Capacity will be limited for this free workshop, booking is essential.

For this workshop,  Writer and poet Mahmoud Alshaer invites people to share in his compositional method: a daily practice in which he asks what it means to write under different temporal regimes—the present, during the genocide, and during the occupation.

Overview

Writer and poet Mahmoud Alshaer’s incredible books I Am Still Alive and A Year on the Abyss of Genocide are vital affirmation of everyday life in Gaza. For this workshop, he invites people to share in his compositional method: a daily practice in which he asks what it means to write under different temporal regimes—the present, during the genocide, and during the occupation.

Mahmoud Alshaer is a central figure in Gaza’s cultural life as the founder and editor of 28 Magazine and 28 Gallery, a community cultural space in Rahfa which included exhibitions, music and social gatherings. At the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, disconnected with no  access to art and culture, Mahmoud started to write about his and his families daily experiences of living under structural state violence. These accounts have been compiled into the books: A Year on the Abyss of Genocide and I am Still Alive, exceptional collections which follow Mahmoud’s displacement and eventual return throughout a year in Gaza.

Mahmoud described the daily process of writing during the genocide as a healing exercise, an act of resistance, to remain human while living under state violence. Now living in France, Mahmoud maintains daily writing strategies to make sense of his situation.

Each day, Mahmoud will choose 3-5 words from the dictionary and will write about what those words mean(t) to him through 3 different time zones; the present, during the genocide and during the occupation. This exercise allows Mahmoud a process to think through memory and re-membering; through mourning; through gesture, and beyond colonial ideas of time.

This workshop will be an unique opportunity to spend time with Mahmoud. During the writing workshop, he will share this daily process and work with a small group to adapt and interpret this structure.

Capacity will be limited for this free workshop, booking is essential.

Content Notes: During this workshop you will be asked to write from lived experience.