The Native and the Refugee
@ The Nightingale
1084 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
Opening Tuesday, October 16th, from 7PM - 9PM
The Native and the Refugee is a multimedia documentary project by Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny that profiles the Palestinian and Native American experience by examining the infrastructure, politics, and geography of American Indian reservations alongside Palestinian refugee camps. In connecting these two spaces, the goals of the project are to understand the centrality of the question of land and territory for any conception of autonomy; to look at the camp as an “extra-national” space with all the contradictions entailed; and to meet with those getting organized politically in these places to understand their communal concerns.
The History of the Camp (2015, 10 minutes)
Indian Winter (2017, 26 minutes)
Aida (2018)
Black Mesa (2018, 10 minutes)
The Native and the Refugee has been presented in Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Guatemala, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Portugal, Quebec, and Syria, including within refugee camps and reservations, and at other venues including cinemas, community centers, galleries, and universities.
Matt Peterson co-directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2014), on the Tunisian insurrection, and Spaces of Exception (2018). He was a member of the collectives Red Channels and the 16 Beaver Group, and is currently part of a commune in New York called Woodbine. His films and videos have screened at Anthology Film Archives, e-flux, Eyebeam, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Indiana University, International House Philadelphia, Millennium Film Workshop, and MoMA PS1. He has spoken and organized events at Artists Television Access, BAMcinematek, Centre Pompidou, DCTV, dOCUMENTA 13, Goethe-Institut, Interference Archive, Light Industry, Maysles Cinema, the New School, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SculptureCenter, and UnionDocs.
Malek Rasamny is a researcher and filmmaker based in both New York and Beirut whose writings have been published in The Daily Star and Fuse. He’s worked at the Maysles Documentary Center, and was a founding member of the LERFE space in Harlem, the Ground Floor Collective, and Red Channels. He is a regular speaker at the Afikra international monthly series on Arab history and culture, and has presented on his travels to Kurdish Iraq and Syria at Interference Archive, Ta Marbouta in Beirut, and La Passe in Montreal. He has organized a series of meetings and fora in support of the Syrian revolution at Columbia University. He is currently working on a research project surrounding Druze sovereignty in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and has presented at the conferences of the American Druze Society.
Official Website
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Tags: Chicago, Malek Rasamny, Matt Peterson, The Native and the Refugee, The Nightingale, West Town
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