softcoreanarchy

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Miles Van Rensselaer (American, b. 1973, Lopatcong, NJ, USA) - Jari Jari Gelas Totem, 2016, Sculptures: Bronze and Glass

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“Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.” ― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

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Photos of LGBT people living in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah, taken by Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, 2010

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Thomas Theodor Heine, Angel (c. 1905)

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Heba Zagout (Palestinian), 1984–2023

killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza.

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I worry that our collective inability to hold space for grief is a slow hardening for all of us. In my experience the denial of pain is the denial of life and connection to the wide expanse of love, the disconnect makes it much harder to be with those around us from a place of openness. It feels like there is no priority or importance in the west for communal rituals of celebration of life or grieving and it’s only to our detriment. I hope to see and experience the revival of this in my lifetime.

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by marzenaaenaa_

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Sacred Heart

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Thierry Mugler SS 1998

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2016-07-07

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Vincent Namatjira (Australian Aboriginal, 1983), Desert Songs (Frank Yamma), 2023. Acrylic on linen, 122 x 152 cm.

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“So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies, which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans…But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (via undoingthedutchstate)

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“To understand statehood as it exists in the Western imaginary is merely a structuralised form of violence, an entity that mediates life and death, is to understand that conceptualising freedom from the state must engage a radical departure from the state-based logics that govern our terms for liberation. Palestinians yearn for their historic place – the borders long imagined and inhabited and restructured from within and without – and call it a “homeland.” The yearning is real, and is valid, but a homeland exists anywhere the people do – and Palestinian people are everywhere, in all bodies. Perhaps the defining feature of occupation and dispossession for Palestinians and their kin is having been denied the ability to occupy space in land, in place, and in memory. The practice of memory is so often (as Said’s terse response to Arafat’s poorly planned statehood proclamation demonstrates) to reflect on what was, what should have been, and what might still be. Thus creating an alternate futurity, for Palestinians, is to remember imaginatively. Displaced from the land, from recognition, and from their own memories, Palestinians are also displaced from linear modes of history and existence. We have, therefore, exactly the ingredients required to imagine a non-linear, placeless freedom – one well beyond the confines of a nation-state. It is a freedom we imagine, every day, by existing for and within ourselves, in these bodies born of Palestine.”

— Palestine Made Flesh, Sophia Azeb. (via kuanios)

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Gazan portraits by Palestinian Photographer Motaz Azaiza (pictured in the center of the final photograph) :

Motaz’s photography captures the daily life of Palestinians in Gaza; from old to young, from happy to sad, from living to dead - he is currently documenting the Israeli onslaught and mass destruction of Gaza live on his social media. His Instagram: Motaz_Azaiza

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"For me, there are two reasons to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine. One, is because they're human beings and they're being treated with absolute brutality. But the other is that there's a specific resistance to Israel as a nation-state. And to be perfectly clear about this, I believe that the nation-state of Israel is itself an artifact of antisemitism.

If we thought about Israel and Zionism not just as a form of racism that results in the displacement of Palestinians, but if we also think about them as artifacts of the historic displacement of Jews from Europe—in the same way that we might think of Sierra Leone or Liberia as artifacts of racist displacement—if we think about it that way, it becomes important for us to be able to suggest that resistance to the state of Israel is also resistance to the idea of the legitimacy of the nation-state.

When the defense of Israel manifests itself as a defense of its right to exist, this is important. It's a defense not just of Israel's right to exist, but of the nation-state as a political form's right to exist. And nation-states don't have rights. What they're supposed to be are mechanisms to protect the rights of the people who live in them, and that has almost never been the case. And to the extent that they do protect the rights of the people who live in them, it's at the expense of the people who don't.

So, part of what's at stake, one of the reasons why it's important to pay particular attention to this issue, why we ought to resist the ridiculous formulation that singling out Israel at this moment is itself antisemitic, is because it's important to recognize that Israel is the state—for reasons that I think are totally bound up with antisemitism—Israel is the state that, insofar as it makes the claim about its right to exist, is also making the claim about the nation-state's right to exist as such.

It's that same kind of argument as those formulations people often make about black people or indigenous people as if they were the essence of the human. So that every time black people or indigenous people do something that supposedly we're not supposed to do, it constitutes a violation to the very idea of the human. Because somehow, as a function of the nobility of our suffering, we constitute the very idea of humanity. And there's nothing more brutal, nothing more vicious than being consigned to that position. Similarly, Israel, as a function of antisemitism, has now been placed in the position of protecting the very idea of the nation-state.

So, for me, first and foremost it's important to have solidarity with the Palestinian people. But second of all, it's important to actually have some solidarity with the Jewish people, insofar as they can and must be separated from the Israeli state. Because ultimately, the fate of the Jewish people, if it is tied to the nation-state of Israel, will be more brutal than anything that has yet been done or can be imagined. And I mean everything that you think I mean when I say that." -Fred Moten

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Katarzyna Karpowicz — A Box with Dreams (oil on canvas, 2023)

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