Cinematic Counter-Archives of Palestine: Memory, Erasure, and Resistance
This program centers on the role of film as a counter-archive under conditions of genocide and Israeli apartheid, examining the systematic erasure of Palestinian culture in its many forms. Featuring A Night We Held Between (2024, Noor Abed), letter to a friend (2019, Emily Jacir), Electrical Gaza (2015, Rosalind Nashashibi), and There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, Yvann Yagchi), the screenings at eikones this fall will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers, foregrounding cinema as a space of memory, resistance, and reimagining.

Organized and chaired by: David Bucheli (eikones), Aïcha Revellat (eikones), Ute Holl (Media Studies), Falestin Naïli (Near and Middle Eastern Studies), Lorena Rizzo (African Studies), and Peter Burleigh (English Seminar)

Program
22 October: letter to a friend (2019, 43min). Guest: Emily Jacir, Chair: Aïcha Revellat
13 November: Electrical Gaza (2015, 18min). Guest: Rosalind Nashashibi, Chair: Falestin Naïli
20 November: A Night We Held Between (2024, 30min). Guest: Noor Abed, Chair: Chus Martínez
8 December: Avant, il n’y avait rien / There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, 71min). Guest: Yvann Yagchi, Chair: Ute Holl

Rosalind Nashashibi is a British-Palestinian painter and filmmaker based in London. Her films chronicle intimate moments of contemporary life with a deeply empathetic approach, often breaking with linear narrative to trace power dynamics, collective histories, and fragile forms of belonging. Subjects have included non-nuclear family structures, the multiple personae of the artist, and Palestinian life — each forming an archive of experiences that resist disappearance. Referencing figures such as Pasolini, Chantal Akerman, Hockney, and Degas, Nashashibi builds a body of work that holds memory and perception together as a living archive. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003, represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017, and in 2024 was shortlisted for The Film London Jarman Award. Her work has also been presented at Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah Biennial 10.

In Electrical Gaza (2015), commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, Nashashibi filmed in Gaza during the week before the Israeli assault of summer 2014. Combining observational footage of everyday life with animated sequences and the sound of her own breathing, she captures a moment suspended between calm and impending violence. The work refuses the expected images of suffering and instead creates an archive of gestures, atmospheres, and intervals that would otherwise remain invisible. Today, the film itself has become an archive, since the Gaza it depicts no longer exists — reduced to rubble by the intensified genocide perpetuated by Israel over the past two years. In this way, Electrical Gaza stands as both testimony and counter-narrative, preserving traces of experience at once ordinary and charged, documentary and interior.

Falestin Naïli is a historian and professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Basel. She specializes in the social history of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Jordan, with a focus on governance, politics, and collective memory. She previously directed Ifpo Amman (2017–2020) and published La Palestine entre Patrimoine et Providence (Karthala, 2022). In 2023, she received a Swiss National Science Foundation Consolidator Grant for her project Futures Interrupted.