Instructions for Placemaking: Nifayatīyāt
19:30–21:00
de Appel, Tolstraat 160, Amsterdam
About Nifayatīyāt by Isshaq Albarbary
This performance by Isshaq Albarbary invites the audience to reflect on the labor of assembling meaning in a world that renders people and objects disposable. This live performance reimagines a disjointed UNRWA trash cart, familiar yet overlooked in Palestinian refugee camps. While its function is to clear waste, here it carries fragmented histories and silenced knowledge. The artist, as an extraterrestrial figure, assembles the cart from scattered parts. With ambient soundscapes, poetic spoken words, and deliberate movements, the performance uncovers hidden narratives, confronting systems that reduce identities to bureaucratic codes. The cart becomes both a practical and symbolic vessel for labor, subjectivity, and translation.
About Our People are Our Mountains: Instructions for Placemaking
In Our People are Our Mountains (quoting from Amílcar Cabral’s words on the Guinea-Bissau's liberation movement), artists and collectives in Palestine and elsewhere who work on questions around land from different perspectives, collaborate with majelis (assembly) Jakarta by sending instructions remotely. Utilizing instructions, rather than physically transferring works or facilitating travel, stems from ethical, political, and environmental considerations. The act of sending instructions is also a way to point to the physical and symbolic distances, particularly emphasizing the profound difficulties associated with moving in and out of Palestine, especially during the ongoing genocide. This initiative, therefore, is an act of transmission and trust—artists will transmit their creative directives to counterparts in Jakarta, who will, in turn, realize, contribute to, perform, or enact the instructions in place.
In the Amsterdam iteration, the instructions will be presented, whereas some of them will be activated throughout the coming weeks. Every week of the presentation span, a new video by the participating artists and others will be screened on loop for one full exhibition week. In addition a programme of performances, workshops and gatherings will take place throughout the project span. This performance is part of the program.
Bio
Isshaq Albarbary's work centers on the notion of Stateless Refugee Heritage, delving into its social and political prospects. By investigating the interplay between materiality and temporality, memory and power, within contexts of settler colonialism and extraterritoriality, Isshaq challenges conventional narratives, calling for new avenues of social and political belonging.
Photos: Nikola Lamburov
