PROTODISPATCH
A monthly digital publication of artists’ dispatches on the life conditions that necessitate their work.
NOVEMBER 28, 2024
NOVEMBER 28, 2024
ROOTS AND RESISTANCE: CULTIVATING COMMONS THROUGH ART AND ECOLOGY IN PALESTINE
Artist Nida Sinnokrot and Architect Sahar Qawasmi share their grafting of local agrarian traditions and art as a means of survival. They describe the conditions responsible for originating their completely off-the-grid residency, Sakiya — Art|Science|Agriculture.
By Nida Sinnokrot with contributions from Sahar Qawasmi, based on the collaborative project Sakiya.
Colonial policies of extraction and land annexation in Palestine forced people out of their lands, resulting in new labor trends. Since the 1970s, many Palestinians have replaced careers in agriculture with manual labor, mostly construction, and service in Israeli factories, projects, and settlements. A major wave of rural migration began in 2002 with the erection of Israel’s apartheid wall which separated villages from their arable lands in the West Bank. This marked an increase in the exodus to West Bank cities, fueled by foreign aid, cultural funding, and Palestinian Authority jobs. There are 150,000 documented workers from the West Bank and Gaza in Israeli projects conditioned to precarity. Since October 2023, Israel stopped issuing worker permits to Palestinians. Workers from Gaza have been sent to the West Bank or back to Gaza, or have been jailed.
With our shared interest in Indigenous farming practices and cultural histories, we established Sakiya — Art | Science | Agriculture. The project came together nomadically in 2012, as we activated derelict sites and community center gardens with roundtable discussions with artists, farmers, academics, and students. We were noticing a shift in narratives of resistance: The struggles to work and to protect ancestral lands were being replaced by struggles to secure mortgages, leaving most farming villages shadows of what they once were. The occupation, the continued annexation of our land and water resources, the apartheid system of enforced geographic fragmentation and segregation, the post-Oslo rise of neoliberal policies, the NGO-ization of our civil society, the increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth, and the inability of our education system to cope are all conditions that led to the establishment of Sakiya.
How can the merging of artistic methodologies with agricultural practices address this loss of cultural capital—this memory of an Indigenous mythology once rooted in a balanced, embodied stewardship of nature? Pre-colonized mythologies, we argue, can be surfaced with artistic methodologies that embrace alternative agricultural traditions and repair the losses embedded in the land under our feet. We initially operated on the premise that cultural funding exacerbates societal dependency, seeking to reunite sites of cultural production and food production. But since the ancestral farm was annexed and the museum rendered inaccessible, what could we do?
In 2016, in collaboration with Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, Sakiya held its first symposium Under the Tree: Taxonomy, Empire, and Reclaiming the Commons 1. Co-produced with Dr. Shela Sheikh (author and academic), we brought together farmers, academics, scientists, artists, and students, featuring Vivien Sansour (artist and conservationist), Beth Stryker (designer and curator), Omar Tesdell (geographer and researcher), and Munir Fakhreddin (academic and researcher). We built a compost center from repurposed cement mixers and planted an urban vegetable garden, from which Saad Dagher (agroecologist) hosted permaculture classes. To harvest knowledge, we made a traveling book scanner with Marcel Mars (free software advocate and social instigator), which featured technology by Danny Qumsiyeh (engineer) and Robert M. Ochshorn (software engineer and media researcher), and built a moving garden with Anika Barkan (artist).
During that nomadic period, polyculture emerged as a theme. Polyculture extends beyond agricultural practices: a metaphorical celebration of diversity across life, spirit, and mind. In 2017, Sakiya was formally established as a progressive academy, residency program, research hub, and farm located in Ein Qiniya, a small agricultural village just seven kilometers west of Ramallah. Its rewilded hillside is home to two holy trees, the ballut (oak) and the qayqab (Greek strawberry), as well as a shrine to Abu Al-Einayn and the Umm Al-Einayn Spring. At one point fully cultivated with vegetables, grains, fruits, and olive orchards, these lands—owned by the Zalatimo family of Jerusalem—had fallen into disrepair following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. Sakiya’s vision is liberation through a society whose confidence is rooted in traditional and contemporary ecological practices, whose tolerance echoes nature’s diversity, whose generosity springs from collective labor, whose creativity is enriched by the intersections of art, science, and agriculture, and whose prosperity surpasses boundaries.
In Arabic, every word comes from a three-letter root. Meaning is relational and entangled in this structure. The root of Sakiya is سقي (Sa-Ka-Ya). Its translation relates to the stem of a mushroom, a papyrus, an irrigation ditch, a water wheel, a cupbearer, the act of supplying or obtaining water. It also refers to the conclusion of a sharecropping contract, or to the right to access water—to tend or to care or to make flow. By grafting local agrarian traditions of self-sufficiency with contemporary art and ecological practices, we cultivate new narratives around our relationship to the land and the commons, or Masha’ in Arabic. Sakiya’s model integrates agriculture with an interdisciplinary residency program, where marginalized cultural actors such as farmers, small crafts, and industry initiatives come to the forefront alongside artists and scholars, challenging the demographic and geographic divides that tend to characterize cultural production and consumption.
Our research explores ways in which collective action and art practice might decolonize the visible and hidden infrastructures of occupation that govern our relationship to nature more generally. By connecting knowledge intimately to the land, Sakiya addresses the challenges we face locally while building a worldwide commons that can be shared through teaching, publishing, and exhibitions. Our polycultural approach, which we call “rewilding pedagogy,” employs symposia, a summer school, garden classrooms, community kitchens, celebrations, thematically-driven open calls, and discrete artistic interventions. To rewild our imaginations, we have to rewild our narrative structures, as well as our environment itself. The Our Garden is our Classroom initiative explores our site’s diverse ecologies, and reimagines the site as a canvas with its own aesthetic, architectural, social, political, historical, and environmental qualities. These gardens function as common spaces for artistic, academic, and philosophical discourse, inspired by historical forests, vineyards, and olive and citrus groves.
Ein Qiniya, our host village, are actively involved in the stewardship and design of our site. Our outdoor classrooms utilize concepts such as Mujawara, which means to act as one’s neighbor or to be taken into protection. In this old Islamic tradition, an apprentice learns from a master—observing, asking questions, taking notes, assisting, and discussing ideas. Our Mujawara takes nature, first and foremost, as our master, as well as everyone in the classroom in equal parts. The classrooms exist in various formats, inspired by the Halakah—a link in a circle of Muallimeen, or knowledgeable ones who share, ask, listen, and imagine together. In these ways, our internship and apprenticeship programs operate in action, restoring and renovating our lands and historic sites.
We spend a lot of time at Sakiya erecting and repairing dry-stacked stone walls. Here, they’re called sanasel. The root of the word is the same for “necklace.” We are adjoining—adorning, rather—the land with jewels of stone. This is a dying art form. We are fortunate to work with Yusef Yaqub, a Muallim of the building arts. Often, passersby stop to watch the careful work of selecting and stacking stones, perhaps sharing a story of so-and-so’s father who built a particular wall, and whether it’s still standing or collapsed in the last rain. Invariably, though, the question of concrete comes up: Why don’t you use cement? It’ll last longer, you won’t have to think about it, and you’ll be finished in no time. People say, You’ll save so much money. This mindset is an example of the colonization of an Indigenous architectural and spatial memory, which we’re attempting to decolonize through our collaborative work and the stories it generates.
Sakiya’s ongoing Ephemeral Infrastructures open call draws on Dr. Tawfiq Canaan’s turn-of-the-20th-century classification of Palestinian demonology as “earth spirits, subterranean spirits, and hellish spirits.” Here, we reimagine these categories as “above ground, ground, and below ground,” and consider how infrastructure—those invisible, technical, and functional networks that govern and manage everyday life—might address, as did the spirit order, the anxieties that dictate our relationship to nature and to humanity. Ephemeral infrastructures provide platforms that attend to physiological needs, fostering new relationships to land and to one another by way of collective space. One of our students, Nadia Asfour, created tarot cards to inspire new narrative structures, keeping in mind that the technologies and mythologies used to maintain colonial ideas of progress, extraction, and liberation are not neutral.
If we are to build for equal rights and justice, we need not only sustainable technologies and practices around food production, but first and foremost, sustainable mythologies that dismantle the visible and hidden infrastructures of occupation that govern our lives. Commoning is one of our primary goals. This is a long, ongoing, and multifaceted endeavor which began with the community of Ein Qiniya. Visioning sessions resulted in an urban master planning project we carried out with Dr. Natasha Aruri of UR°BANA (urbanist and researcher), Mai Battat (researcher and activist), Wala'Limmalah (community activist), and 20 local women, each of whom expressed her own vision for the future of her village 2.
As an example of Sakiya’s interventions, we addressed the facts that building fences in occupied Palestine is often prohibited, and that scarecrows are often targeted and removed by Israeli soldiers. Scarecrow in Arabic is faza’a. The root of this word references fear or astonishment. We are more focused on astonishment itself. Sakiya conceived of “Sonic Faza’a,” a totem to animal migration—to coming, going, waiting, and hosting. These devices are aesthetic and functional, aiding local farmers by sonically deterring wild boar as their crops mature, and ceasing after harvest, thus welcoming the boar to till the soil. Fluid and permeable, their presence and subsequent absence challenge the absolute binary of inside and outside that defines enclosure. Inspired by the spirit world that inhabits Sakia’s site, these sonic scarecrows are revenant, reverberant bodies that witness rather than surveil, resituating the non-human within an acoustic ecology. In this iteration, the scarecrows manifested as germinating water vessels, amplifying compositions recorded by Bint Mbareh (sound researcher and artist) while she was in residence with Sakiya; Her composition “Lentil Soup as an Antidote to Rampant Wildfires” transposes rain and other elements into a speculative future that is simultaneously dystopian and flooded with possibility. Sonic Faza’s transducers are attached to clay vessels by Nur Minawi, a potter from Yaffa, who carries on his family’s tradition. Conjoined, they create noise that symbolizes Mbareh’s conception of the mother’s voice.
Residents have also included Jumana Emil Abboud (artist), whose Water Diviners project deeply influenced our understanding of Sakiya’s spirit world. She worked with women from Ein Qiniya, university students, and young creatives to remap local water springs and their folktales. Shaima Hamad (artist) researched and recreated traditional recipes that called for fruits from the wild trees on our site; she made bread from our historic oak, which is more than 2,500 years old—the oldest in the area.
One of our ongoing projects is the design of an outdoor kitchen—both a functional and income-generating space. To support it, we’ve developed modular, self-watering pots inspired by Dr. Omar Yaghi’s groundbreaking material science research, as well as historical references to stone water condensers in Palestine mentioned by the Jewish scholar Maimonides nearly a millennium ago.
No restaurant is complete without a toilet, and at Sakiya—a completely rewilded site with no conventional plumbing, electricity, or roads—this arose as a design challenge. Drawing from my Art and Agriculture course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), we issued a prompt to create one integrating a Geneva mechanism: an ingenious intervalometer found in clocks, cameras, and machine guns, drawing from the principles of Reverend Moule’s 19th-century earth closet. The result was a metabolic toilet, as we took human waste to be a vital element in the nitrogen cycle, with potential for improving soil health. Its clock-like rotational mechanism addresses what we term the “peaking problem” at the community’s scale, efficiently promoting composting and pathogen elimination.
The plans for these projects—and many others, including art, research, and community work—are published in the textbooks of our summer school students. In keeping with our seasonal approach, each time of year holds its own rhythm: In the spring and fall, we host residents; in the winter, we compile and publish our research; in the summer, we encourage children to take part in the activities of the site.
Sakiya is an experience in slow time, in metabolic time, in time to heal, to grow, to build shelter, and to care for one another. The loss of land associated with the Israeli occupation is not only measured by lost area, but also in lost knowledge. The erosion of the Masha’, our commoning practice, dates back to Ottoman times with the passing of the 1858 Land Code; it marked a shift towards a mapping system where land became private property. Subsequently, during the British Mandate, further regulations were passed with the aim of eradicating the Masha', which was seen as primitive. Nevertheless, the custom of commoning persisted. Under Israeli occupation, the Masha' fell under Israeli military law, classified as “Area C.” Today, what is left of the common lands in “Area A” is threatened by large-scale Palestinian development projects, with partially assigned title and sell-off lands—often under protest, because there’s nowhere to expand. Sakiya seeks to keep the culture of Masha' alive against this political, economic, and social reality. Mapping as a tool for subjugation and control is all too palpable. Military drones from nearby Israeli settlements fly over our site on a weekly basis.
Seeking to take control of aerial mapping technologies, we made our own site survey as a counter-map and digital repository for the site’s oral histories, preserving our collective memory in a remotely-accessible way. But as we mentioned, these technologies are not neutral. This raises pressing questions around rooted, Indigenous, land-based practice. What happens when the ancestral farm is annexed, and the museum rendered inaccessible? That question remains. Until we find an answer, let’s take refuge in the wisdom of the boulder of sunrise featured in Shuruq Harb’s Untitled sketch (2022), a work-in-progress from her residency at Sakiya. She writes: “For centuries, this beautiful Ein Qiniya mountain has been a place for the practice of mysticism and spirituality. For Ramallah residents today, the mountain is the last outlet into nature, and a marker of an Israeli imposed border. Living in the mountain and staying at the Sakiya residency heightened my awareness of this duality, this dichotomy, this tension between the desire to surrender back into nature, to sink into the subtle inscriptions of time on the stones and trees, while being unable to shake off the dangers of the current political realities. The imminent threat that looms and hovers, the violence that I can feel but am unable to fully explain or document become present in my video as an initial sensory sketch capturing this haunting feeling.” This duality, which we aim for the residency to embody, simultaneously addresses the urgencies of our times and the slow cycles of nature, revealing the importance of ancient knowledge as essential for survival and resistance.
Footnote
- Taxonomy, Empire, and Reclaiming the Commons was an interdisciplinary conference organized by Nida Sinnokrot and Shela Sheikh around the colonial legacies of botanical classification, empire-building, the loss of the commons, and how the standardization of measurement and classification paved the way for the unit division of land as part of the long-term process of private ownership. We asked how imagination was affected, how we domesticate ourselves as we domesticate crops, and how polycultures and monocultures infiltrate society.
- Between 2018 and 2023, UR°BANA (a multidisciplinary studio for research and design) and Sakiya collaborated on ethnographic research and exercises in spatial reimagining with a group of women from the village of Ein Qiniya. The discussions and workshops led to Takhayali Ein Qiniya, a set of master plans which translate in visual form the participants’ spatio-political needs, fears, and desires related to their village.
NOTE:
This Protodispatch is based on a talk authored by Nida Sinnokrot and delivered in collaboration with Sahar Qawasmi at a panel titled “(Re)learning Indigeneity: Ecologies of Art, Sustainability and Resistance”, with Nida Sinnokrot, Sahar Qawasmi (Sakiya); other indias; Beatrice Catanzaro, Fatima Kaddumy (Bait al Karama) Moderated by Alia Swastika (Director, Jogja Biennale Foundation and Sharjah Biennial 16 co-curator) at Sharjah Foundation March Meetings, Sharjah, U.A.E, 2024. Sections of this work have appeared in prior interviews and publications, including the Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 76, Issue 2: Pedagogies for a Broken World, Rewilding (at) Sakiya (2022) and Artists and the Practice of Agriculture: Politics and Aesthetics of Food Sovereignty in Art since 1960 by Silvia Bottinelli (Routledge, 2023) and in an upcoming book featuring the work of Nida Sinnokrot and Sakiya.