Participants: Leila Awadallah, Linda Al Rajabi, Samar Zughool, Anwar Samara
Moderated by: Emina Bužinkić
This panel interbraids practices of architecture, movement, community art, and critical pedagogy to think resistance as something lived, sensed, and enacted through bodies, spaces, and relations. It does so in full awareness of the ongoing brutalization of Palestine, where violent cuts fracture the land and leave it bleeding across time and generations.
Refusing the colonial naming of the so-called “Middle East” as a cartographic convenience of empire, the panel asks what it means to think and feel beyond imposed geographies—toward lands, histories, and solidarities that persist despite fragmentation, occupation, and erasure.
In dialogue with Anwar Samara, Leila Awadallah, Samar Zughool, and Linda Al Rajabi, the panel explores how embodied practices reimagine connection across violently divided lands and lives. From re-stitching land through speculative urban design, to dancing grief and resistance into collective motion, to diasporic art as feminist method, to classrooms as sites of critically grounded worldmaking—these interventions insist on life amid structures of death and politics of debilitation.
Together, the speakers foreground how bodies remember what borders attempt to sever; how land holds histories that outlive empire’s maps; and how resistance emerges through everyday acts of teaching, moving, building, and imagining otherwise. At a time marked by mass violence, dispossession, and ongoing genocide, this panel affirms embodied resistance as a force that reclaims meaning, restores relationality, and sustains politics of life beyond the geographies of empire.
Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and sometimes Beirut. She is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project alongside her sister Noelle Awadallah. Her artistry holds Palestine at the center —rooting her embodied research in practices that disrupt settler colonial narratives while invoking/conjuring/demanding Right of Return and cultural INTIFADA. Leila has received multiple fellowships: DanceUSA, McKnight, Jerome Hill, and Daring Dances. Her artistry is meaningfully impacted by her years working with Ananya Dance Theatre, Theater of Women of the Camp (Lebanon) and El-Funoun (Palestine).
Linda Al Rajabi was born in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she spent her early childhood with her parents, sister, and brother. Following the outbreak of war, her family was evacuated from their besieged hometown to Karlovac, Croatia, where she completed her primary and secondary education. She pursued higher education in Zagreb, enrolling at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she studied English and Turkish language and literature. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Linda returned each summer to Hebron, Palestine — bearing witness to the erasure of the land that had belonged to her ancestors for generations.
Samar Zughool is a researcher and community artist at Reka Si, a diasporic intersectional feminist organization focused on research and art. She migrated from Jordan to Slovenia in 2014 and dedicated her master’s thesis to the role of women’s rights movements in reforming public policy after the Arab Spring. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Ljubljana, where her research explores diasporic community arts as methodologies for critical and feminist social work.
Anwar Samara is a Palestinian architect, urban planner, and researcher. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Ljubljana, focusing on urban design strategies in Palestine. Her work explores architecture as a form of resistance under conditions of occupation. Through her practice, she highlights how spatial design can preserve identity, support resilience, and challenge systems of control.
Screening schedule
- Dokukino KIC
