JUMANA MANNAReading Club

Programme

Thu 6 Jun 
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh

Thu 13 Jun, with the invited guest Joana Rafael 
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott

Thu 20 Jun, with the invited guest Tomás Sopas Bandeira
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Thu 27 Jun, with the invited guest Geanine Escobar 
Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Brenna Bhandar

Thu 4 Jul, with the invited guest Vítor Silva
Light In Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, ed. Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze

Thu 11 Jul, with the online presence of Jumana Manna
Open Letter to Sylvia Wynter: Unlearning the Disappearance of Jews from Africa, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Thu 18 Jul
Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine‑Israel, Irus Braverman

Guests

Joana Rafael is an architect and post-doctoral researcher at CEAA-ESAP. Her work is focused on ecology, pollution, and contamination, reflecting on the intersections of architecture and urbanism with human geography, political theory, environmental studies, and histories of power. She explores how materiality, territorial conflicts and limits of physical infrastructures interact systemically at a planetary scale. She has taught subjects related to Contextual Studies and Contemporary Culture at ESAP, ISCE Douro, Central Saint Martins, University of London and University of the Arts, Canterbury. Joana is also a certified farmer. Graduated from UM; MArch from Metropolis, Barcelona; MRes and PhD from Goldsmiths, UoL.
 

Tomás Sopas Bandeira born in Braga, 1993, studied medicine in Lisbon, and then specialized as an internal medicine doctor in Switzerland. He has accomplished several humanitarian missions with Médecins Sans Frontieres and has since been actively involved in the quest for self determination of the peoples of West Sahara, who are currently colonized by Marroco. After having stayed in the Saharauis refugee camps in Algeria, Tomás has published the novel: “Zahra”, a story based on the reality of a woman refugee. In 2023, the book was translated and published also in Spain.
 

Geanine Escobar aka GÊ is a researcher and cultural activist. She is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at UA and a PhD student in Museology at ULHT. She is an FCT Doctoral Fellow at the Museology Department of Lusófona University of Lisbon. Conservator-Restorer of Cultural Goods, Master's Degree in Social Memory and Cultural Heritage from UFPEL, awarded a Master's Degree in Heritage, Arts and Cultural Tourism in Portugal by P.PORTO. She is currently researching social justice strategies through the artistic-political use of digital archives, cultural maps and decolonial counter-narratives as possible theoretical/practical tools for claiming the rights of the black, Afro-descendant, immigrant and LGBTQIA+ population, with a focus on problematizing intersectional discrimination, especially the close link between racism, lesbophobia, xenophobia and whiteness in museum spaces and academic research in Portugal. She is a research member of the project “Generating Bodies: from aggression to insurgency. Contributions to a decolonial pedagogy” (2023-2026) and Coordinator of the Study Group “Sociomuseology and Intersectionality: Gender, Race and Class” (Somus-Intersectional) under the UNESCO Chair in Education, Citizenship and Cultural Diversity.
 

Vítor Silva graduated in Fine Arts from ESBAP in 1983 and has lectured at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto since 1987. He has focused his research on drawing and image, having published numerous articles in journals, and books such as Aby Warburg 1866-1929, uma cartografia da história, da arte e da cultura (Braço de Ferro, Porto, 2010). He is currently a member of the Arts, Design and Society Research Institute at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto and is part of the DRAWinU Project. He has been co-editor of the magazine PSIAX since 2002, and of the publishing house KKYM, Imago collection, since 2011. He co-directs projects such a Ymago 11, Ymago 13, Ymago 15, Projekto Ninfa, Imagens Migrantes and especially (Un)common ground; which is focused on artistic and cultural production in contexts of conflicts, where belonging, possession, control and power over the territory of Israel/Palestine strongly opposes indigenous peoples and settlers. More recently, he co-curated the exhibition Terra Estreita at the José Guimarães International Arts Center. Since 2000, he has regularly been showing his work under the name Vítor Silva Cravo at Galeria Extéril, Porto.
 

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.