For the third time in a row, Ramallah Municipality will participate in Qalandia International Fair 2018 – Solidarity. Ramallah Municipality believes in joint cultural work with the cultural institutions in Palestine as a basis for developing the city’s cultural infrastructure and addressing the lack of resources and the constraints of the occupation. Ramallah Municipality seeks to develop an identity and vision for future cultural work in the city.
Qalandia International, which includes more than a dozen cultural institutions from Palestine and abroad, provides Ramallah Municipality with an important opportunity to learn more about the priorities and mechanisms of cultural action in partner institutions. It creates a platform for dialogue and networking, and places the city of Ramallah on the map of global cultural action. This year’s theme – Solidarity – reflects the spirit of Ramallah Municipality as part of the city’s cultural life. It seeks forms of joint institutional and cultural activities that can provide partner institutions with the support they need to realize their own identity and cultural vision in order to be able to continue and prosper, and in order to respond to the material, political, and social conditions that best support Palestinian artists. Ramallah Municipality decided to employ the Mamarat technical residency program, an artist exchange program that calls on partner institutions to rethink the concept of artist residency and its role in supporting artists in the current global geopolitical situation.
The Lasting Effect (Curator: Reem Fadda) is the result of this series of residencies that invited Palestinian artists and their counterparts in partner cities to reflect on the concept of solidarity from various angles. The exhibition offers a variety of artistic interventions, including synthetic works, performative lectures, performances, community works, video clips, paintings, and billboards. These artworks question the diversity of current forms of solidarity, imbue them with historical models, present future proposals, raise important questions, and sometimes criticize the concept of solidarity itself. What brings together these works is the attempt to start from the “other side,” using art to create a free space that understands the concept of solidarity from a broader political perspective. These actions, in various forms, transform solidarity into a form of rescue. How can we retain what has faded away? Or how can we point out what disappears? All these actions move towards inviting groups or individuals to begin to face each other, in spite of the challenges, and to work towards the realization of our cultural and national goals. The Lasting Effect is organized in open spaces throughout the city of Ramallah in line with Ramallah Municipality’s strategy to dedicate public city space to cultural action and social solidarity.
