How To Inherit a History of Solidarity? is the second chapter of Choosing the Sad End, a four-chapter artistic research project that critically interrogates national liberation and transnational solidarity and asks: How did the left's political and cultural-artistic project shift from an internationalist liberation project to just symbolic gestures within a globalized political economy of solidarity?

Through dialogues in four different cities — Amman, Nicosia, Beirut, and Tunis — the project seeks to inspire a political imagination in the current moment, by engaging with archival and historical networks, various publications, knowledge production, artworks, and films. These materials engage with national liberation, decolonization movements, and transnational solidarity in the Global South. In each city, the project collaborates with a co-curator and partner art space around its core questions.

In the Nicosia chapter, we focus on the archive of Palestinian and independent publications produced in Cyprus between the 1980s and 1990s, including Al-Karmal, Palestinian Studies, Palestinian Revolution, and other periodicals. The publications spanned a wide range of formats and themes — social studies, theoretical reflections, literary production, and journalistic periodicals. Printed in Cyprus through what we call an infrastructure of solidarity, they were then distributed across Arabic-speaking countries. This work was carried out alongside major literary figures such as Mahmoud Darwish and Salim Barakat.

How To Inherit a History of Solidarity? takes this history as a starting point to rethink and practice solidarity in today's moment of genocide in Gaza, militarization, financialization, and the rise of populism and fascism. The geographies gathered in this chapter may seem distant and disparate, yet they are entangled in a long shared history of colonialism. As the abolitionist thinker Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, geographies of abolition — that is, of solidarity — are “the negation of the overlapping and interlocking carceral geographies of which the prison-industrial complex is one examplar — while absolutely nonexhaustive”.

Public program:

Monday 28th
- “Under the shades of the olive tree in Cyprus, Arabic soil speaks” by Ali al-Adawy
- “Article 1 - Human Dignity” by Sami Rostum & Sina Ahmady (Fehras Publishing Practices) with Seta Astreou Karides

Tuesday 29th
- “Palestine in Cyprus: Political intimacies, geopolitical imagination, and solidarity in the 1980s” by Panayiotis Achniotis
- “Restless Returns: Vignettes from Amman” by Joud al-Tamimi (Asphalt)
- Two short films by Jocelyne Saab and Layaly Bader with an introduction by Ali al-Adawy

Choosing The Sad End is conceptualised by Ali al-Adawy, developed by Wekalet Behna (cultural centre based in Alexandria) and Asphalt (cultural centre based in Amman), and funded by AFAC (Arab Fund for Arts and Culture) and SDC (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation).