Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)

Abstract

Jasbir K. Puar and Dima Srouji build upon their respective work in architecture, visual art and decolonial theory to produce a collaborative examination of colonial pathologies for Sharjah Art Biennial 15, 2023. Srouji’s architecture and art practice encompass a variety of mediums that allow her to explore notions of heritage and public space in Palestine and the region. Puar is a writer and scholar whose current work focuses on settler colonial violence, disability and debility in Palestine. Their collaborative installations integrate understandings of space and planning with the contemporary politics of resistance in the context of Palestine and the surrounding region. At Sharjah Art Biennial 15, Puar and Srouji present ‘Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)’ (2023), a series of household items that respond to the material conditions of lockdown, interweaving the artists’ experiences of COVID-19 quarantine in Palestine and their memories of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), a major Palestinian uprising against Israel. The project reframes everyday objects emblematic of the trauma of enclosure for Palestinians as transformative matter and reservoirs of affective practices of resilience, community and caregiving: hoarded cans of tuna form the constituent parts of a radiator signifying warmth; resin apricots evoke the exchange of sustenance among neighbours; shrapnel becomes decorative wallpaper motifs; a stairwell used as shelter from air raids transforms into a communal reading space. Exploring the collective rhythms and materialities of these conditions, Srouji and Puar conjure the everyday making and remaking of the commons through and against the constraints of siege and containment. The conversation published here took place between March and September 2023, and thus predates the latest phase in the catastrophic violence that has historically defined Israel’s relationship to Palestine and the Palestinians. Triggered by an unprecedented and shocking attack by Hamas on 7 October, Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza is not an anomaly, but in line with and part and parcel of the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Apartheid system that the settler colonial state of Israel has relied on for its sustenance since 1948. The questions asked here by Maasri and Toukan, as well as the artworks discussed by Jasbir and Srouji, probe aspects of this very condition that has brought us to the unabashed genocidal violence we are now all witness to today.