Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa

Overview

Landwalks: Across Palestine and South Africa explores embodied ways of knowing land and the reclamation of the collective landscape of Palestine and South Africa. The objective of this cross-cultural publication is to overcome fragmentary colonial boundaries through artistic practices and research. The collection of creative mappings authored by eight scholars, artists, architects and activists and complemented by two theoretical pieces by Tshepo Madlingozi and Sumayya Vally reveals the complex layers of memory, belonging and identity embedded in land and the ways in which these are entangled with ideological inscriptions of territory. More specifically, and in light of the continuing land violations, the different voices speak to how Palestinians and Black South Africans overcome political and geographical fragmentation on both metaphorical and tangible levels. The publication highlights how they challenge the ideologies that hold land hostage to zero-sum prophecies and violently transform maps into multilayered projections of historical violence.

Landwalks forms part of a larger, ongoing creative research collaboration between the Palestinian Museum and the School of Architecture at the University of Cape Town that considers the historical similarities and peculiarities of the systemic violations of human rights and land confiscation in South Africa and Occupied Palestine. This publication was produced as part of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual Publishing Grant (2021), awarded to Tomà Berlanda and Meghan Ho-Tong in 2021. Edited by Berlanda and Ho-Tong with Marah Khalifeh and Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, the publication includes contributions by guest authors Tshepo Madlingozi and Sumayya Vally and participants Hala Barakat, Zara Julius, Samia Kayyali, Tareq Khalaf, Mette LouLou von Kohl, Tanzeem Razak, Rasha Saffarini and Nisreen Zahda.