Sumud

In this podcast, Filmmaker, urbanist, educator, and cultural practitioner 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 this podcast, Palestinian cultural organiser and activist Fadya Salfiti unfolds the layers of her trajectory –from Kuwait to the United States and then to Jerusalem– to reflect on what it means to go back, to take root, and to struggle in an occupied land. From her situated experience, she dismantles the “humanitarian” and “developmentalist” façade of international aid: how colonial philanthropy depoliticises struggles, fragments the territory, gathers data, monitors, imposes external priorities, and generates dependency. Against this, she proposes other ways of sustaining life and collective projects: networking, self-organising, solidarity among organisations, and the creation of projects such as Owneh Initiative and Rawa, which seek to liberate resources, language, political discourse and  imagination. Here, memory acts as insubordination, return as a daily practice, and community organising as a radical wager on Palestine’s future.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across sound, image, text, installation and performance, unfolding a practice that moves between documentation and performativity, between political reality and speculative imagination. Focusing on their works in the MACBA Collection, FONS AUDIO #65 turns to their reflection on Prisoners of Love (Until the Sun of Freedom) (2024–2025). Developed as a site-specific multimedia installation, the work emerges from their ongoing research into the resilience of former Palestinian political prisoners, where song and poetry persist as forms of transmission under conditions of confinement.