You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising at de Appel (9 July) and Lola Lieven (10–12 July), in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. The programme brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Rojava, Artsakh, Iran and Turkey.

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. 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 marginalised peoples are often folded into these frameworks, but this does not delegitimise their struggles. It makes it more urgent to hold them carefully, and to build forms of relation, language, and solidarity that cannot be returned to imperial powers and narratives.

This 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.

Reading Counterpower is an initiative to gather and collectively learn from the tools that revolutionary movements from all over the world have offered. It is a space for collective learning through study and community building. By learning from various anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements, Reading Counterpower strives to strengthen international solidarity.

“This is not just a book; it is a screaming, recorded on paper. I am Salah, a young man who once dreamed of building a future, only to find myself living through a genocide written by bombs, the absolute and terrifying algorithm of destruction. This memoir is a testament to the fact that wars do not just destroy buildings; they shatter the silent architecture of the soul. My story begins in Rafah, a city that was once home to simple dreams of university elevators, football matches, and late-night programming sessions, only to become the epicenter of a historical tragedy.”

From: the introduction of Stories of Resilience: Salah and People of Gaza Between Life and Death

Built from fragments of personal narratives, testimonies, messages, images, and archival traces, this dialogue performance brings together voices from within Iran and across the diaspora. It reflects on the long winter of 2026, a period marked by war, disconnection, and uncertainty, and the afterlives of successive crises. Through a conversation woven from multiple voices, the piece traces how events are lived differently across distance: how news becomes experience, how proximity shapes what can be known or said. Projected images, videos, and archival materials accompany the dialogue, holding open a space where personal and collective histories meet without resolving. The performance assembles fragments, allowing different perspectives, contradictions, and unfinished stories to remain in conversation with one another.

To close the day, we will screen Dina Mimi’s film THE MELANCHOLY OF THIS USELESS AFTERNOON Chapter I and II, followed by an online discussion with Dina Mimi. Chapter I of the film reflects on the role of the fugitive and the smuggler. It layers images of birdsong competitions from Suriname, and revolutionary songs from Oman, Yemen, and Palestine accompanied by a narrative contemplating movement, loss, separation, and revolutionary practice. Chapter II employs a clandestine style to document bird smuggling and the role the human body plays in this act.