Son[i]a #433
Tareq Khalaf
Still from Tareq Khalaf's film and ongoing project Azziza’s Garden
Filmmaker, urbanist, educator, and cultural practitioner, Tareq Khalaf lives and works in Ramallah, Palestine. Shaped by a family history marked by exile and his own movements between Palestine, the United States, Uganda, and South Africa, Khalaf’s practice emerges from a collective, inherited struggle to remain rooted and sustain ways of belonging within a landscape shaped by occupation and settler colonialism. Trained in architecture and urbanism, Tareq’s work explores agrarian life as a site of memory and resistance, emphasizing the political urgency of restoring situated knowledge, reconciling seasonal rhythms, and preserving ancestral relations with the land.
His film Azziza’s Garden –a work-in-progress that began as his 2020 master’s thesis – documents the everyday life of his great-aunt Azziza, who has tended the family land in Ramallah for over nine decades. Through planting, pruning, and harvesting, Azziza becomes a living archive of ecological knowledge, food sovereignty, and political survival. As the last member of his generation still living in Palestine, Tareq uses filmmaking not only to reconnect with the land and Azziza, but also to ask: what comes next?
Evolving through companionship and reciprocity, the project challenges academic hierarchies by foregrounding Azziza’s cosmology as a form of embodied, intergenerational wisdom. In parallel, Tareq collaborates with Sakiya, an experimental academy for collective learning and land restoration in the village of Ein Qiniya, to create pedagogical and cultural spaces where imagination, community, and resistance can flourish in rural Palestine.
In this podcast, Tareq Khalaf opens a conversation on the agrarian ways of life and the deep-rooted significance of land in Palestinian identity. He reflects on memory, absences, legacies, collective labor, fig harvests, resistance, and radical pedagogies. The conversation also examines the insidious strategies of slow violence at the heart of the settler-colonial project, revealing occupation and its spatial regime –shaped by fragmentation, land confiscation, settlement expansion, conservation policies, and food politics– as a form of environmental erosion and disaster. We also delve into the emotional and psychological toll of life under occupation,,and the vital role of imagination, community, and collective expression in sustaining identity and hope, especially in the face of efforts to normalize deeply abnormal conditions.
In collaboration with:
Sound excerpts from Freesound’s Sounds from Palestine, by Mohammad Balawne:
01’08 Kids playground in Ramallah
02’18 Kids having fun with their uncle
03’48 Immersive Bees Sound
04’57 Deeper Into Old Ramallah
07’57 Street Ambience‚ Äì Ramallah Al-Tahta, Palestine. P1
13’39 Young men working in their farm in Shwikeh
28’27 Crickets, Distant Dogs, and Subtle Echoes
31’37 Construction Site in Ramallah P1
35’04 Sun Set Ambience From Palestine
38’54 Relaxing Insect Sounds from Palestine
42’46 Plane Above Ramallah
47’47 Birds, Backhoe loader, Arabic
55’31 Fighter Jet above Ramallah
58’08 Infront of The Apartheid Wall in Tulkarem
65’37 Evening Birds and Urban Ambience – Ramallah Municipality
71’38 Best Maghreb Call For Prayer You’ll Ever Hear
80’12 Banging Pots for Gaza: Peaceful Protest in Ramallah
Conversation: pantea and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: pantea. Sound: taken from Freesound's Sounds from Palestine, by Mohammad Balawne.
ATTRIBUTION/NON-COMMERCIAL/SHARE-ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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