d-0 دال-صفر
Communist Museum of Palestine / d-school in Bergen
Over the course of the Bergen Assembly, the Communist Museum of Palestine and the Bergen Committee for d-0 د٠ will animate the d-school.  d-school is an ongoing attempt to reimagine what comes before and beyond the settlements of knowledge and education whether of museums or universities. How to reclaim learning and study as integral elements of life in common and our efforts, struggles to reimagine, reshape its conditions? In the midst of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which is intensified daily in its most acute form in Gaza, the d-school will become a site for thinking how such violence has emerged, how it is connected to other experiences of such violence, how art and knowledge practices have been shaped by such violence, what we can do together to stop it, to abolish and delink from the cultures that have and continue to make it possible?  Can there be such a thing as a genocidal culture? What are the cultures of genocide? What forms and practices of denial are integral to forming cultures of genocide? How have those who have been subject to such violence found ways to overcome and resist these cultures of genocide and denial? If the name for this obliterative violence has been called the Nakba (the Catastrophe) by Palestinians, can we use our occasions of study to think further through what it has meant, what it means today and how its perpetration/denial has been integral to producing the conditions for racial, patriarchal, capitalist, colonial, imperial forms of violence on a planetary scale? Can we also use our assemblings to practice, share ways and forms of un/doing, thinking, learning, relating which at their heart show us what could be cultural practices and forms which have and will continue to outlive those constructed to deny or enforce futures built on genocidal violence? The program will begin with Munir Fasheh orienting our process by sharing Mujawarah as a ground for thinking an other way to relate to learning which respects the innate capacities of all of us to produce meaning.   On Friday the 12th we will begin with Munir at 11am. The idea is that a group will form through the Mujawarah and  will continue to hold that space together intensively until the 16th.   The Mujawarah that forms will determine the timing and rhythm of our assembling for the following days.  At 4pm on the 12th at Katedralskole, for those unable to follow the Mujawarah, there will be a more public moment in which  Munir and a few of the animators of the d-school will be in conversation with tenthaus.  At 5pm on the 15th at Bergen Assembly, there will be a second public moment of the d-school, with writer and theorist Peter Makhlouf (Learning Nakba, Unlearning the 'After')  sharing some reflections on the Mujawarah we have  been animating and link them with some questions he has been thinking through, regarding the cultural and philosophical armature which have perpetrated and denied the Nakba, especially as they relate to the questions of education, knowledge and cultural production in the aftermath of the second war world.  On the basis of the group that forms around the Mujawarah and/or others interested in joining the the d-school from the 16-19th, we will be determing the scope of activities and times for assembling.  On these days, the d-school will be animated by the Mandaloun Collective (including Izz Aljabari, Shahd Itbakhi, and Rani Al-Sharabati) who are based in Al Khalil / Hebron and will be with us for the entire duration of the d-school. We will also be joined by writer and historian Mezna Qato.  On the 17th at 4pm at Katedralskole as part of the d-school, we will have yet another public moment (Archival Resistance to the Nakba), this time beginning a dialogue between Mezna and Mandaloun Collective so as to think through our contemporary understandings of the Nakba, what Palestinians are enduring today and how reopening our relation to the archival can offer us different entry points to perceiving and confronting the long durée of this violence as well as plotting our potential ways of outliving it.   The points of departure for the conversation will be Rawhi Studio collection in Hebron (the first photographic studio in Hebron comprising over 200,000 photographs spanning Jordanian rule, the post-Naksa occupation and the arrival of the Palestinian Authority) and the Grinde collection in Bergen (one of the biggest photographic achives of the Nakba in its post 1948 moment) Those interested in taking part should write to bergen [at] d-0.org. * Mujawarah مجاورة from jiwar (جوار, proximity and close distance) is neither a lecture nor does it have a predetermined goal, it is rather a meandering in convivial language and a sharing of a period of time together; a nourishing of a lifeworld together shaped through words, food, movement, and emphasizing relations to all matter and all that matters around us. This emphasis is encouraged through a proximity to al-kalimat al-hasanah الكلمات الحسنة, kind words, words that nurture the heart, the words that arrive through experience, through stories, through an understanding, an undergoing - of taking care and distancing oneself from al-kalimat al-khabithah الكلمات الخبيثة,  malicious words which we are exposed to, or which are forced on us, in many situations in our everyday lives.  Mujawarah is a way of reclaiming wisdom, and has a closer relation to tafakkur (تفكّر contemplating), than to tafkeer (تفكير thinking) which is a purely mental process directed towards the production of ideas. Tafakkur is a repetition of an effort that requires a broader and a more holistic understanding of a situation to arrive at a lived meaning of truth. Through this repetition, one arrives closer to al-Hikma (الحكمة wisdom), which in Arabic implies experience, time spent with wise persons, reading books of wisdom that record the ways of the wise ancestors and avoiding the influence and company of the ignorant (those who ignore the necessary). Mujawara has no predetermined schedule, only a specified location and a time for beginning, the rest is decided together through the encounter. As a result, Mujawarah is not based on a model, each iteration is singular and has its own specificity through the constellation of words, places, times and those partaking in it.