A permanent provisional situation (2008) is a piece made up of 96 small screens that make up a document on Palestinian cinema. Through the testimonies on Youtube of three of its exiled filmmakers – Maya Sambar, Osama Qashoo and Saeed Taji -, newsreels recorded on screens, interviews and images of the places and inhabitants suffering genocide, it reflects on repetition, the visibility of denunciations and how narrative is reduced to a visual and auditory tapestry. Its author, Pedro Ortuño, stated at the time that he was “sixty years after the beginning of a provisional political situation that is beginning to seem permanent”.
The Palestinian genocide – particularly alarming and mediatised in recent months but dragging on a history of decades – is once again today one of the sources of despair and impotence for those of us who face a political life, in the face of the ostensible ineffectiveness of our struggle against the suffering caused by states and corporations. The video will be accompanied by the intervention of Santiago López Petit, whose trajectory of thought and writing is profoundly related to these feelings of affliction and search for hope. Santiago says, “If life is a word, wanting to live is a cry. But for wanting to live to become a challenge requires a force of pain. We will only be able to enter into the force of pain if we understand social discomfort as our own, and our own discomfort as social discomfort”.
