offbeat amsterdamFutures on Our Own Terms
Perdu, Saturday, June 6 at 02:00 PM GMT+2
On 6 June, Perdu is hosting Futures on Our Own Terms, a conversation with designer educator and researcher Dr. Danah Abdulla and poet and outreach worker Sarona Abuaker about their work on Countless Palestinian Futures [palifutures.com]. Organised by the Spatial Justice for Palestine Network NL, the event forms part of a broader solidarity and knowledge-sharing initiative, advancing spatial knowledge on Palestine through research, education and public programming in the Dutch context.
14:00 – 17:00 Countless Palestinian Futures
Countless Palestinian Futures (CPF) is a conversational game that moves conversations around Palestine beyond historical or present framing and toward tools that help us think through what a return to Palestine could be. It is centred on the questions: How is return imagined? and in what ways is return conceptualised in a landscape dominated by the materiality of territory, home, and nationhood?
Created by Danah Abdulla and Sarona Abuaker, CPF aims to engage and stimulate the imagination by helping diverse practitioners develop tangible outcomes and ideas around Palestinian futures framed around near, medium, and long-term actualities. The game is inspired by Umberto Eco‘s notion of the ’open work,‘ because it can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the participants bring to, and how they inform, future iterations.
Participation in CPF is open to Palestinian and Arab cultural producers, policy makers, activists, academics and organisers. Registration is limited, so please send a short email of interest briefly introducing yourself to [email protected]
18:00 – 19:30 Futures On Our Terms
In conversation with architect / researcher Ali T. As’ad, Danah Abdulla and Sarona Abuaker reflect on the conceptualisation of CPF. Through a discussion about their practice, thinking and process, they will explore the concept of imagination more broadly, the role of CPF today and its ability to imagine Palestinian return and a future for Palestinians in today’s geopolitical landscape.
To register for the open talk: Perdu Registration System
Danah Abdulla is a designer, educator and researcher interested in new narratives and practices in design that push the disciplinary boundaries and definitions of the subject. She is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Anti/Post/Decolonial Histories, Theories, Praxes at the Decolonising the Arts Institute at the University of the Arts London. Danah is the author of two books Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Designerly Ways of Knowing: A Working Inventory of Things a Designer Should Know (Onomatopee, 2022). She is a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform, and founded Kalimat Magazine (2010-2016), an independent, non-profit publication about Arab thought and culture.
Sarona Abuaker works in political education. Her work has been published in KOHL Journal, Mizna, and other platforms, and her debut poetry collection, Why so few women on the street at night, was published by the 87Press. She is currently an LAHP funded PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at King‘s College London.
Ali T. As’ad is a researcher, architect, educator, and editor based in Amsterdam. He is a co-founder of the Spatial Justice for Palestine Network (NL) and editor-in-chief of MAKAN: Journal of Culture and Space, a trilingual print publication engaging with architecture, urbanism and critical arts writing from the SWANA region. He is also a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, UvA.
chrishamde
サファイア・ネオ
ポイズン雷花
Script Kiddie