Museo delle Civiltà – Palazzo delle Scienze, Rome
curated by Marta Federici

Screening of films by:

〰️ Basma Alsharif
〰️ Mustafa Abu Ali
〰️ Emily Jacir

from 3:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Speakers / Marta Federici, Emily Jacir, Monica Maurer

The event is part of the project Geographies of the Selves carried out with the support of the Italian Council, General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity, Ministry of Culture.

On Saturday, February 10, the Museum of Civilizations in Rome hosts Rebuilding a sense of landscape to recover memory: three films about Palestine, an afternoon dedicated to delving into the history of the territory and the Palestinian people through the narratives of directors of different generations.

Starting at 3:00 PM, the films Home Movies Gaza (2013) by Basma Alsharif; Tall el Zaatar (1976) by Mustafa Abu Ali, Jean Khalil Chamoun, and Pino Adriano; letter to a friend (2019) by Emily Jacir, will be screened at the Conference Hall "Filippo Maria Gambari" (Palace of Sciences, Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14, Rome).

The event is part of a broader research project conducted by curator Marta Federici, developed with the support of the Italian Council program, promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, aimed at promoting contemporary Italian art worldwide. Federici's project, winner of the relevant public notice and entitled "Geographies of the Selves," explores the production of images and the development of narratives in video works and experimental films investigating the territories in transformation in the Mediterranean region. By examining the role and possibilities of artistic practices in bearing witness to the profound processes of change that have altered and continue to alter the social and physical conformation of the Mediterranean region, the research develops a reflection on themes such as the construction of hegemonic narratives, the role of historical and personal memory, the landscape as a field of negotiation of the sense of identity and otherness, human capacity to elaborate the space-time dimension, and how to position oneself within it.

The screenings proposed at the Museum of Civilizations originate, in particular, from the dialogue between the Italian curator and the Palestinian artist and director Emily Jacir, who will accompany the screenings together with German filmmaker Monica Maurer, interspersing them with moments of conversation. In her research, Jacir has recounted the Palestinian collective experience through individual, social, and political stories since the late 1990s, while Maurer has been active since the 1970s in the creation and preservation of film and photographic archives dedicated to contemporary Palestinian history. The screenings intend to compare heterogeneous directorial perspectives in methods and attitudes: the lyrical and dreamlike visions of Home Movie Gaza are juxtaposed with the epistolary and diary-like narration of letter to a friend and the documentary approach of Tall el Zaatar. In their succession, the three films reconstruct a map of Palestinian geographies that, traversing time and space, moves from the landscapes of the Gaza Strip to the occupied territories of the West Bank, extending to the territories of the Palestinian diaspora during the initial phase of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s.