All That Remains (The Right of Return)
To close The Nature of Remembering, we are honored to welcome artist-filmmaker Inas Halabi for a performative presentation that is part listening session and part analogue media performance. As an expanded cinema experiment combining field recordings, images and teas extracted from indigenous plants, the presentation sensorially leads us through sites of demolished Palestinian villages that were turned into Israeli national parks and nature reserves. The remains of these villages have been deliberately overgrown with foreign pine trees in an attempt to erase them, confiscate the land, and prevent the original inhabitants (now refugees) from returning.
The materials shared in Halabi’s presentation stem from her ongoing research toward a film she is currently producing. The film project disrupts the ongoing erasure of the villages through collective rituals related to the harvest season and the land and through the indexing of Indigenous plants that continue to grow in these locations. Holding together the drum-like song of cicadas, quiet moments in a village’s cemetery or under a native carob tree, and the drone of jet engines, the aural landscapes of these sites invite us to consider: What might an image of ‘return’ sound like? And what alternative languages and futures become possible to imagine by challenging established forms of representation?
This event will be held in English.
Please note: This gathering has very limited capacity and each person will be provided with their own pair of headphones, so please register in advance via the Eventbrite link.
Ticket: €7,50
Student and solidarity ticket: €5
Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.
Inas Halabi (she/her) is an artist-filmmaker living and working between Palestine and the Netherlands. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power manifest, and the impact that overlooked or suppressed histories have on contemporary life. This is anchored around her interest in landscape and systems of power and control. Taking up the history and territory of her native Palestine, her work explores the politics of erasure and the everlasting impact of colonialism on the land and its people. Through the deliberate use of repetition, she aims to capture and create situations that insist on being looked at more closely, bringing to the foreground details of the invisible violence in the everyday, while continuously searching for ways to disrupt this through image and sound, and more recently through collective practices and rituals related to the land.
Image: The demolished village of Beyt ‘Itab, Palestine, 2024. From The Right of Return / All That Remains, an ongoing project by Inas Halabi.
