Unlearning Maps: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark

You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. When genocide and war are narrated as inevitable, the language of justice is co-opted to justify imperial violence. This violence not only destroys lands and lives, but also captures the future, closes the horizon, and makes us believe there is no outside to the binaries imposed on us, no other possible future. Solidarity, then, cannot mean simply choosing a side within the maps already given to us. Imperial powers, authoritarian governments, nationalist projects, media systems, and even oppositional narratives can all become entangled in reproducing domination and narrowing political imagination. The histories of marginalized peoples are often folded into these frameworks, but this does not delegitimize their struggles. It makes it more urgent to hold them carefully, and to build forms of relation, language, and solidarity that cannot be easily returned to imperial or authoritarian narratives. This four-day gathering centers situated knowledge. Solidarity cannot flatten different struggles into one language. It must begin from where people stand, their histories, lands, wounds, survival, and limits of vision. Every community sees from somewhere. No position holds the full picture. Listening, then, is not distant sympathy, but a way of disturbing inherited maps. Across different histories and struggles, other geographies of resistance may become visible. The program brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Rojava, Artsakh, Khuzestan, and Tehran. The films do not only reflect the present moment of crisis and conflict, but the longer historical formations and structural forces — displacement, ethnic marginalization, petro-capitalism, and the exclusions produced by national projects — that shaped these conditions and continue to shape them. Harvesting Througout the gathering, we introduce the practice of harvesting, a collective method of processing, witnessing, and responding to what we experience together. Fundraising The donations gathered through this program will travel to grassroots initiatives and communities whose struggles accompany this gathering. We do not understand donation as charity detached from relation. We understand it as a gesture of solidarity, however partial and insufficient: a way of refusing distance, and of remaining accountable to the lives, struggles, and futures that this gathering asks us to witness. If you are able to contribute, your support becomes part of the passage between here and there, between those who listen, those who remember, and those who continue to endure and create under conditions designed to make life impossible. Each small candle lights a corner of the dark. Tickets Each ticket will go to the fundraiser. This gathering is about (un)learning together. If you cannot afford the ticket, come by, and we will work it out together. Day ticket 12.5 - lowest price for the day sliding - 20, 25, 30 Fundraiser link If you cannot attend the event, but would like to donate, you can use the link above. Dates • De Appel Amsterdam // 14:00 - 20:00 >> 09/07/2026 • Lola Lieven Amsterdam // 15:00 - 23:00 >> 10/07/2026 • Lola Lieven Amsterdam // 15:00 - 23:00 >> 11/07/2026 • Lola Lieven Amsterdam // 15:00 - 22:00 >> 12/07/2026 Chapter Three Denialist Futurity 14:30 Doors Open 15:00 - 15:15 Introduction and Recap 15:15 - 17:45 Film Screening: Black Back Artsakh by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri 17:45 - 18:30 Dinner 18:30 - 19:00 Reading: Denialist Futurity by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri 19:00 - 19:30 Break Chapter Four No Friend but the Mountains Film 19:30 - 20:30 Film Screening and Talk A Turtle in Ten Seconds by Rojda Tu\u011frul 20:30 - 21:00 Break 21:00 - 22:00 Film Screening from Rojava Film Commune: Letters from Shengal by Dersim Zerevan 22:00 - 22:30 Wrap-up with music and drinks. Location: Lola Lieven Rodenrijsstraat 43, 1062 JD Amsterdam lolalieven.nl More info Asian Movie Night website