project came together nomadically in 2012, as we activated derelict sites and community center gardens with roundtable discussions with artists, farmers, academics, and students. We were noticing a shift in narratives of resistance: The struggles to work and to protect ancestral lands were being replaced by struggles to secure mortgages, leaving most farming villages shadows of what they once were. The occupation, the continued annexation of our land and water resources, the apartheid system of enforced geographic fragmentation and segregation, the post-Oslo rise of neoliberal policies, the NGO-ization of our civil society, the increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth, and the inability of our education system to cope are all conditions that led to the establishment of Sakiya.
How can the merging of artistic methodologies with agricultural practices address this loss of cultural capital—this memory of an Indigenous mythology once rooted in a balanced, embodied stewardship of nature? Pre-colonized mythologies, we argue, can be surfaced with artistic methodologies that embrace alternative agricultural traditions and repair the losses embedded in the land under our feet. We initially operated on the premise that cultural funding exacerbates societal dependency, seeking to reunite sites of cultural production and food production. But since the ancestral farm was annexed and the museum rendered inaccessible, what could we do?
Read more at Protocinema’s website.
Protodispatch is a monthly digital publication of artists’ dispatches on the life conditions that necessitate their work. Published by the international nonprofit Protocinema, Protodispatch is available for free on the organization’s website, communication channels, and through publication partners including Argonotlar.com, GroundControlTh.com. Conceived by Laura Raicovich with Mari Spirito, the initiative was launched in the autumn of 2022. To see past commissions, please visit Protocinema.org/protodispatch
Supporters:
Protodispatch is supported by Jane Hait and Justin Beal, Jane Lombard, Helen and Peter Warwick, and SAHA Association, İstanbul.
