For the Bergen Assembly, the Communist Museum of Palestine will share activities which will comprise part of the fourth phase of its de/construction which is entitled دال-صفر d-0.

d-0 دال-صفر is the most critical phase of the museum’s reclamation, because it is a process by which its very premises will be intensified, communalized and tested further.

The museum has begun its reclamation by asking what sense to repeat forms and infrastructures of art which have been constructed not only on the basis of colonial, racial, patriarchal, capitalist violence but also in order to maintain the supremacies they institute - the same censoring boards, the same hierarchal and bureaucratized violence, the same dependence on an enriched, chosen, certified few to determine for the impoverished many what culture is and should become.

The museum’s animators have asked can communities, using a basic communist ethic (from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs) reimagine other possibilities for life, for art and their infrastructures of support? Moreover, by centering these questions through the enduring practices and experiences situated in Palestine, there is a more fundamental question: How can communities, who have survived and resisted ongoing colonial, racial, genocidal violence, offer clues to relinking, rethinking, reimagining a destiny and care for art and life which is not founded on nor committed to reproducing forms of supremacy?

The urgency of asking whether we can exit the cultures of supremacy is grounded in a fundamental question of how we want to live together? What are the premises of future which insist on the perpetration and denial of the continued destruction of the planet and so many of its unique life forms, communities? If the dominant hegemonic western cultures have been shaped through genocidal violence and the subsequent institutionalization of forms of denial, can the regenerative forces, political practices of love, of solidarity reimagined, of the reclamation of spaces of autonomy, of transcommunal learning — with and through situated experiences, cultures, practices of outliving such forms of violence — restore our capacities to reclaim the common premises and equality of all life? Can we outlive the cultures of genocide/denial? What kind of forms of togetherness, of common/s and senses of our near and distant pasts can be forged to reclaim our worlds in common?

Situating these questions through and with Palestine carries a specific meaning, relevance, responsibility and urgency - not only because we have asked them prior to what is today rendered undeniable in Gaza, that is the underlying obliterative drive of the Nakba (the catastrophe) - but also because we can see more clearly than ever what a world, an idea of culture constituted on reasserting this denial of the Nakba and the supremacist violence it authorizes means and has always meant on a planetary scale.

For the Bergen Assembly, the museum is planning

a. Aseries of assemblies, encounters, seminars, meetings, programs, materials disseminating, exploring further these and related urgent questions.

b. As a baseline we will be forming the Bergen Committee for d-0. this committee will coordinate different processes before and during the bergen assembly. we hope that the process will be rich enough that its efforts may also stretch beyond the time frame of the bergen assembly itself.

c. An open call related to the friends to come, who can help put together, a life affirming vision of what an abolitionist praxis - as it regards the modern/colonial museum and the wider infrastructures of art and learning - could look like.

The call will be a contribution to the wider call of d-0 دال-صفر d-0 دال-صفر proceeds with the conviction that there is no future possible for earth, for our common worlds without reckoning with and beginning to see Nakba not only in its specificity of structured oblivion, obliteration, denial of Palestinian life and the violence Palestinians have been enduring for a century, but also an invitation to consider through various histories, across geographies, communities how that structure and its processes have been imposed on a planetary scale.

d-0 دال-صفر asserts that if the Nakba and its denial have been constitutive of the post-second world war world ordering, then culture, cultural forms and their associated infrastructures have been deeply affected and impacted by this process, structuring, regime.

d-0 دال-صفر is an attempt to delink the fate and future of our cultures from complicity in the long durée of genocidal/denialist violence as they have been perpetrated against Palestinians and other communities historically and to the present day.

d-0 دال-صفر is thus a call to all those who resist these cultures of impunity and denial, to link their practices together, to divest collectively from reproducing a futurity premised on relegating this living past to death and oblivion.

If the past is not dead and is what constitutes our contemporary condition and predicament, then repeating, retrieving, reconsidering, reclaiming, confronting all those histories of racial, patriarchal, imperial, colonial violence cannot be averted. How we can reclaim a cultural movement which not only confronts these shared histories but tries to weave them together, to be in dialogue, to plot courses or images of future which do not deny their existence and their immense relevance, not merely as truths, but truths which carry with them urgent responsibilities, this could be part of the adventure of whatever we understand as d-0 دال-صفر. 

d-0 دال-صفر as a call toward collective studies, actions, encounters, processes, texts, objects, forms, softstructures weaving our existing efforts toward such a movement.

d. One significant component of the museum’s, the committee’s, and d-0’s manifestation in Bergen will be a public site realized and hosted through a collaboration with Oslo based collective tenthaus. This will be one critical node of access and mode of opening some of the fields of study with a broader public.

e. A second significant component will involve the realization, placing, arrangement, hosting, sharing of objects, archives, works of art as well as projects, thinking and  asserting a culture delinked from the denial of Palestine, of the Nakba, both in its specificity to Palestine as well as its larger more planetary ramifications. These will be shared in Bergen and potentially other parts of Norway in homes, cultural, common and public spaces coordinated with the Bergen Committee of d-0.

- Communist Museum of Palestine, 2025