At our first reading, we gathered outside in the rain, sheltering under a concrete awning to read poems by Palestinian writers and those writing toward Palestine. Each poem was selected from a library of photocopies and read by a volunteer. The weather and the public space made it hard to hear every word, but it was important to be together. Our beginning—a huddle of bodies reading in solidarity.

When we started the reading group we didn’t know what it was for. The impulse to do so was driven by a shared sense of distress and anger that something so terrible could be made completely invisible, disappeared from our campus. At the second meeting, we sat in a circle of plastic chairs in an empty room. We read two essays by Palestinian political prisoner and novelist Walid Daqqah but mostly we just needed to be in this circle of chairs, in this empty room to know that there was a starting point. Here, together, we resisted the silence and absence the university insisted upon.¹

Some of those who showed up regularly had been part of previous activism on campus, such as union actions related to the casualisation of the university and the formation of a much-needed group on the VCA campus: the BIPOC collective.² Why insist on a reading group for Palestine though? Are we fixated on one cause? Among these activists, there exists a sense of ‘a moral imperative to be fixated on Palestine.’³ Such intersectional activism with the Palestinian cause is not new. Historically, many leftist groups have been allied with Palestinian justice, seeing parallels with localised efforts to unpack hierarchies of capitalism, workers rights, racial justice and ecological issues. Examples include the South African ANC, the Black Lives Matter, the Irish Liberation movement, The Jewish Labour Bund and other movements for Land Rights and Indigenous self-determination.⁴ The editor of the Funambulist magazine Leopold Lambert reminds us that ‘solidarity does not erase the specificity of each situation and each struggle; quite the contrary.’⁵ While we acknowledge the vast difference between our context here in Naarm and the exceptionality of the Palestinian Liberation struggle, we found the reading group and the speculative artistic proposal of a university here very important in deepening an informed solidarity. ‘Before fascism erases the other, it must purify the self. It must cut off the dissident, cosmopolitan, and solidaristic parts of its own people’s history, to foreclose other futures that might be.’⁶

We find hope in historical and present parallels, where memory and solidarity are not erased. Collectively, students and staff—Kim Feng Cheong, Perin Gulsen, Rosie Isaac, Raafat Ishak, Keiran Molaeb, Lara Oluklu, Lisa Radford and Azza Zein—have conceived different potential designs and ideas that have emerged from our reading and look to counter orientalising approaches. Here, we outline an imagined university where speculative writing centers art and artistic processes as ways to lift us out of the abyss.

Bodies forming a circle, gathering, was the through-line of what we were doing—sometimes it was a small circle, sometimes larger, sometimes our hands were busy folding, cutting, stapling to make pamphlets that we shared. We were one small conversation among many going on all over the world while institutional actions suggest that we should hold up or stop making visible our pro-Palestinian position. As writer Sara Ahmed suggests ‘By accounting for the ‘‘I cannot,’’ for the body that is stopped or held up, we also attend to the condition of possibility for the emergence of a collective form of activism.’⁷ For us artists, this activism lies in the potentiality of drawing objects and spaces that are yet to be. In a world where mainstream media erases the brutality of a genocide and vilifies pro-Palestinian lives, we saw in this speculative and collaborative text a way to make the dis-orientation visible and re-orientation possible.⁸  How do we dis-orient and re-orient our artistic work toward ... a liberated Palestine? A different university model? A kinder world? 

A University for Gaza

We start in the hopeful future: we arrive at the International Airport of Palestine. The airport is integrated within the spatial engineering department, where the ethics around demilitarising space and the discipline of engineering is not taboo but researched. We exit the arrival gate and encounter an escalator named after the artist Larissa Sansour.⁹ The exit door takes us to an olive tree, where taxi drivers are standing. We ask a driver to drop us first at the library.   

Library

A library isn’t that different from a circle of chairs and a collection of photocopied poems. The infrastructure of a library includes: a gathering place (chairs and a rug), shelving and storage, books and other materials (the collection). We think about scholasticide—the destruction of all universities in Gaza, of many libraries including: Gaza City’s Municipal Public Library, The Edward Said Public Library, the library at Al-Aqsa University, Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library, Lubbud Library, Al-Nahda Library, Al-Shorouq Al-Daem Library and many more.¹⁰

We produce a library of questions:

How does a library function not only as a method of preservation but of regeneration, of liberation? Given that gathering to read and hold a vigil was prompted in large part by institutional denial, complicity and silencing—how does a library help us to reimagine our university? How does the library build a collection? What are the processes for deciding what we should read? How does a library hold grief? How does a library mourn? How does a library provide space for questions? For those excluded and silenced? What would a library look like that doesn’t just preserve culture but is a place of living culture? How can we design a university after an ecocide?

Herbarium

The smell of mint, sage and jasmine surrounds the library and all buildings. The university campus in Gaza is anchored around the preservation of herbs, herb research, patterns and songs. The architecture of the herbarium parallels the wild mint herb as drawn in the thirteenth century illustration of the Kitāb al-Ḥashāʼish.¹¹ The book of herbs inspired us to imagine many of the buildings in the form of key herbs. Our discussion has centred around the parallels between orientalising approaches to art, archives and ‘environmental orientalism’.¹²

We have started with three key mentioned herbs: wild mint, the black seed, and the Gundelia. The name of the black seed in Arabic is the Barakeh seed: meaning the seed of blessing. The choice of the Akkoub (Gundelia tournefortii) and Zaatar is inspired by Jumana Manna’s film Foragers.¹³ The film highlights how the Israeli police detain Palestinians who are foraging these herbs. The rest are included for their importance in Arabic cuisine. The images are based on tracing from the book of Herbs: Akkoub (fol 11b), Barakeh (fol 48 a), Wild Mint (fol 21b), Zaatar (fol 22b), Cumin (fol 37a).¹⁴

A Campus Without Borders

The borders of the campus are undefined, with university-associated public buildings distributed throughout the city. For example, a community hospital that treats patients and provides education to future doctors, and a herbarium coordinating across many expanses of farms and park reserves. Libraries and equipment are open-access, requiring inductions and project screening before permitting people to use high-risk materials. The university’s learning format combines lectures, tutorials, and informal open discussions to learn from the community.

An aerial view of some buildings looks like herbs or trees, including a selection of herbal designs along with the map of Gaza. A different angle of the campus centres the olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian culture, depicting the university’s mandate to pass on plant knowledge.  The tree has reached all over the world, forming a global site of learning and community to share Palestinian stories and culture. The circular globe alludes to the use of badges in expressing support for a cause, where dedication to education is resistance. Badges ‘are small enough to be relatively unthreatening, and can slip beyond dramatic protests into everyday life more easily than larger objects.’¹⁵

The flexibility of the design’s dimensions between pocket-size to architectural scale emphasises how the human body simultaneously is embraced and embraces these symbols. The discussions in the reading group have often analysed what constitutes a free space when reading texts by political prisoners or academic texts analysing the politics of space. In A House on the Beach is No Dream, Micaela Sahhar investigates the layers of colonial reframing of architecture in Palestine by drawing attention to the settler nature of Bauhaus architecture and reminding us that a parallel history of Arab modern architecture existed before 1948.¹⁶ So how do we conceive a radical architecture for a university in such a contested space?

The Economic Model

A for-profit university seeks to maximise profit above all other decision-making factors, including management of wages and contracts,¹⁷ conducting research, and centering narratives that benefit investors. In a capitalist system, this often creates an academic-military-industrial complex, as the technologies of war seem to be profitable ventures to invest in.¹⁸

Remaking Communities and Adult Learning cautions against a university’s archival and research work failing to adequately engage with the community and its requirements.¹⁹ This university will examine Gaza’s needs as a foundation that directs and mobilises the institution’s productive potential.

It employs a break-even model to cover the costs of workers’ wages, equipment, and infrastructure. The majority of revenue is publicly funded through corporate taxes and grants. Citizens are not charged for access to libraries and course materials, to lower barriers to entry and encourage life-long learning. The singular university network offers courses in practical skills and theory, with significant real-world experience embedded within the courses to smoothly transition to professional work.

On what labour conditions do we build this university? The workers must be offered free food, breaks, and secure employment. In this future there is no fear of labour, work, and innovation for the people because it will not be built on pain, desperation, and abstraction.²⁰ Incentives to build will be proposed, the workers and people will be in charge, they know what is best. We define rebuilding not as a real estate project like a Riviera, but rather a collaborative grassroots process.²¹ The systems behind architecture design and labour must be in tune with each other: the university construction process must empower the worker.

The Department of Songs and Patterns

The poet Mosab Abu Toha writes:

In Gaza
Our birds have hidden their songs
In their nests before
Flying to search for food.²²

In the Library, we would like to see songs of resistance…

Bu tarla bizim tarla
Parla gül yüzlüm parla
Yakından görüşemem
Uzaktan mendil salla
 
Güllüm açar ağlama
Gündür geçer ağlama
Bu kapıyı kitleyen
Bir gün açar ağlama²³

This land is our land
Shine, my rose face, shine
I can’t see you closely
Wave a tissue from the distance
 
My rose is dying, don’t cry
The day(s) will pass, don’t cry
The person locking this door
One day it will open, don’t cry

In Kurdish, (Zaza/Kirmanjki) Trijda is the light that seeps from the smallest crack/hole/unexpected place. In the struggle against oppression, songs and music have (and will continue) to convey lived experiences, give meaning to loss and suffering, keep language and culture alive, and verbalise experiences of harm. In the face of adversity and displacement, folk songs carve out communal spaces for people to access and exercise their agency. In doing so, speculative worlds where no minority experiences injustice are imagined, (where all the chains are broken). Songs take on the form of poetry and people become memory-makers. The collective desire for a different future emerges, they are intricate, nuanced and encompass multiple perspectives.

The late Palestinian poet Mahmood Darwish reminds us:

I kept nothing but the rhythm
I hear it
and follow it
and lift it, doves
on the path to the sky
the sky of my song²⁴

Just as songs and music are harnessed as a means of collective resistance, so too are traditional textile, weaving and embroidery practices. Embroidery is a treasure trove of women’s stories across the Middle East. For women in Palestine, tatreez (Arabic for embroidery), is an expression of cultural identity that is passed from mother to daughter. These embroidered patterns developed into local styles and function to signify cultural heritage and identify the wearer’s origins (region and even village), through diverse variations in pattern, style and colour.²⁵

In Gaza, typical thob fabrics include linen and cotton and contain coloured silk border stripes.²⁶ Distinctly, indigo (blue) is employed to represent the Mediterranean Sea and Magenta (red) signifies the connection to rich earth and the enduring spirit of the Palestinian people.²⁷ The Cypress tree motif that appears in Gazan Tatreez expresses a unique design heavily embroidered with amulets and triangles. The coffee bean, as well as the heart branch motif emerge regularly. Both convey Palestinian social traditions and symbolise a collective unity, compassion and resilience.²⁸

Every stitch and loom tells a story and every embroidered motif holds hidden meaning. For Palestinian women, the practice of Tatreez, exemplifies and embodies the continuation of a shared cultural identity under the threat of colonial occupation and erasure. Through these intricate stitches, memories and dreams are repeatedly being documented and passed down from one generation of women to the next.  

Conclusion

It is hard to conceive a conclusion for a speculative essay being written in a brutal context that has not been concluded. After this speculative campus tour, we ask you to imagine and scribble a future university, for Naarm or Gaza. Meanwhile we will be drinking Maramiye tea and heading to a workshop that runs activist flash embroidery sessions.