The School of Insurgents: Rehearsing Return draws on the everyday experiences, knowledges and practices of Palestinian farmers working in agricultural cooperatives across Palestine. Today, these agricultural cooperatives, which are increasingly networked and bound by relations of resource-sharing (including knowledge sharing) and exchange, are redefining the social, political and economic landscape in Palestine. Not only are these agricultural cooperatives materialising an insurgent economy, but also, they have become sites where various forms of self-organization, participatory democracy and cooperative labor are being tested, refined and mainstreamed, and ecological farming techniques are recovered that rehabilitate the soil from the ravages of monoculture agriculture and other forms of colonial violence which have eroded the soil, destroyed agricultural biodiversity and eliminated autonomy. They stand as living examples of the reclamation of the mashaa’ (the commons)-  including knowledge commons via the recuperation of ancestral forms of knowing, relating to plants, caring for the land, etc.- and affirm the mashaa as a terrain for the experiment of building a new society.

These commons are now expanding to include Palestinians from the diaspora, exemplified by the establishment of the Palestinian Social Fund; a volunteer-run non-profit founded by a group of Palestinians living between Jordan, the United States and Canada to mobilize unconditional financial support from the diaspora and beyond for Palestinian cooperative farms. But also, beyond this specific form of solidarity economics across borders, we can see the rise of numerous platforms and collaborations bringing together members of these cooperatives with collectives and communities all the way from Guatemala to Italy and Indonesia to exchange experiences, knowledges and methodologies relating to agroecology. The School of Insurgents seeks to intervene at this conjunction between Palestinian farmers living inside Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora and communities from other parts of the world engaged in similar land-based struggles and practices.

The project locates itself within a genealogy of cultural practices from Palestine, the region and beyond that embody a practice of ‘witnessing’ that is deeply entangled in the speculative act of worldbuilding, a witnessing of “other possible worlds from within ecological, political and economic disaster”, one where “ongoing practices of autonomy and care meet the violence of settler colonialism with the sense that it can be otherwise.” (Estefan, 2021)

Bio

Joud Al-Tamimi is an artist and curator. She studied Politics and Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Her research focuses on anticolonial imaginaries, insurgent economics and psychoanalysis. She worked at Darat al Funun from 2019-2021, where she directed The Lab program and curated the trilogy: Internet of Things: Another World is Possible, Measuring Life: Notes Toward an Impossible Exchange and Postcolonial Ecologies. Currently, she is completing a fellowship at the Universität der Künste Berlin.