The conference “Mahmoud Darwish: Narrative of the Past and Present” concludes its work, after a series of seminars and conferences, presented and attended by critics, writers and poets from inside and outside occupied Palestine.
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The conference was held over 3 days and saw a large participation
The AM Qattan Foundation concluded yesterday, Saturday, the activities of the conference “Mahmoud Darwish: Narrative of the Past and Present”, which it held in collaboration with the “Mahmoud Darwish Cultural and University Chair” – the BOZAR Foundation from Belgium, and the two institutions “Moseem” (MUCEM) and “CAMARGO” from France, and the “Mahmoud Darwish Foundation”, through which he celebrated the late poet (1941-2008) for a period of 3 days.
In an explanatory statement on the reason for holding this conference, the Foundation said: “Since the origin of the importance of the situation formed by the personality of Darwish, the discussions have concluded to establish a project of 3 different phases, provided that it is of the poet’s life works in different artistic and cultural forms.”
The coordinator of the general program of the Qattan Foundation, Shadi Bakr, explained that “in a first phase, the foundation has decided, within the framework of the residency grant, to grant an artistic residency to the Tunisian artist Hamdi Dridi to create a work artistic, whose Curatorial text was written by director Elia Suleiman, but what happened in After the Israeli occupation refused to allow Dredi to enter Palestine.
Bakr continued: “In the second phase of the project, the Foundation contracted artists who performed a series of performances, which celebrate the work of poet Mahmoud Darwish and his global literary impact, and also explore his creativity as symbol, patriotic, Arab revolutionary and nationalist figure, and fundamental reference for modernist poetry in general, and engaged in it.” In particular, the project was called “Eternal Tension”.
He added: “The third phase will be a conference dealing with the poet’s works, which have interacted with literature and modern political thought, as the conference seeks, through its five sessions, to explore the impact of international literary works by Darwish and the tensions that sometimes shaped his language, in a way that made the understanding fluctuate in the listener’s ear.” Through the meanings presented by his works, between meaning and nonsense, tragedy and comedy, the individual and the group, the specific Palestinian and the human general.
The conference was launched on Thursday and featured several workshops and lectures, which were presented and attended by critics, writers and poets from inside and outside occupied Palestine, some of whom were Darwish’s contemporaries in various stages of his life. It dealt with many topics from Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and life, we mention among its titles “Jadaliyya The first pronoun: Darwish’s poetic statement between “I” and “we”, “Darwish in his place: meanings of emptiness and its factions”, and “Mahmoud Darwish or the inexhaustible spring”.
