You are warmly invited to the second iteration of
Unlearning Maps: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark, presented in the context of the exhibition
Life After Love: In Search of the Militant Image at Framer Framed. The event stands in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence.
In this edition, we will begin by reading a text that helps ground our political approach together, followed by two film screening blocks focusing respectively on Palestinian and Iranian perspectives. We will then reflect on and document (harvest) what we have witnessed and learned. In dialogue with the exhibition, we hope to foster an intergenerational and cross-context exchange starting from situated histories, the horizons of possibility they open up, and grounds for solidarity within the region and beyond.
When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice gets co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also narrows our political imagination, making other futures seem unattainable. Within these constraints, the histories of marginalized peoples, often entangled in these violent frameworks, must be held carefully in order to build other forms of relation and language that resist a return into imperial narratives.
Solidarity, then, cannot be limited by choosing sides within the maps already given to us, or operate by flattening or universalizing all struggles. It must begin from where different people stand, their histories, lands, wounds, and limits of vision. We can begin listening not through detached sympathy, but as a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may then become visible.
SCHEDULE
PROGRAM of Framer Framed
Saturday 28.11.2026
14:00 Collective reading:
Feminist Recalibration of a Magical Compass
On the Difficulties of International Solidarity in Post-Jina Movement
Shima Vezvaei
14:45 Screening Block I: Subversive Film
15:25 Reflection on textile
Break
16:00 Screening block II: Iran.
Siege Your Besiege with Madness
17:20 Reflection on textile
18:00 End
RSVP
Donation link TBA
FUNDRAISING
Across Palestine, Iran, and beyond, 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, but 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.
ABOUT
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.
Block I: Subversive Film
Palestine, the Road to Tragedy
dir. Don Catchlove (From the Subversive Film Archive) / 1970 / UK / 21’ / Arabic w/ EN subs
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Commissioned by the Arab League, the director Don Catchlove repurposes the colonial British archives to explore the Palestinian question, starting from the British Mandate and followed by the Palestinian uprising against the mandate and the creeping Zionist settlement project. Although made by a British director, the film is considered one of the early attempts to decolonise the archives in relation to Palestine, presenting a narrative of resistance that comes from within the archive itself, countering the Western narrative about the events that led to the colonisation of Palestine.
Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza
dir. Moustafa Abuali (From the Subversive Film Archive) / 1973 / LB / 13’ / Arabic w/ EN subs
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A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first cinematic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Abu Ali edited this footage, originally shot by a French news crew, creating one of the earliest films about the occupied territories in the Gaza Strip. Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza uses experimental montage techniques to produce a film that is both cinematically and politically agitational. It was the only film produced by the Palestinian Cinema Group, which later became known as the Palestinian Cinema Institution in 1974.
Siege Your Besiege with Madness
dir. Sina Khanahmadi / 2024 / IR / 56’ / Arabic w/ EN subs
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The new generation of Arabs in Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, is turning to rap music. Although Arabic rap has a short history in the city, a group called “Emad Records” has been working to bring it into the spotlight. In Iran ethnic minorities are not allowed to study in their native languages. Despite lacking a formal education in their native languages, Arab rappers in Ahvaz strive to use poetry and perform rap in their own language to reflect on their experiences and the challenges they face.
