The symposium “Collaborations between peripheries” brings together cultural and film workers across the Balkans and Southwest Asia. For three days, we intend to examine historical connections between the regions, explore similarities and differences in their positions as peripheries within the systems of global cultural industries, and speculate on the forms and significance of mutual collaborations. In times when imperial and settler colonial forces are enacting utter horrors around the world by destroying populations, environments, and infrastructures, we cannot help but seek ways to come together in our effort to overcome the shaping of the world according to the logic of genocidal forces and racial capital. Certainly meager in scale, our urge to come together nevertheless helps us, offering insights into the histories of international alliances that stood in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. Often meandering, persistently marginalized, these modalities of connection continually remain just under the threshold of legibility. Yet they teach us that and how resistance survives even the harshest conditions. Our program centers on exchanges and struggles, forged around cinema, that bring together people across the Balkans, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Bringing together a range of film workers–from filmmakers and festival programmers to cultural organizers and researchers–the symposium invites them to think through their existing practices and to jointly map the traits of our peripheralities. Departing from such materialist accounts, we’ll aim to speculate and enact bonds that can matter in our struggles to reshape the world in accordance with principles of justice and non-exploitation.
The focus of the first day is bonds established in the past, particularly those forged through the Non-Aligned Movement between Yugoslavia and the Arab world. Simultaneously, we will think through film work that emerges from diasporic experiences and from geographies that in the post-1990s period have become disconnected. Together with editor and artist Hrvoslava Brkušić, filmmakers Theo Panagopoulos and Sanaz Sohrabi, and researcher Žiga Smolič, we will trace different experiences, histories, and cinematic practices, allowing us to grasp how solidarities were once imagined and how they were materially sustained. Building on Smolič’s research, which focuses on the Palestinian revolution and Yugoslav relations with Egypt and Iraq, we revisit the historical infrastructures of anti-imperialist alliances. In dialogue with the artistic and filmmaking practices of Theo Panagopoulos, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Hrvoslava Brkušić, spanning collective memory and anti-colonial methodologies in working with archives and visual histories of the Global South, we explore how cinema-making can both inherit and unsettle the past.
On the second day, we turn to the present conditions of these geographies, examining the processes of their peripheralization and the historical, political, and economic forces that continue to produce it. The second panel questions how this knowledge survives today: which connections have been sustained, which have been interrupted or erased, and what forms of struggle, imagination, and cultural work still bring us together. The panel brings together Abdalla’s curatorial and academic work around Arab cinema and its circulation, Kelada’s research on labor and media cultures in Egypt and the Global South, and Perić’s journalistic and activist engagement with Palestine, feminism, and anti-imperialist struggle to think through the infrastructures that shape what can be seen and shared. In dialogue with Vuković and Aleksov, whose recent work has been tied to the student protests in Serbia and the blockade of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, we will also consider how contemporary forms of organizing and cultural production create new spaces of resistance within conditions of precarity, censorship, and political exhaustion.
On the final day, we turn toward speculation and offer an imagining of new possibilities for future collaborations. Practical questions guide us: what can we actually do together? How can we share resources, knowledge, infrastructures, programs, spaces, and forms of support across these geographies? Moving from histories and present conditions into what is still unfinished, this closing day hopes to open possible connections for the future: modest, concrete, and necessary bonds through which cultural, political, and cinematic work might continue.
Program
Day 1 — Entangled Histories
Participants: Hrvoslava Brkušić, Theo Panagopoulos, Sanaz Sohrabi, Žiga Smolič
Moderator: Sima Kokotović
Day 2 — Peripheries Now
Participants: Mariz Kelada, Ivana Perić, Emilija Vuković, Feodor Aleksov, Iskandar Abdalla
Moderator: Karla Crnčević
Day 3 — Collaborative Futures
Participants: Hrvoslava Brkušić, Theo Panagopoulos, Sanaz Sohrabi, Žiga Smolič, Mariz Kelada, Ivana Perić, Emilija Vuković, Feodor Aleksov, Iskandar Abdalla
Moderators: Karla Crnčević, Sima Kokotović
