/si:n/ Biennale of video arts and performance was co-founded in 2009 by the A.M. Qattan Foundation, Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques and the French Institute in Ramallah. It takes place in Ramallah, Gaza, and for some of its editions in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jenine…
This year, the partnership gathered 6 cultural institutions: A.M. Qattan Foundation, Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques/ Marseille, Eltiqa/ Gaza, Shababek for Contemporary Art/ Gaza an the Ramallah Municipality.
For its 6th edition in September 2019, the festival decided to have the main shopping street of
Ramallah under the occupation of others eyes, with 2 performances and 16 video installations.
“To see our own town not only through anthropocentrism but also from the point of view of animals, insects, plants, can reveal another story of the body. Erected, confined, full up, subjugated, groomed, anonymised, sacrificed… Analogies with human being can emerge, bring to different thoughts and actions. To see our own town not only as a space where human being is a minor figure with the role of a consumer, but a space of wanderings, of dreams, of encounters. To change a commercial street into a botanical garden, a zoo, by occupying its shop windows, its stalls, its storefronts, its advertising spaces, means to open a competition between two trickeries, two fantasies: the consumerist happiness and the unspoiled nature. The history of visual arts, of cinema and video art is full of animals representations, of wild world, of animals or flowers still lives, of underwater worlds, of scientific or phantasmagoric visions of these worlds that are, let us not fool ourselves, visions on ourselves and human life. We suggest to change for a few days, a shopping street of the city of Ramallah, to have it under animal and vegetal world occupation, and to invite for that purpose contemporary artistic creations, video and digital art, photography, performance…”.
Institut Français de Jérusalem – Ramallah Ramallah
