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
8 December: Avant, il n’y avait rien / There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, 71min). Guest: Yvann Yagchi

Emily Jacir is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based between Bethlehem and Rome. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, photography, sculpture, interventions, archiving, performance, video, writing, and sound. Through these strategies, she explores silenced histories, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Since 1994, her work has been widely exhibited internationally and has earned numerous distinctions, including the Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), the Prince Claus Award (2007), the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008), the Alpert Award from the Herb Alpert Foundation (2011), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015), among others. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.

In letter to a friend (2019), Jacir addresses her friend Eyal Weizman from her family home in Bethlehem, anticipating its possible occupation by settlers. The film gathers fragments of memory, biography, and place into an epistolary record that resists silencing. It confronts the structural erasures of the Israeli occupation and capital-driven dispossession, insisting on the urgency of documenting lives and histories before they are lost. Jacir’s letter becomes an anticipatory archive, resisting disappearance and preserving evidence.

Aïcha Revellat is an art historian focusing on contemporary and post-conceptual art. After studying art history, image theory, and English at the University of Basel, she became a member of the Graduate School at the eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image where she wrote her dissertation on Swiss Artist Hannah Villiger's oeuvre. Her research interests include photographic media, image theory with a focus on phenomenology and psychoanalysis, queer art and theory, as well as African diaspora art since 1960.