Arid Visibilities: Practices of Countervisuality in the Negev\Naqab

The Negev\Nagab Desert is a 13,000 square kilometres arid and semi-arid area located in the southern part of Israel\Palestine. Spanning between Gaza to the west, the Dead Sea to the east, and the Sinai Peninsula to the south, the Naqab\Negev has been adopted by the Israeli State as a “sacrifice zone”, wherein the Israeli military experiments with weapons, private corporations test new technologies of extraction, and the government’s civil administration expands techniques of land grabs, uprooting the native Bedouin population for their land to push them into urban sprawls. Although the Bedouin population has been native to this land for centuries, most localities in this region are officially classified as “unrecognised” and “illegal,” and their populations are considered “trespassers” on state land. The lack of recognition of dozens of villages, though their inhabitants commonly live on their ancestors’ land, derives from state denial of the indigenous land regime that existed in the Naqab\Negev before the establishment of Israel in 1948 and from Bedouin indigeneity.

The desert is thus governed by a unique in\visibility. On the one hand, the dry climate, arid surface and frequent use of vision technologies such as satellites and drones by Israeli state actors make it a highly visible, transparent and surveilled space. On the other, the Negev\Naqab is rendered opaque through colonial environmental imaginaries that erase the specificity of places and the existence of the life, human and nonhuman, that the desert inhabits. Considering this in\visiblity, what kind of practices of capture, design and image-making can be employed to resist the embedded denial of native lifeworlds in the desert? Is there a technique of visualising aimed at resisting the weaponisation of laws and land regulations by the State? Why are material remnants, objects and leftovers so crucial in developing modes of seeing and sensing the land?

This one-day symposium invites writers and practitioners to present their work in and on the Naqab\Negev desert. Through collaborative design and image-making, we will reflect on practices of image-making aimed at challenging this duality of transparency and opacity with the intention of approaching the desert as a space of speculation and collaboration.

Hosted by the Institue of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London