DAAR/studio in exile: 01 PRESENT RETURNS

London, Delfina Foundation
Wednesday 2 July 2014, 10.00 – 12.00
RSVP-guestlist@delfinafoundation.com

Participants: Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman, Ismail Shek Hassan, Muhammed Jabali, Shourideh Molavi, Gautam Bhan, Ruba Saleh, Umar al-Ghubari.

Return is a political act that is both practiced at present and projected as an image into an uncertain future. But return cannot be understood only as the suspended politics of an ideological projection, but also as a varied form of politics constantly practiced, grounding a future ideal in present day material realities. This represents a varied set of practices and spatial interventions that we would like to call “present returns”. The concept of present returns grounds the right of return in daily material practices. Traditionally, the return is understood as a coming back to one’s places of origin and one’s property. However, during the sixty-six years of exile, conditions have changed not only in the cities, towns, and villages that were cleansed but also in the places of refuge, where a new political culture has gradually started to articulate itself. The return poses both a challenge and a promise that are far in excess of the mere reversal of time. It is the most necessary move in the implementation of decolonization because the notion of returns demands the complete reorganization of modes of property ownership and the relation between multiple polities and territory.

Returns will have a simultaneous material effect in both the sites of origin and the sites of displacement. The result might be a reciprocal extraterritoriality that connects the two sites into a single dislocated site. This project seeks thus to chart out and intervene within a wider field of possible political, social and cultural practices of returns.

The right of return is the right to the urban, to a condition of heterogeneity and multiplicity that may already distinguish the sites of origin. Furthermore, the right of return challenges the structure of property rights and means that new forms of co-habitation will need to be developed. But the returns of Palestinian refugees will not only demand a radical change in and to Israel/Palestine, they will also affect the transformation of cities across the entire region. There are millions of refugees across the region already undergoing revolts and massive transformations, mainly on the outskirts of the now burning conurbations of Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, and Amman. The emergence of refugees as a diffused polity might help us to rethink today’s struggles not from the point of view of national liberation, but from that of a continued profanation and decolonization of state borders.