On the New Platform, ‘Palestine is Everywhere’
Editors of the anthology Palestine is Everywhere — Skye Arundhati Thomas, Edwin Nasr, and Gloria Habsburg — recently launched a new “Palestine is Everywhere” platform to host a series of monthly commissions, “creating an ongoing space to support and amplify the work of artists, writers, and practitioners from Palestine and the wider region.”
You can explore the platform here: https://palestineiseverywhere.
Can you talk a little about the origins of the anthology and the particular work you wanted it to do — in a publishing landscape where there have been a lot of books about Palestine in the last couple years?
Editors, Palestine is Everywhere: This project was conceived in a time where the narrative landscape around Palestine felt both heavily censored and reactionary. We wanted to create a space where writers and thinkers could produce and share without any heavy editorial guidelines, and without tight deadlines. To center testimony as a form of history keeping, and to have different forms of writing side-by-side. Poems next to diary entries next to political analysis next to drawings from Gaza. They all speak to the same sentiment, the centring of Palestine in this moment of world history, but without abstracting it. This is something we felt was missing heavily.
This book was also created to move beyond the publishing landscape. It was instigated by TBA21, a contemporary art institution that wanted to take a stance, whilst most other western cultural organisation remained silent and complicit. We wanted to integrate their working method which includes bringing people from different fields together to talk about urgent topics that affect our planet, and to use cultural production to make a change.
We focused on bridging worlds we felt were too far apart. First and foremost centering Gazan voices and testimony, translating writers that had never been translated before. Combining a wide range of literary approaches, as well as photography and drawings. Making an accessible book that speaks to both the literary world and the art world.
What made the editors want to expand the anthology into an ongoing series of monthly commissions published online, and what your hopes are for this space and how people engage with it? Who do you imagine in the audience?
EPIE: The digital platform is an extension of the book. Its a place where we could build on the knowledge production that the book laid the groundwork for, and a place that allowed for a wider range of media. Since one of our top priorities with the book was for it to be affordable and accessible, we had to be very cautious of the printing costs of it, keeping it simple, black and white etc. Therefore we wanted to create this place for both new commissions as well as extensions of works from the book to explore a wider range of expression. What happened in the making of this book was the creation of a network and a safe space for writers and thinkers who were being largely disenfranchised, and we wanted to continue the lifespan of this. To keep the conversation going. To keep working with and supporting emerging artists and thinkers.
Additionally, we also wanted to reach people that might not be able to get the book for one reason or another. So our imagined audience remains the same and is a wide net. People interested in long form reading and in Palestine, people in the contemporary art world and involved in critical cultural production.
What sorts of work will people find there? How are you discovering and selecting the authors and artists you work with?
The authors and artists we work with find us in many different organic ways. They could come recommended from our network, we might see something online from them that really stands out and so we reach out, there’s really not one set path.
The works uploaded do always come with a literary element, but its not always the central piece. There have been audio-visual rendering of a text from the book, testimonial essays, digital archives, graphics, amongst others. In future we will be hosting films and music also.
If the idea is to speak to/with Gaza are you considering having Arabic versions of the pieces published online?
EPIE: Arabic translations are definitely in the works. Initially our push to “speak to Gaza” had us focused on translating writers that had never previously been translated into English, in order to increase their social mobility.
Are there other ways people have taken the anthology out into the world? Ways you’d like to see it out in the world?
EPIE: The best thing is to see where our authors have been able to go since being a part of the anthology. We don’t take all the credit of course, but we are grateful to be a part of a journey of many of out writers getting out there. Thanks to our unwavering support from TBA21 and their commitment to emerging voices in the art world, we were fortunate enough to be able to take a chance on writers who have not yet been widely published yet. Having their works that we translated be published in other places, seeing their words get featured and shared. Seeing their confidence grow within the world of English language literature. That’s what this was always about.
Can you tell us a bit about about future projects and commissions?
EPIE: At the moment we have an interactive digital archive of a London-based magazine from the 1970s, Free Palestine, accompanied by an essay by Rami Rmeileh and Sorcha Thomson that looks into its fascinating and tumultuous history. What strikes us most about this project is how it maps that a magazine is a community, a legal aid effort, a directory, a way to build internationalist and anti-colonial networks and even provide mutual aid.
In August we will be hosting a film by Reem Shilleh called Perpetual Recurrences. This film is a vignette into a long history of Palestinian cinema. We will also be publishing an interview between the director and Adam Haj-Yahia.
We also have a commission in the works alongside two formidable Gazan writers, Mohammad al-Zaghzough (who contributed to the book) and Mahmoud al-Shaer. Together they used to run 28 Magazine in Gaza, a place that supported emerging local writers. However their offices, archives and entire infrastructure has been destroyed during the genocide. We have commissioned them to make an issue of 28 Magazine that we will host on the digital platform. This issue will of course also be translated, and were looking into the possibility of also creating a printed version.