An Echo in Search of its Shadow, Aesthetics of the Repressed

<p>“To all those we are indebted to” brings together poetry, critical writing, image-making, drawing, and song in a multidisciplinary series that examines the politics of refusal in Palestine. Composed of four contributions assembled through paired collaboration, the contributors explore and develop novel ways of producing knowledge.</p> <p>What aesthetic practices have Palestinians been employing throughout their revolutionary anti-colonial tradition, both historically and in contemporary times? How can we read the performative gestures, image-making techniques, and singing replete in Palestine’s streets as ones embedded within a collective psychosocial and material experience and not as arbitrary isolated events? In An Echo in Search of its Shadow, Aesthetics of the Repressed Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad formulate an aesthetic theory of revolt by examining anti-colonial praxis. Unfolding through analysis, image-making, and poetics, HajYahia and Haddad assemble a new framework from which to understand dialectics between the visual and the audial, body and soul, form and content. Instead of the usual approach to aesthetics and politics where aesthetics are practiced and politics are thought, An Echo in Search of Its Shadow urges us to practice politics and think aesthetics.</p> <p><strong>Haitham Haddad</strong> is a visual artist and graphic designer whose work centers on historical and contemporary manifestations of myth and folklore, as well as political tensions between the individual and the collective. He works at the intersection of printmaking, illustration, video, and tattooing, with an ongoing investment to revisit past histories and test how they can reshape the present.</p> <p><strong>Adam HajYahia</strong> is invested in the relationships between aesthetics and politics; capitalism and desire; negative speculation and contemporary art. Through his work as a writer and curator, he examines how practices of image-making, performance, poetry, and sound reflect on and affect revolutions to erupt, be suspended, and/or terminate. He is interested in how psychic desire is at once captured and unbound by capital and the aesthetic practices that tirelessly attempt to forge a way out.</p>