‘Waste Siege and Material Practices of Resistance’ – Part of ‘History is not Context, It’s Reality: Teach-ins on Israel/Palestine’

The environmental impact of the war in Gaza might seem of little importance in comparison to the humanitarian atrocities of the unfolding genocide. Yet, images showing the debris resulting from the destruction or damage of more than 100,000 buildings in Gaza remind us that the consequences of the war in terms of illnesses and premature mortality will extend for years after the conflict has ended. In which way does waste shape forms of sociality, politics, and self-understanding for people living in conditions of war and occupation? How can material practices help to trace and make legible the political, environmental, and social affordance of waste in these contexts? The two-part event will address these questions with a workshop and a public lecture. The workshop and the lecture inform each other, but they respond to different aims. Interested people may decide to follow both or just one of them.

The workshop focuses on the ways material practices can become tools to investigate the political ecologies of waste in contexts of non-sovereignty. Combining theoretical reflections with material practices from arts and design, the conversation will unfold around six key concepts with the aim of refining and possibly expanding the methodological tools of the participants.

In the public lecture, the invited speakers will introduce the notion and theory of waste siege and discuss how waste in Palestine is a weaponized materiality that impinges on and interweaves with (the loss of) historical crafts and knowledges, industrialized modes of production, as well as forms of sociality and self-understanding under Israeli occupation.

Practical information

Workshop: 7 May 2024, 17:00-20:00. Online. Register via: g.bellinetti@uva.nl

Led by Sakeb (Mariam Saleh and Raghad Saqfalhait) and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bard College).

To ensure a dynamic and collaborative learning environment, the workshop requires some preliminary preparation and reading. For the same reason, participation is limited. Please register by sending an email to g.bellinetti@uva.nl.

Public lecture: 17 May, 16:00-17:30. Online. All are welcome. Register via: https://tinyurl.com/mpjacmbx

Speakers: Sakeb (Mariam Saleh and Raghad Saqfalhait); Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bard College). Moderator: A. George Bajalia (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wesleyan University).

The event is a collaboration between ASCA, AHRC, and the Future Materials programme at the Jan van Eyck Academie. 

Biographies

Sakeb

Sakeb is a design and research collective that works on, about, and through waste. They experiment on a wide range of leftover industrial waste like stone slurry and sawdust, earth waste from construction sites, and natural binders to create furniture and everyday products. Their designs recognize the potentials of the natural drying processes of biomaterials and embrace them with the forms they adopt. Sakeb was founded in 2019 in Ramallah by Mariam Dahabreh and Raghad Saqfalhait. They participated in a number of local and international exhibitions including Sharjah Architecture Triennale 2023, Milan Design Week 2022, Amman Design Week 2019, Art Jameel, Khalil Sakakini Center, Warehouse421, and Beit Obaid Al-Shamsi.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins 

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her interests include infrastructure, waste, environment, platform capitalism, the home, disability, and kinship. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019), has won five major book awards, and examines waste management in the absence of a state. Her current book, Controlled Alienation: Airbnb and the Future of Home(under contract with Duke) explores the joint world-making of austerity and home-sharing in Greece. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and lm-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/. ”

A. George Bajalia is a sociocultural anthropologist concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University (CT, USA), where he is also the Coordinator for Middle Eastern Studies and a founding member of the Committee on Palestine Studies. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier and Ceuta. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (NY, USA).