Location: Oulu Central Library Saari - Event Space Laituri
Address: Kaarlenväylä 2, 90015 Oulu, Finland | Venue Information | Event Map  

Captions are available for this session

This participatory workshop asks how archives can be activated as sites of collective imagination and action in times of crisis and injustice, fostering communities that act together beyond institutional structures and individual research.

Working with a living album of Palestinian cultural materials from the 1960s-1990s that artist facilitator Riham Isaac has been researching and assembling since 2024 - including posters, revolutionary poetry and songs, paintings, protest materials, and performance scores addressing land, liberation, and anti-colonial struggle - participants will engage with a range of hands-on tasks proposed through the archive itself. Participants may respond through writing, movement, improvisation, voice or shared reflection. 

Together, we will explore how the archive is not a repository of the past, but something activated in the present through use, encounter and embodied response, where cultural artefacts can shift from observation to action, and contested materials become sites of reimagining and protest.  

Participants should expect conversations about cultural resistance, anti-colonial struggle and collective action as part of the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation.

No prior experience with embodied practice is needed, only curiosity about collective action and a willingness to engage imaginatively.

This activity requires registration and has a maximum capacity of 25 people. 

Facilitator:

Riham Isaac, Performance Artist & PhD Candidate at University of Exeter, Palestine/United Kingdom

SIGN UP

Sign-up deadline: 16 June, 23.59

Resources:

The archival album used in this workshop contains materials gathered from:

• Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS)
• Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
• al-Wasiti Archive of al-Hoash Gallery
• Birzeit University Digital Palestinian Archive
• Palestine Poster Project Archives (PPPA)
• Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU), University of Exeter

Further Reading:

• Azeb, Sophie. "Who Will We Be When We Are Free? Palestine and Futurity" (2019)
• Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer's Handbook (2010)
• Campt, Tina. Listening to Images: An Exercise in Counterintuition (2017)
• Friedman, Ken, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn (eds.). The Fluxus Performance Workbook (2002)
• Halaby, Samia. Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (2001)