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Tagged: Activism

Old photograph of a boy, above it a rubber stamp.

Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence

By Judith Sieber. With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.” This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment. The author takes a look at three films – “Das falsche Wort” (English The Lie, 1987) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, “Empty Metal” (2018), a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, and “Vents Violents” (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025.

Palestine and the Migrant Question in Postcolonial France

By Olivia C. Harrison. This article is a review of Olivia Harrison’s new book “Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France”. She examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, she shows that the Palestinian question has served as a “rallying cry” for anti-colonial and antiracist activists for the past fifty years.

Spaces of Participation: Dynamics of Social and Political Change in the Arab World

By Randa Abou Bakr, Ulrike Freitag, and Sarah Jurkiewicz. The uprisings in the Arab region in 2010/11 took many observers of the political scene by surprise, given the authoritarian nature of most regimes in the area. However, the roots and reflections of these uprisings can be found in the social, cultural, and artistic spheres of these locations, as we argue in our book.