Palestine . Reimagining Solidarity . Paths of Exit
Second Conference of Butterflies

Building on what we have outlined and explored in Palestine. Reimagining Solidarity, a conference of butterflies, we would like, for our second conference, to add a further element by thinking through Paths of Exit. 

Sunday June 20rd 2021
(10am - 4pm est)

If you would like to join please write to mai [at] 16beavergroup.org

Just as the police killing of George Floyd intensified a planetary movement confronting systemic racism, the state killings targetting oppressed communities throughout Colombia today, the bombing and killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the relentless attack on Palestinian Life––epitomized in the efforts to forcefully displace the inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan––have made more urgent the necessity to confront the social and material infrastructures, which justify and uphold such states of supremacy and the myriad forms of settler-colonial violence they enact. 

The pandemic has further opened, on a planetary scale, a collective sense of urgency to struggle against the devastation that is being inflicted on earth. It is a devastation that subjects all forms of life to a calculus that operates according to some variation of this injunction: accept the growing expansion of forms of violence rooted in colonial/imperial processes and supremacist ideologies, be incorporated under their terms and conditions, or face eradication/extinction. 

The question of exit poses itself precisely in seeing that the existing institutions and their frameworks for responding to struggles against this calculus  - from the international bodies of governance and the legal protections they purport to guarantee to the celebrated universities and museums - are all inadequate. More precisely, these existing frameworks are all founded upon reproducing, legitimating, and working within the imposed terms and conditions.

But the movements for decolonization, ending the apartheid and occupation imposed on Palestinians, like the movements for Black Life, movements of indigenous communities across the planet, feminist struggles, peasant struggles, struggles by other communities who have also historically faced the exclusionary and destructive violence of states and capital, call us all to search for ways to exit those imposed conditions and their accompanying terms. 

Here, exit is not a prescriptive demand, but comes as an exigency emerging from those very struggles, opening to questions which may lead to new or recover old ways of conceiving, knowing, thinking, imagining, inhabiting, embodying our politics, relating to other bodies, forms of life, caring for our worlds.

And it is with this exigency that we have invited friends and comrades, inside Palestine and beyond, to help nurture that space of reimagining and searching. We have asked each contributor to think through  their practices a path of exit which Palestine calls us to consider, in the hopes that the emerging constellation may open new solidarities across struggles or remind us of past ones that have been obscured through physical and epistemic violence. 

If indeed the imaginary and the real are two juxtaposable parts of a single trajectory of every struggle, then this conference is a modest effort toward searching for paths of exit from relations, complicities, concepts, as well as material structures and processes which continue to sustain the targeting, constricting, incarcerating, destroying of planetary life, of Palestinian Life.