Leyla-Nour Benouniche
Internship: Moving Mountains : Fannie Sosa and Navild Acosta
justthis-spaceship.com, instagram.com/da_leylaa, leylanourben@outlook.com, instagram.com/justthis_palace, instagram.com/kabkstudentunion
WELCOME TO THE FRIEND-SHIP
Quick tip before we ride together:
Space is big, very big, but a space-ship is limited, and ours is very cosy. We have a zero tolerance policy for infectious galactic diseases such as white supremacy, homophobia, anti-blackness, trans-phobia, ableism or islamophobia. We do not support hate speeches or rigid cancel culture. Space is very big, don't end up out here all alone.
GRADUATION PROJECT
What if all forms of (free) labor were recognised?
What if we were really decolonised?
What if steady effort took over urgency?
What if we could rest?
"What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing."Adrienne Maree Brown
Inspired by the North African 'qaada' or hammams, Just This Spaceship is a platform and toolkit which mediates a space for this culture to grow within artistic and epistemic structures.
THESIS
Abracadabra - Intersections of cultural politics in imaginary times
===This thesis explores a budding phenomenon, imagining pockets of possibility in a synchronic and global way. It explores how its participants deal with internalised bias, practice pleasurable resistance and organize for future communities. We will see the generative and the destructive uses of memory, identity, and embodiment, and how these emergent methodologies engage with speculation.
__A continuous motion
_Accelerate-
-Accelerating-_
But there is something happening in Europe,-
_-Dancing on the ruins of the post-orientalist stage; in the desert of the unreal; high on the opulence of emptiness. -Something is happening in Europe-
-The internet as a public square,-
Arabfuturism celebrates the temporalities of our colla borative genealogies-
Sulaiman Majali reflects on the resulting alignment of diverse struggles protesting the “hegemonic stance on European people of colour” gaining exposure in recent global shifts. In a “growing discourse, within Europe, surrounding the policing and censoring of brown minds(...) the power to define has never been more contested.”
This thesis is a collection of observations, dreams, theories and reflexions imagining the destructive but more importantly, the generative potentials of new media and the shifting paradigm, with an analysis informed by past cycles of oppression and its evolving tools. To do so we will understand the origins and warped functions of processes of epistemicide within official structures and how its Orientalist fictions translate to cultural production. We will then explore alternative, informal spaces of imagination and how they can free targeted communities from those representations, before exploring further radical approaches to speculative fiction in socially active cultural politics.