Berlin:
4 May 2024, 16–18 hrs
And in your throats, 
A sliver of glass, a cactus thorn
Convened by Joud Al-Tamimi and Lama El Khatib
خان الجنوب khan Aljanub, Donaustraße 27, 10243, Berlin

“If the Palestinian Revolution is armed with a philosophy at all, it is armed with the anti-determinist vision of the open-endedness of the future.”
—Fawwaz Turki, “Meaning in Palestinian History,” 1981 

The first gathering of the reading group in Berlin, convened by curator and artist Joud Al-Tamimi and writer and curator Lama El Khatib and hosted by bookstore khan Aljanub, is an invitation to dwell on Palestinian resistance in the wake of genocide, to reflect on its very essence—the struggle over land—in a moment marked by a systematic attempt to annihilate all Palestinian presents and futures.

Confronting settler colonialism’s foreclosure of the horizon, this session looks at resistant agrarian practices across Palestine that constitute a reordering of labor, land, and property relations and an unsettling of the fractured material reality of the settler-colony, gesturing as such toward the liberatory beyond. The study is grounded in a historical materialist analysis of land relations and ownership in Palestine, spanning the years of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate period, and Zionist occupation from 1948 onward.

READINGS:
—Al- ‘Una Conference, Transcript (English Translation), Khalil Sakakini Center, 2021.
—Peter Linebaugh. “Palestine & the Commons: Or, Marx & the Musha’a.” Counterpunch, 2024.

5 May 2024, 16–18 hrs
On Value-Disrupting Activity
Convened by Joud Al-Tamini and Lama Khatib
Hopscotch reading room, Kurfürstenstraße 14, 10785, Berlin

“‘For everyone, everything,’ say our dead. Until it is so, there will be nothing for us.”
— Zapatista National Liberation Army. “Second Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle,” 1994

The second day of the Berlin reading group, hosted by Hopscotch reading room, picks up the thread from the first day to explore in further depth the political and theoretical stakes of value as it links to violences enacted on and through land and property in Palestine and elsewhere. Labor (dead and living) extends as value-creating activity across the time-spaces of capital, connecting historical expropriation and exploitation (of lands and populations) to ongoing processes of extractivism and accumulation. Capital’s drive toward surplus-value production is only ensured with a continued production of surplus populations, lands, power, and capital to be managed through dispossession, displacement, and death. 

Thinking with philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva, the line that separates the colonial past and the colonial present must be erased in order to move towards anticolonial futures; and, through political theorist Joshua Clover’s writing on riot, what political forms and figures—commune, riot, strike, resistance, return—intervene materially and discursively to disrupt these processes of value-making as they persist in their past and present?

READINGS:
—Joshua Clover, “Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune,” Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, Verso Books, 2016.
—Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital,” Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Duke University Press, 2020.

All readings read as part of the Usufructauries of earth reading groups are made available through the “Usufructuaries of earth” online reading resource.

Limited space is available for the Berlin reading group. If you are interested and able to attend the Berlin reading group in person, please send an email—by 19 April 2024—with a short motivation letter of no more than 200 words to opencall@bakonline.org. Please note that the Berlin reading group spans over two days, on 4 and 5 May 2024, and takes place on different location each day. This reading group takes place in English.