L’AQUILA – Arci L’Aquila and the Arci Querencia club promote the exhibition With other eyes. A visual glossary of Palestinian culture which is part of the national Arci campaign With other eyes, with the aim of describing Palestine by reversing stereotyped narratives and trying to articulate a series of independent cultural proposals to spread throughout the territory.
The exhibition, which is traveling through several Italian cities, is a national Arci project, curated by Imaginary bookswith a selection of poems by Palestinian authors edited by Carla Cocilova, Arci Toscana and with the podcast Learning Palestine: Until Liberation, The 12 hour session II, edited by Learning Palestine Group in collaboration with Radio Alhara.
The exhibition will be open to visitors in L’Aquila from 15 to 18 May 2024 in an itinerant form through a route that winds through the historic center, thanks to the collaboration of bookshops, meeting places and the Academy of Fine Arts of L’Aquila. The exhibition therefore becomes a path that from the Colacchi bookshop, reaches LiberaMia, passes through Art Café, through the ancient Boss tavern, arriving at the Polarville bookshop, to continue to the headquarters of the Academy of Fine Arts.
The works can be visited during the opening hours of the places that host them.
Sunday 19 May 2024 the exhibition “With other eyes“ will be reunited and entirely visitable at the headquarters of the Experimental Museum of Contemporary Art, in Piazza d´Arti, from 5pm to 8pmwhich will host, in addition to the works, a moment of reflection on the current Palestinian situation.
The illustrations in the exhibition are created by seventeen artists from Italy, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria and Malaysia: Lilia Benbelaïd, Valeria Brancaforte, Marco Brancato, Cammamoro, Raed Charaf, Gloria Di Bella, Clara Fois, Kalina Muhova, Seif Eddine Nechi, Giulia Orecchia, Marco Quadri, Alex Raso, Guido Scarabottolo, Laura Scarpa, Jana Traboulsi, Inda Ahmad Zahri , Salim Zerrouki.
The exhibition intends to focus on some symbolic and historical issues that concern the Palestinian people, the various rights denied by the Israeli state and the visual strategies adopted to represent their condition, experiencing a narrative device of the complexities that every Palestinian must undergo in his life , from the uncertainty of having a home, to the denied right to travel, to the continuous violations of every right which also concern the possibility of cultivating and taking care of one’s livelihood.
Through popular embroidery, calligraphy and through different expressive languages, the Palestinian people have told of their historical condition, their traditions and in this also the plants and fruits (such as Jaffa oranges, the cactus), the various elements of the landscape have become symbols of the fight against occupation and emblems of hope. Through this exhibition we want to tell the story of a traumatic landscape, marked by occupations, by a separation wall, monitored and militarily devastated. In this landscape, the resistance of symbols and signs (which also manifests itself through creative practices of art and craftsmanship) is a vital contribution to the reconstruction of hope and an opening for humanity and coexistence.
The choice to accompany the illustrations of this exhibition with some verses of Palestinian poets is based on the desire to combine visual images with some emotional images, which through the figures and poetic constructions can offer further elements of knowledge and create assonances between words and graphic signs . The choice of verses included in the exhibition was in fact made starting from the illustrations themselves, with the sole purpose of provoking further opportunities for reflection and paying homage to the Palestinian people and their literary production.
This small selection of texts, some by big names recognized worldwide – Fadwā Ṭūqān, Samīḥ al-Qāsim, Ğabra Ibrahim Ğabra and clearly Maḫmoud Darwish – others by two contemporary authors: the famous writer Ibrahim Nasrallah and the young poet and activist Moḫammad el -Kurd, contains within itself some key themes of Palestinian culture.
Visiting the exhibition “With other eyes” you can also listen to the podcast Until liberation II by Learning Palestine & Radio Alhara. The podcast is a schedule of lessons, conferences, poems, music and songs to imagine ways of acting together, to break down the walls and borders that separate us, for a just peace in Palestine.
