Schizophrenia, The Urban Experience and Temporal Art Interventions

Saturday, February 22nd, 2:00pm
Campus in Camps, Al Feneiq Center, (Dheisheh Refugee Camp)

The lecture is concerned with the urban visual material and representations as a barometer to understand the current urban transformation of the Palestinian liberation project. The urbanization of the Palestinian landscape and its new visual material – consumed by the new middle class culture- generate a considerable power to mobilize people’s passions and desires. The visual in the city becomes a space of hallucination, amnesia and erasure, hence, a strategic site for obliterating the past and distancing history by means of the anesthetics of neoliberal aesthetic. Hence, this perplexing ‘personality disorder’ of the current Palestinian conditions between the colonial and postcolonial can be read in the production of space, where cities like Ramallah are constantly in a struggle to reconstruct a new urban image. New forms of contemporary art practices have also emerged amidst the political shift from the liberation movement to the post-Oslo schizophrenic reality. The lecture sheds light on several examples where temporal art interventions in the city and its landscape have managed to generate different imaginaries of the current crisis of the liberation project.

Biographical note

Yazid Anani is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture- Birzeit University, Palestine. He is currently part of several collectives and projects such as Decolonizing Architecture & Ramallah Syndrome and has curated and co-curated several projects such as Palestinian Cities – Visual Contention and Ramallah – the fairest of them all? He took part in several art projects such as Al-Riyadh together with Emily Jacir, Urban Cafes, and Riwaq Biennale.