How To Produce Freedom from Non-Freedom?
A verbally experimental article
A sound that almost deafens my ears. Searing the surface of my throat and up to my skull. It was my voice, screaming excruciatingly into my head; “WHAT DOES FREEDOM FEEL LIKE?”
My mind crumbles, unable to imagine the slightest bit of that feeling, and my body recoils, unable to break loose from its experience as a Palestinian who has only lived under occupation in Palestine but has exited a few times.
In manically searching for bodies in action, hoping to grasp a hint of freedom, I saw the most fascinating manifestations of bodies in movement. The closest I have seen to what a free Palestinian body can be. As if it were practiced in a gap in space and time where the rules of the colonial reality do not apply. It was the communal practice of throwing stones. I saw all these bodies jump and stretch in the air, spatially and dimensionally breaking, for a moment, all that the occupation had conditioned in them—these movements are how freedom is practiced in space.
BODY /Is the body a border? A colonial state? What is IT? What are we?
Existing under systems that try to cancel you, the tangibility of our bodies reminds us and each other of our physicality. I carry my bodily residence into space, my inside voice talking to my tangible existence. Through that speech, I can initiate motions. These motions then turn into movements playing in both space and time.
Under occupation, you often run out of space, time, or both. But if you manage to steal back some of them, while accumulating movements, you and your body can build a practice. A literacy of how the body can move and transform dimensionally in space.
For a body, this movement in space is a fundamental element to express its freedom or non-freedom.
My body breathes and recoils.
My body etches spatial topographies into my memory, hoping enough ink will stick to form a map.
Since most of the space around me is (forb)hidden, I rely on my bodily experience to trace it. Bit by bit. So far, my memory of space is as fragmented as a patchy low-res scan. I remember in 2D. I cram my multi-dimensional body into these 2D cut-outs, trying to avoid their razor-sharp edges. Of course, with so many borders, it’s not a matter of being cut, it’s a matter of how deep, and how severe.
I am a wanderer. So, as I was biking aimlessly in a European city, my body froze after a certain perimeter. Despite all the open space ahead, I was like Pacman hitting brick walls. I still struggle to intercept the waves of colonial speech transmitted from their radios, but I do.
That freeze is part of the spatial literacy of oppression: a language that my body has learned to speak. Movement is like reading. It’s built syntax by syntax, and each move belongs to a language; Freedom or oppression.
If you’ve never known something, how can you recreate it, or understand it?
‘REALITY’ /Will you help me know what I don’t know? Have you lived for a long time and/or are you free?
Reality is a combination of matter and an image of what the world is. Formulating a shared imagined version of reality results in a common sense that sustains it in mind, body and space.
To formulate is to assign specific meanings and create triggers that activate those meanings.
The mass reproduction of these triggers rejuvenates the colonial structure. To regulate is then to eliminate collisions that shake this colonial structure and erase triggers that contribute to its disintegration.
What are visuals, sonics, and expressions but reproductions and mirrorings of certain triggers, not only to yourself but to others? How can we intercept frequencies of the spatial literacy of oppression and transform them to become ones of freedom?
How would you know me?
If we happen to be in the same place, the Hague, on the first Monday of the month, at noon, you will see a body contorting in tension, trying to stand straight with a neutral face. Eleven months later, I still squirmed because someone thought it was a great idea for the fire testing sirens to share the same sound as the missile alarm sirens... How about you, how would I know you?
To oppress is to require recognition of the target. You and me. If form changes, so does the perception of it. With movement, the body, the residence, grows malleable. The body takes space to the extent that it shapes it. Both the body and the space become anonymous, unidentifiable, and no longer on the same wavelength as the oppressor’s radio, no longer at its mercy. That is what happens through protest: we redefine.
SPACE /Is space nature? Is the body industrialising it?
Semiotics. Meanings. How are common sense and memory built if the eyesight is void but of colonial triggers? And ‘othering’ reproductions? All to manufacture a barrier and a distance of severance and alienation.
When crossing the border between the Netherlands and Belgium by land, the memories of the IOF soldiers, the barbed wire, the weapons, the queuing, and the clicking sound of the red and green light bulbs at the checkpoints were summoned. My body felt fear that my logic was unable to dilute. A mirage I kept seeing.
“We have just crossed into the border of Belgium,” the driver said. There was nothing as I looked out of the window in hypervigilance.
At that same time, my sister was going from Ramallah to Bethlehem. It took me half the time to travel between two countries as it took her to cross between two cities. Both were in the bus.
BODIES /How much of freedom is a physical experience?
With whatever national identities of each of our em(body)ed ‘states’, we exchange triggers of meanings through our sensory interactions. We understand them through a language system that includes movement.
The interlinking and movements of bodies are strong communicators beyond any language barrier or attempts at shapeshifting. Especially in the context of life under occupation in Palestine where Israelis disguise themselves as protesters and assimilate to attack from inside. The subtlety of their spatial expressions reveals their mismatch in a crowd of protesters.
Do you know whose hand is on your shoulder? Is it a pull or a push? Is it to protect or to harm?
GAZE /Does your gaze ever see what is actually in front of it without layering on its politics? How much politics is in touch? Can touch neutralize the politics of our gaze or are we now imperializing ourselves?
There is great freedom in touching things. There is great security, tranquility, and joy. But there is also great violence, oppression, and deception. Touching is to detect life, not only by hand but by skin. Touching and connecting bodily topographies through movement can be highly conditioned, and can also reproduce politics of oppression or produce those of freedom.
But touching can fail to (un)detect a life. In the Nakbeh (1948), my grandma was almost mistaken for a pillow when her family was forcefully displaced from ‘Abu Shusheh’. In fact, because of the horrors the Israeli gangs and army practiced, too many parents mistook their babies for pillows.
The ‘inferiors of/from the orient’ are often anonymous, and flat, with no identity or characteristics. With the absence of our physical contact with each other, we become unknown to each other. We become each other's ‘other’. In protest, you may or may not know the face of your fellows, but every dimension of their existence is de-flattened and un-othered. As if life has been blown into a painting. Your senses and bodily experience, instinctively do the work of decolonising us. You’re no longer an isolated reference, but one in the plural existence. The most physical yet.
PROTEST /Do we, you, I produce? Or reproduce politics? Whose?
Protests allow communities to practice the spatial literacy of liberation, enabling them to break into each other’s realities. Severed communities have hope in meeting in foreign lands, perhaps filtered through visas and perhaps only understanding each other through a foreign language.
In attempts to break the borders, we are racing for Noah’s ark. One containing exclusive specimens who deserve to be incorporated, temporarily, into the land of the all-deserving. Bit by bit erasing all that is unwanted, ‘unpopular’ and unplural in the world. In that process, we are being reiterated and reiterating each other out of the manual of existence.
In Europe, it was my first time meeting a Libyan and a Yemeni. It felt like a legend was realized. I’ve only known of them. How inhumane is un-experiencing each other? Since when are we each other’s legends?
Protests are restart buttons. There, the collision of our bodies is how spatial literacy mobilizes communal liberty, or otherwise, an oppressive one. It restores what our severance has deprived us of.
I go to protests to see and be seen by us. I am tired of outlined shapes that I color from imagination, attempting to piece you together. I need to know you. Only when we are seen by us, our gathered sight dissolves the solar eclipse obscuring our sun. Our differences rebalance our equilibrium towards collective liberation.
FREEDOM /Who’s actually the free one?
Are the ones fully situated in the Western—colonialist states—the ones who are free? Is it freedom because of space and resources? Or does that come as a reward to those fully identifiable by its bureaucracies? Fully visible, predictable, and for the state’s sake, docile. Or are the custom pieces surpassing the system machine the free ones? Are, then, the ones under oppression the most free?
FUTURE /What will be the dawn of a new world order?
________________________________________________________________________________
I was selected as part of Design Drafts #3 to write this article to be published in May 2025 as part of the Protest Issue. This is a collaboration between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Journal Safar.
My mind crumbles, unable to imagine the slightest bit of that feeling, and my body recoils, unable to break loose from its experience as a Palestinian who has only lived under occupation in Palestine but has exited a few times.
In manically searching for bodies in action, hoping to grasp a hint of freedom, I saw the most fascinating manifestations of bodies in movement. The closest I have seen to what a free Palestinian body can be. As if it were practiced in a gap in space and time where the rules of the colonial reality do not apply. It was the communal practice of throwing stones. I saw all these bodies jump and stretch in the air, spatially and dimensionally breaking, for a moment, all that the occupation had conditioned in them—these movements are how freedom is practiced in space.
Our BODY sustains a ‘REALITY’.
SPACE and BODIES reconnect, revealing the politics of our GAZE.
PROTEST restructures us to produce FREEDOM…
Our FUTURE.
SPACE and BODIES reconnect, revealing the politics of our GAZE.
PROTEST restructures us to produce FREEDOM…
Our FUTURE.
BODY /Is the body a border? A colonial state? What is IT? What are we?
Existing under systems that try to cancel you, the tangibility of our bodies reminds us and each other of our physicality. I carry my bodily residence into space, my inside voice talking to my tangible existence. Through that speech, I can initiate motions. These motions then turn into movements playing in both space and time.
Under occupation, you often run out of space, time, or both. But if you manage to steal back some of them, while accumulating movements, you and your body can build a practice. A literacy of how the body can move and transform dimensionally in space.
For a body, this movement in space is a fundamental element to express its freedom or non-freedom.
My body breathes and recoils.
My body etches spatial topographies into my memory, hoping enough ink will stick to form a map.
Since most of the space around me is (forb)hidden, I rely on my bodily experience to trace it. Bit by bit. So far, my memory of space is as fragmented as a patchy low-res scan. I remember in 2D. I cram my multi-dimensional body into these 2D cut-outs, trying to avoid their razor-sharp edges. Of course, with so many borders, it’s not a matter of being cut, it’s a matter of how deep, and how severe.
I am a wanderer. So, as I was biking aimlessly in a European city, my body froze after a certain perimeter. Despite all the open space ahead, I was like Pacman hitting brick walls. I still struggle to intercept the waves of colonial speech transmitted from their radios, but I do.
That freeze is part of the spatial literacy of oppression: a language that my body has learned to speak. Movement is like reading. It’s built syntax by syntax, and each move belongs to a language; Freedom or oppression.
If you’ve never known something, how can you recreate it, or understand it?
‘REALITY’ /Will you help me know what I don’t know? Have you lived for a long time and/or are you free?
Reality is a combination of matter and an image of what the world is. Formulating a shared imagined version of reality results in a common sense that sustains it in mind, body and space.
To formulate is to assign specific meanings and create triggers that activate those meanings.
The mass reproduction of these triggers rejuvenates the colonial structure. To regulate is then to eliminate collisions that shake this colonial structure and erase triggers that contribute to its disintegration.
What are visuals, sonics, and expressions but reproductions and mirrorings of certain triggers, not only to yourself but to others? How can we intercept frequencies of the spatial literacy of oppression and transform them to become ones of freedom?
How would you know me?
If we happen to be in the same place, the Hague, on the first Monday of the month, at noon, you will see a body contorting in tension, trying to stand straight with a neutral face. Eleven months later, I still squirmed because someone thought it was a great idea for the fire testing sirens to share the same sound as the missile alarm sirens... How about you, how would I know you?
To oppress is to require recognition of the target. You and me. If form changes, so does the perception of it. With movement, the body, the residence, grows malleable. The body takes space to the extent that it shapes it. Both the body and the space become anonymous, unidentifiable, and no longer on the same wavelength as the oppressor’s radio, no longer at its mercy. That is what happens through protest: we redefine.
SPACE /Is space nature? Is the body industrialising it?
Semiotics. Meanings. How are common sense and memory built if the eyesight is void but of colonial triggers? And ‘othering’ reproductions? All to manufacture a barrier and a distance of severance and alienation.
When crossing the border between the Netherlands and Belgium by land, the memories of the IOF soldiers, the barbed wire, the weapons, the queuing, and the clicking sound of the red and green light bulbs at the checkpoints were summoned. My body felt fear that my logic was unable to dilute. A mirage I kept seeing.
“We have just crossed into the border of Belgium,” the driver said. There was nothing as I looked out of the window in hypervigilance.
At that same time, my sister was going from Ramallah to Bethlehem. It took me half the time to travel between two countries as it took her to cross between two cities. Both were in the bus.
BODIES /How much of freedom is a physical experience?
With whatever national identities of each of our em(body)ed ‘states’, we exchange triggers of meanings through our sensory interactions. We understand them through a language system that includes movement.
The interlinking and movements of bodies are strong communicators beyond any language barrier or attempts at shapeshifting. Especially in the context of life under occupation in Palestine where Israelis disguise themselves as protesters and assimilate to attack from inside. The subtlety of their spatial expressions reveals their mismatch in a crowd of protesters.
Do you know whose hand is on your shoulder? Is it a pull or a push? Is it to protect or to harm?
GAZE /Does your gaze ever see what is actually in front of it without layering on its politics? How much politics is in touch? Can touch neutralize the politics of our gaze or are we now imperializing ourselves?
There is great freedom in touching things. There is great security, tranquility, and joy. But there is also great violence, oppression, and deception. Touching is to detect life, not only by hand but by skin. Touching and connecting bodily topographies through movement can be highly conditioned, and can also reproduce politics of oppression or produce those of freedom.
But touching can fail to (un)detect a life. In the Nakbeh (1948), my grandma was almost mistaken for a pillow when her family was forcefully displaced from ‘Abu Shusheh’. In fact, because of the horrors the Israeli gangs and army practiced, too many parents mistook their babies for pillows.
The ‘inferiors of/from the orient’ are often anonymous, and flat, with no identity or characteristics. With the absence of our physical contact with each other, we become unknown to each other. We become each other's ‘other’. In protest, you may or may not know the face of your fellows, but every dimension of their existence is de-flattened and un-othered. As if life has been blown into a painting. Your senses and bodily experience, instinctively do the work of decolonising us. You’re no longer an isolated reference, but one in the plural existence. The most physical yet.
PROTEST /Do we, you, I produce? Or reproduce politics? Whose?
Protests allow communities to practice the spatial literacy of liberation, enabling them to break into each other’s realities. Severed communities have hope in meeting in foreign lands, perhaps filtered through visas and perhaps only understanding each other through a foreign language.
In attempts to break the borders, we are racing for Noah’s ark. One containing exclusive specimens who deserve to be incorporated, temporarily, into the land of the all-deserving. Bit by bit erasing all that is unwanted, ‘unpopular’ and unplural in the world. In that process, we are being reiterated and reiterating each other out of the manual of existence.
In Europe, it was my first time meeting a Libyan and a Yemeni. It felt like a legend was realized. I’ve only known of them. How inhumane is un-experiencing each other? Since when are we each other’s legends?
Protests are restart buttons. There, the collision of our bodies is how spatial literacy mobilizes communal liberty, or otherwise, an oppressive one. It restores what our severance has deprived us of.
I go to protests to see and be seen by us. I am tired of outlined shapes that I color from imagination, attempting to piece you together. I need to know you. Only when we are seen by us, our gathered sight dissolves the solar eclipse obscuring our sun. Our differences rebalance our equilibrium towards collective liberation.
FREEDOM /Who’s actually the free one?
Are the ones fully situated in the Western—colonialist states—the ones who are free? Is it freedom because of space and resources? Or does that come as a reward to those fully identifiable by its bureaucracies? Fully visible, predictable, and for the state’s sake, docile. Or are the custom pieces surpassing the system machine the free ones? Are, then, the ones under oppression the most free?
FUTURE /What will be the dawn of a new world order?
________________________________________________________________________________
I was selected as part of Design Drafts #3 to write this article to be published in May 2025 as part of the Protest Issue. This is a collaboration between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Journal Safar.
“
Review 1:
“Tala Abdalhadi’s How Can We Produce Freedom from Non-Freedom? begins in the throat and ends in the limbs of collective action. Sentences push and pull on one another, guttural sounds from inside the body begin sentences, and what comes out is still being formed. The text never finds its freedom, but that is not Abdalhadi’s aim. She aptly reminds us you can't find it but rather “the collision of our bodies…mobilizes communal liberty.”
Abdalhadi’s essay challenges the reader to rethink the abstraction of liberation, and its effectiveness or lack thereof. The essay moves through forms: quotes, paragraphs, and sometimes one-liners. She cuts form to create structure and underscores that you, the reader, the protestor, the ethical being cannot only move through this world. It is not enough. You have to make space by creating space, even in language, for liberty to find its form under oppressive structures, which for Abdalhadi is life under Israeli occupation in Palestine.
This text pulls and pushes until it makes its way out of its subject. After all, Abdalhadi shows us freedom has no shape until you obtain it. You chase its shadows until that moment.“
~ Nadim Choufi,
Journal Safar Editor, writer & artist.
Review 2:
“...Tala’s participation in Design Drafts has been exemplary. Her interdisciplinary
approach, combining her background in design, art direction, and storytelling, is complemented by an ability to engage deeply with complex philosophical
questions. Her work on social justice, culture, and collective action stands out
for its nuance and originality.
In her proposal for Design Drafts, Tala explored the spatial dimensions of
movement in the context of liberation and oppression, focusing on the body
within protests. This work, grounded in the realities of life under occupation in
Palestine, reflects her exceptional capacity to navigate the subtleties of physical
and social expression. For example, her analysis of the spatial mismatch of
infiltrators within protests highlights her ability to read nuance and uncover
layers of meaning in complex scenarios.
I have no doubt that Tala will make a significant contribution to your program
and the broader field of artistic research. Her unique perspective, intellectual
rigor, artistic depth, and wonderful personality will enrich any academic and
creative environment...”
~ Delany Boutkan,
Researcher for the Research & Development team since 2019, & Founder of Design Drafts, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
