This day-long gathering brings together guests whose practices engage with sound, piracy, anti-colonial solidarity, archiving, and critical fabulation. It is convened by yasmine eid-sabbagh and Layal Ftouni in conjunction with the opening of the project Frictional Conversations – The Script by yasmine eid-sabbagh and organised by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.

The programme is divided in two parts. The study session in the morning is guided by Rayya Badran and Alia Mossallam, and builds on their research and work with radio and sound archives, tracing presences and erasures that speak to histories of anti-colonial, working class, and solidarity movements and struggles. During the session, participants will work with archival materials they have collected and engage in collective readings of texts to map the ways in which histories of struggle can be traced and co-constructed to uphold their legacy into the future.

The afternoon programme starts with a conversation between yasmine eid-sabbagh and Layal Ftouni and continues with three invited guests: Rayya Badran, Alia Mossallam, and DJ Lynnée Denise. The conversations address the role of sound and pirate radios in forging anti-colonial solidaries, focusing on Palestine and other transnational struggles. The speakers will also talk about the place of speculative imagination and critical fabulations as methods of interventions in archives, and storytelling against the grain of colonial histories. Finally, the panel attends to the entanglement of visual, narratological, and sonic registers in the transmission of the affective and political grammars of solidarities.

Closed study session with Rayya Badran and Alia Mossallam
Limited capacity, lunch included (13:30–14:30)

Conversation part one: between yasmine eid-sabbagh and Layal Ftouni
Conversation part two: with Rayya Badran, Alia Mossallam, and DJ Lynnée Denise, facilitated by yasmine eid-sabbagh and Layal Ftouni

Accessibility notes

○ GROND is located on the ground floor and has two barrier-free entrances;
○ It has gender neutral, and wheel-chair accessible toilets;
○ Seated event;
○ Language: English with live captioning (speech-to-text interpretation).

Frictional Conversations – The Script is presented by If I Can’t Dance in the framework of Edition X: Body as Memory and was commissioned as part of the Consortium Commissions — a project initiated by Mophradat. The project is further supported by the Mondriaan Fund, AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), het Cultuurfonds, and the DOEN Foundation. The symposium is co-organised with, and supported by de Appel and, partially, by the Dutch Research Council through Layal Ftouni’s VENI grant Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival.