MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI /// Walls, Ground, Atmospheres, and Bodies in Palestine

This conversation with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi can be divided into three chapters, all corresponding to one physical aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in relation to Palestinian bodies. We begins with the physicality of the wall and compare its securitarian spectacularity with the ones built at the edges of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the last decade. We then address the question of the ground and its ability to shake our convictions when no longer providing the resistance to the entropy named gravity, like during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Finally, we talk about the colonized atmosphere on the traces of Frantz Fanon, and the difficulty one finds in breathing within it.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist. Her work in film, video, text, sound, photography, and performance appears in a wide variety of exhibitions and publications. Forthcoming books include American Letters (Zer0, 2015) and a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016). She writes the blog South/South and is an editor at The New Inquiry. In 2014-2015 she a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow based in the West Bank.

WEBSITES:

– http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/southsouth/
– http://harvard.academia.edu/mmg

REFERENCE ARTICLE:

– Mirene Arsanios, “Forensic Transgressions: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi in conversation with Mirene Arsanios,” on ibraaz.org (November 6, 2014)

REFERENCE BOOKS:

– John T. Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care, Princeton University Press, 2013.
– Edward Paice, Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, Quercus, 2010.
– Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, Grove Press, 1959.