You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice is co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also captures the future, closes the horizon, and makes us believe there is no outside to the binaries imposed on us, no other possible future.
Solidarity, then, cannot mean simply choosing a side within the maps already given to us. Imperial powers, authoritarian governments, nationalist projects, media systems, and even oppositional narratives can all become entangled in reproducing domination and narrowing political imagination. The histories of marginalized peoples are often folded into these frameworks, but this does not delegitimize their struggles. It makes it more urgent to hold them carefully, and to build forms of relation, language, and solidarity that cannot be easily returned to imperial or authoritarian narratives.
This four-day gathering centers situated knowledge. Solidarity cannot flatten different struggles into one language. It must begin from where people stand, their histories, lands, wounds, survival, and limits of vision. Every community sees from somewhere. No position holds the full picture. Listening, then, is not distant sympathy, but a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may become visible.
The program brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Rojava, Artsakh, Khuzestan, and Tehran. The films do not only reflect the present moment of crisis and conflict, but the longer historical formations and structural forces — displacement, ethnic marginalization, petro-capitalism, and the exclusions produced by national projects — that shaped these conditions and continue to shape them.
Harvesting
Througout the gathering,
we introduce the practice of harvesting, a collective method of processing, witnessing, and responding to what we experience together.
Fundraising
Across Palestine, Rojava, Lebanon, Iran, and Artsakh, communities continue to live through war, displacement, militarization, censorship, economic violence, and the long afterlives of colonial and authoritarian projects. Yet even under these conditions, people continue to make worlds: through art, teaching, care, collective survival, memory, and resistance.
The donations gathered through this program will travel to grassroots initiatives and communities whose struggles accompany this gathering.
We do not understand donation as charity detached from relation. We understand it as a gesture of solidarity, however partial and insufficient: a way of refusing distance, and of remaining accountable to the lives, struggles, and futures that this gathering asks us to witness.
If you are able to contribute, your support becomes part of the passage between here and there, between those who listen, those who remember, and those who continue to endure and create under conditions designed to make life impossible.
Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.
TICKETS
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Each ticket will go to the fundraiser. This gathering is about (un)learning together. If you cannot afford the ticket, come by, and we will work it out together.
Day 1 at De Appel is free of charge.
FUNDRAISER LINK or
HERE
If you cannot attend the event, but would like to donate, you can use the link above.
ABOUT
Curated by
Black Holes Archives is an initiative born in the winter of 2026, engaging with grassroots archives and pedagogies rooted in situated knowledge, embodied memory, solidarity, and coexistence. It emerges from a belief that what gets left out of official histories — the margins, the silences, the undocumented — holds its own gravity. Borrowing its name from the essay Cleansing Personal Archives and the Birth of the Black Hole of Collective Memory, it seeks to create space for counter-narratives, micro-histories, informal archives, and oral histories.
The gathering is specially supported by Mensen Maken Nieuw-West
SCHEDULE
De Appel
Thursday 09.07.2026
14:00-20:00
Chapter Zero
Introduction. Situated Beings
14:00 Opening
14:30 - 16:30 Reading Counterpower Amsterdam
16:30 - 17:00 Break / Book Launch: Salah and the people of Qaza between Life and Death
17:00 - 17:45 Dialogue performance by Black Holes Archives and Ehsan Fardjadnia
17:45 - 18:00 Break
18:00 - 19:00 Film Screening:
The MELANCHOLY OF THIS USELESS AFTERNOON Chapters I and II by
Dina Mimi
19:00-20:00 Discussion with filmmakers
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Stories of Resilience: Salah and People of Gaza Between Life and Death by Salah Akram
Lola Lieven
Friday 10.07.2026
15:00-22:30
Chapter One
From Here, From There
14:30 Doors Open
15:00 - 15:10 Introduction
15:10 - 16:35 Film Screening:
happiness
by Firat Yücel and Image Acts
Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship
by
Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema
16:35 - 17:10 Discussion with the filmmakers
17:10 - 17:40 Break
Chapter Two
Geographies of Resistance
17:40 - 19:15 Film Screening from Subversive Film Archives:
Palestine, the Road to Tragedy by
Don Catchlove
Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza
by Moustafa Abuali
Kuneitra. Death of a City by
G. Yacoub
Kufr Shuba by
Samir Nimr
19:15 - 20:00 Dinner with Het Rode Keukentje
20:00 - 21:00 Film Screening
Perpetual Recurrences
by Reem Shilleh
21:00 - 21:40 Discussion with a filmmaker
21:40 - 22:30 Wrap up with music and drinks
Lola Lieven
Saturday 11.07.2026
15:00-22:30
Chapter Three
Denialist Futurity
14:30 Doors Open
15:00 - 15:15 Introduction and Recap
15:15 - 17:45 Film Screening:
Black Back Artsakh
by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri
17:45 - 18:30 Dinner
18:30 - 19:00 Reading:
Denialist Futurity
by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri
19:00 - 19:30 Break
Chapter Four
No Friend but the Mountains
Film
19:30 - 20:30 Film Screening and Talk
A Turtle in Ten Seconds by Rojda Tuğrul
20:30 - 21:00 Break
21:00 - 22:00 Film Screening from Rojava Film Commune:
Letters from Shengal by Dersim Zerevan
22:00 - 22:30 Wrap-up with music and drinks.
Lola Lieven
Sunday 12.07.2026
15:00-22:00
Chapter Five
Living in the Extraction Zone
15:00 - 15:15 Introduction and Recap
15:15 - 16:00 Film Screening
Gas, Fire, Wind by
Kamran Shirdel
16:00 - 16:15 Break
16:15 - 17:30 Film Screening
Meezan by Shahab Mihandoost
17:30 - 18:15 Discussion with the filmmaker
18:15 - 19:00 Dinner
19:00 - 20:00 Film Screening
Siege Your Besiege with Madness by Sina Khanahmadi
Epilogue
Harvesting Workshop
A Letter in Return: Collectively Assembling Fragments into Letters of Solidarity
20:00 - 22:00 Harvesting Workshop
