The Politics of the Armed Lifeboat

A group exhibition hosted by Radius CCA Delft showing the work of Diana Al-Halabi, Hilda Moucharrafieh, with a soundscape by Diane Mahin.

02.12.2023 – 11.2.2024

*The work I produced for this exhibition is part of my longterm research “Famine and Hunger Strikes: Decolonizing the Digestive System” (2021-2024)

A note for the visitors of the exhibition by participating artists (Diana Al-Halabi - Hilda Moucharrafieh):

While we were preparing for this exhibition, we caught ourselves witnessing one of the biggest genocides Palestinians are undergoing by the Israeli Settler colonial state. The works in this exhibition have the taste of our attention dictated by the news we receive from our loved ones in Gaza. This is an interrupted exhibition, like every focus in the world must be interrupted because colonialism did not end. We stand by Palestine, and we call for you to learn its history under settler colonialism since 1948 up until our day.

“Record on the first page:

I do not hate people

nor do I encroach,

but if I become hungry

I will feast on the usurper's flesh!

Beware!

Beware my hunger

and my anger!”

Excerpt from “Record, I am an Arab!” - Mahmoud Darwish

My text for Radius publication:

When thinking of food, it is often the case to think about appetite, degree of physiological hunger, kitchens, and a choice of food that is affordable to eat. A constellation of the psychological, the physiological, and the economic. But is the political considered to be a part of this constellation?

Can we look through food, beyond the reductional micro of the biological, and towards a macro image of the political use of food? And arrive at the notion of political hunger, its precondition, and its aftermath. How can food be weaponized against people to subordinate them or ethnically cleanse them? How can famine inflicted by war, neo-colonial sanctions, or caused by climate change be a precondition to migration and thus affect its policy in Europe?

In my approach to the topic of political hunger, I have been working on the juxtaposition between famine and hunger strikes; one that comes from states, subordinating people in a top-down manner (famine), and another that uses hunger individually or collectively, but as a bottom-up resistance to fight for a right (hunger strikes).

In previous exhibitions, I used the concept of aprons made of mulberry fruit leather to speak about the question of preservation, food security, the domestic, the public, and the political. Who can preserve food beyond its season? Why preserve food? Is preservation a result of a surplus or a fear-taming method of protection?

Aprons, a domestic element used for protection against accidental stains, in this exhibition, mirror kinds of protection that surpass the domestic. What shapes does protection take when adopted by states and its apparatuses? Is it by creating borders? Migration policies? Systematic violence? Counterinsurgency techniques and ballistic shields?

This exhibition departs from these concepts and intersectionally relates the personal and the digestive to geo and necropolitics.

——————————————————————————————————————

A further take:

Schemes of isolating people like blockades, economic sanctions, border control, and apartheid lay in the very idea of isolating oneself in a safe space and the other in a precarious one, stamping it as a dangerous place. It is to elevate and gravitate oneself into the center of the world and the other into the periphery.

To do so, creating a “homeland” mirrors how life is percieved inside a home. A homeland is a land that needs to be marked as home, as a shelter, yet only for family members, while everyone else is a guest. In fortress Europe and its ongoing colonial artifacts such as the Israeli settler colony (a live example of the colonial past and its atrocities), I would rather call this isolation scheme an “insulation” scheme, from which this exhibition takes its inspiration.

According to Etymonline, the etymology of the word "insulate" is “the blocking from electricity or heat, state or action of being detached from others". The literal meaning is "act of making (land) into an island"; that of "a state of being an island."

Isolation and insulation work as two parallels, where the existence of one, by default, means the implication of the other. To isolate a nation is to build a wall around it, be it a physical wall, or be it by cutting electricity, water, internet, aid, or any economic exchange. We see this evident in Gaza, where the strip has been under siege for the last 16 years, and the Israeli settler colonial apartheid has been controlling the calories and liters of water that is allowed to enter. In October 2023, this siege had turned into a collective punishment, where having the upper hand to cut water on two million people is accompanied with internet blackouts to dim the ethnic cleansing happening.

To that end, when we speak of apartheid, it is vital to remember that insulation takes place when the extraction is manipulated and incorporated inside the aforementioned “home.” A glass reflective foil is then necessary to make unclear what has been extracted and hidden behind walls and to enter a process of gaslighting and victim blaming those who come to ask for their stolen rights.

This exhibition is about who owns the means of power, and how the domestic is a model for fascist politics to take control of the bodily, the visceral, and the digestive of the people and use it as a means of subordination.

No one is safe except those who know how to navigate the hell they created. Those who live not in bunkers but own them, those who know how to keep their emergency-alert sirens in check. Reminding their people that the danger is not only a tale of the past but also lives in the present, even if imaginary, and in the near future, eventhough as a possibility. Those for whom the machine that creates sanctions, arms, and the graphs for a free economy is the machine that protects them from those who are crawling to their shores.

“To protect” oneself – a canon used in rightwing fascist discourse– is to work towards a condition of being unaffected by and indifferent to the political climate.

Oftentimes, the term “protecting oneself” is dropped, and the term “defending oneself” is delusionally adopted. “To protect” is to assess the foreseen dangers and take preventive measures, but to defend oneself surely should mean that an attack has already happened and it is time to defend oneself. In both cases, the entity of danger is often imaginary, created to imply fear of that which is the other, and in better words, it is a method of prioritizing a life over the other. A tool that allows a cold war to be inherited from one generation to the other. A method of regenerating a sense of superiority bound with fear to keep a position of power.

“In the state of siege, time becomes space

Transfixed in its eternity

In the state of siege, space becomes time

That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.”

Excerpt from “Gaza’s Siege” - Mahmoud Darwish