Show Notes
Bassem Khandaqji spent 21 years in Israeli prisons, winning the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for "A Mask the Colour of the Sky" while still behind bars. Now in exile, the Palestinian novelist speaks to Tarwida Podcast about writing secretly at 4am, smuggling manuscripts out of detention, and how imagination helped him survive and resist. He also introduces Adab al-Ishtibak — Literature of Engagement — and previews his next novel about late fellow prisoner Walid Daqqa.
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Palestinian architect Elias Khuri joins Tarwida Podcast to discuss architecture as an accumulation of people, places, histories, and knowledge. From his "Noon Insan" installation and his relationship with Elias Khoury and Kamal Boullata, to building around olive trees and restoring Khan Jaljulia, Khuri explores how architecture can preserve relationships with land and history without freezing them in place. He also reflects on the role of language in developing a contemporary Arab architectural vocabulary.
Architect and historian Nadi Abusaada joins Tarwida Podcast to discuss Palestinian cities through material culture. He explores how Palestinians reconstruct history through the traces that remain, the challenges of curating Palestinian heritage, and why romanticizing the past can obscure the realities of the present.
Artist Dima Srouji joins Tarwida Podcast to discuss glassmaking traditions in Jaba' and Hebron, the politics of archaeology in Palestine, her Amman Design Week installation, and reclaiming looted heritage through replication.
Sliman Mansour, the pioneering Palestinian artist whose paintings of olive trees, stone terraces, and steadfast women carried Palestine across generations, passed away this week at 79. In memory of his legacy, we're resharing this conversation, where he looks back on his childhood, his mischief and hardships, and speaks with humor and honesty about what art meant to him.
Palestinian abstract painter Samia Halaby, 89, on growing up in Jerusalem, the Nakba, documenting the Kafr Qasim massacre, and what censorship by Indiana University and Michigan State revealed about her art and the system.