Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

Can we organise ourselves within new and different frameworks? What are the utopian forms that would emerge from such grassroots frameworks? Can we create a new social imaginary capable of begetting the intertwined self-organisatory forms and impacts we desire? How can we construct a self-sufficient form of self-organisation?

But These Forms Need to Be Created is both an exhibition and an attempt to explore forms of self-organisation. Threading through artist-run spaces and wrapping around other social genres of self-organisation such as agricultural and production cooperatives, the exhibition features a spectrum of self-organisational structures to illuminate the intricate details of self-organised groups—including funding, means of production and communication, power relations, sustainability, and varieties of cultural products. 

The exhibition illustrates an assemblage of visions of self-organisation by juxtaposing 18 varied artworks, pieces of research, and art interventions; some are complete, others are still works in progress. The various self-organisatory forms in the select collection intersect in form, theory, and terrains of application. Tracing the evolution of the featured works, first and foremost the self-organisational values they enshrine, the exhibition involves functional artworks or projects defying the conventional notion of artistic activity in an attempt to reinforce the validity of self-organised groups or introduce nascent ones. At its heart, the exhibition provides loci of experimentation for the featured artists, artist-run spaces, and self-organised groups. Sticking to their independence and selectivity when it comes to funding, many self-organised groups regard experimentation as a costly decision warranting a great deal of consideration due to the shadow it can cast over their modes of production and developmental pace.

But These Forms Need to Be Created was also pursued to push curatorial interventions beyond the bounds of their usual role of dictation to that of mediation; thus, featured works can organically develop without being steered to eventual, pre-set destinations. This push engendered total changes in some of the exhibited works. De-verticalising curation, the exhibition preparations garnered for all the stakeholders an edifying horizontal interaction, markedly with the engaged art spaces. Still and all, these attempts were subject to the exhibition framework and the special conditions of the geographies of the showing artists.

The collective exhibition is arranged into six thematic chapters: ‘Experimental Organisation’, ‘What about the Sheep?’, ‘Hakoura? As Infrastructure’, ‘Networking Self-Organisation’, ‘Playful?’, and ‘How to Organise? Artistic Praxis’.

Chapters:

What about the Sheep?

Structured around three multifarious works united by ovine concerns, ‘What about the Sheep?’ canvasses self-organisation attempts, some successful, others failed, with a touch of irony. With ‘Dreaming of Sheep’, Benji Boyadgian and his friend d share with us their experience of creating a utopian self-organisation form. Complementing one another with their theoretical footing, hands-on know-how, capital, and a ‘landlet’, they build up a collaborative project sustaining them with income and fresh food. On an environmentally-neglected lot, the two friends build a garden that has what it takes to secure the university education of Hassan’s daughters, amongst other ends. From Benji and Hassan’s dreamland in Ma’asara village, Israeli-occupied Palestine, Ziad Naitaddi’s ‘The Absents, Volume II’ beams us to the break-up of collectives that once lived in the Grand Atlas, Morocco. Along with their droves of sheep, these communities left a dark mountainous landscape that was once a theatre of their quotidian pastoral life, to disappear in urban labour markets. Although these de facto collectives dissolved, incapable of securing decent livelihoods for their members, they still remain as an image of an exotic locale that once stood on the slopes of the High Atlas far away from the global capitalist economy. Semiotics of sheep are invoked yet again by Malak Abdelwahab’s art object, ‘A Flock of Sheep Crossing the Asphalt Streets to Get to the Other Side of Luscious Greenery’, inspired by an ethological notion that sheep, through the communality of the herd, defy threats to their individual survival. Either in flocks or pairs sheep know they must stay; otherwise, herdsmen and women have no other tool but a mirror to break the loneliness of a single head of sheep! This interplay of the one and the many stirs up the notion of bogus societies, where all the trappings are in place, yet none of the authentic social values is present.

Experimental Organisation

This chapter stages two pieces of research by the first Palestinian Engineering Commune, an experimental nucleus dedicated to collaborative engineering activism in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Represented by Eng. Majid Doghlas, the Commune facilitated a series of discussions amongst engineers and architectural theorists, all sharing a common set of concerns, to question the instrumentality of such a commune. Switching from the verbal to the visual, the chapter moves to Sada Movement’s experimental art installation, ‘Taboo’. By means of disguise and masks, Sada has experimented with the flouting of taboos in various social and political settings in the Israeli-occupied al-Quds/Jerusalem.

Hakoura? As Infrastructure

Given over to exploring the semiotics of land, as betokened by the word Hakoura (Palestinian for yard), this chapter presents three land-and-self-organisations via inspired and inspirational art interventions. In a documentary titled ‘Im Odeh AgroGarden’, Majdi Habash and Micheal Tannous chronicle the progress of Im Odeh AgroGarden since its inception and promote the self-organisational values it represents. From the heart of Ramallah city, Israeli-occupied Palestine, Omina Sabry teleports us to a farm spread along the Cairo–Ismailia desert road through a sound installation and digital booklet, ‘Through the Olive Trees’. As part of an extended research project initiated in 2019, Sabry documents a farm founded in 1992 as a small business by a family of Levantine roots. The artist reflects on the forms of relationships to the farm and their sustainability compared to those of art institutions by tapping into her casual employment at art institutions. The chapter draws to a close with ‘Al-ʿUna Conference’, a dialogue art intervention coordinated by artist Joud al-Tamimi, which attempts to provoke a collective inquiry into land-centred self-organized solidarity economics and how they inform  decolonization. 

Networking Self-Organisation

Through four art interventions, this chapter touches on the success of technology as a tool of organisation, be it for design, communication, or revolutionisation, as well as on some of its failures. Artists Charbel Alkhoury and Monica Basbous’s video installation ‘POPG Clanc’ traces the twists and turns in the function of an eponymous WhatsApp group, an online gaming space set up to arrange play times and share tips. As the Lebanese uprisings unfolded in 2019, the group transformed into a tool with which to organise the group members’ actions in response and provide updates about the situation on the ground.

In Daniel Elias’s ‘Floating Energy’, simulation software and the Rhino program are deployed to study self-organisation in migratory birds and how they preserve energy through the murmuration phenomenon. Those insights absorbed, and buttressed with a little science fiction, Elias came up with a visionary solution to power outages in Palestinian villages and thus saved some of them from dependence on Israeli colonialists’ power sources.

In a similarly subversive vein, Donghwan Kam’s ‘sendittoyourfriends.com’ examines the notion of togetherness by way of visual and experimental media. Amidst the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, Kam used data and 3D printing to design a bottle cap to hold a solution for washing eyes exposed to tear gas. With a few clicks, thousands of protestors in Hong Kong and beyond benefited from the new functional technology.

In an apt summation, the chapter’s final installation features ‘ABC Assembly’, a participatory manual on self-organisation by ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative. Guest curator Alaa Mansour will set the manual in print via a xerox -black and white- printer located in the exhibition’s white space for this purpose.

Playful?

This chapter presents two art interventions. Challenging notions of gamification as competitive, LAPSUS’s ‘Dungeons & Artists: Terra Plana’, a group maze board game, tests players’ skills in constructing their avatars and steering them to cooperate and combine their abilities in pursuit of a common aim and, eventually, playfully find their way through the maze. With this frolic, the art-run space renders an alternative to individualistic one-winner group games. With a whimsical touch, Moatsem Siam’s ‘Inanimate Possession’ tackles a serious issue: urban planning in Israeli-occupied al-Quds/Jerusalem and the resulting daily problems encountered even among the residents of the same neighbourhood. The art installation documents a potpourri of the tactics Jerusalemites devise to preserve their parking lots in a colonised landscape. Against this scene, the artist drums up questions about the advisability of ‘appropriating’ small items of private property placed out as makeshift traffic cones to mark residential parking spaces as part of a networked resistance to the prevailing (lack of) urban planning.

 How to Organise? Artistic Praxis

This chapter challenges (pre)conceptions of power with four artworks. The space52 ‘Artist-Run Dialogues’ features a map that charts the path of a series of dialogues amongst an array of artist-run spaces on self-organisation in the arts. Through art video and collage, Jana Nakhal and Ashraf Mtaweh’s ‘On Power: Dynamics Play: Why’s your basket empty?’ pores over power relations and authority in groups and visual and historical references—those deep, often unrecognised coordinates from which our imagination of alternative futurities emerges—from a femnist perspective. The video component of the artwork was not brought to fruition due to the catastrophic situation ripping through Lebanon. Therefore, we made do with the directors’ comments and initial script for the aborted video.

In the same thematic vein, the chapter presents ‘Persuasion//Allusion’, a collection of alarmist propaganda posters created by DROSS. With the help of its fluid anonymous membership of casual workers employed in art and cultural institutions across Britain, DROSS draws back the veil from some of the institutions’ secrets and voices a barrage of internal criticism. The collaborative group also uses the posters to advise staff in art institutions of the existence of subversive critical groups, which might also serve to attract would-be ‘fellow travellers’ and potential recruits to its cause using the strategy of entryism. Taking the group Militant Tendency as a starting point, DROSS continues its inquiry into other self-organisation forms. Even art hinges on language: ‘Machi Mashy, or in Other Words Not Working’, a research-based art installation by artists Mohamed Abdelka, Soukaina Joual, Engy Mohsen, and Mooni Studio, gathers a selection of terms pertaining to individuals who engage in collaborative art practices. Departing from the prosaic but loaded word ‘artwork’, words in Classical Arabic are dissected, and their derivatives then re-examined through the prism of three dialects: Moroccan, Egyptian, and Palestinian. In parallel, Mohamed Abdelkarim reflects on the linguistic disconnects and overlaps between the institution and the intellectual in the political/cultural field.