In November 2023, L’Internationale Online, the research and publishing platform for the European network of museums, arts organizations and universities, began the publishing strand Towards Collective Study in Ties of Emergency. A collective response to the drastic shifts in the public sphere as a result of the genocide in Palestine, the resulting publication brings together 19 contributions commissioned spanning essays, listening sessions, poetry selections, music, and artistic contributions.

Within the context of Every Act of Struggle: Intrusion and Assembly, de Appel’s research project and exhibition, L’Internationale has been invited to propose a programme of study. The programme is a moment to launch the publication in Amsterdam with public readings, listening sessions and gathering with friends, whilst also forging and strengthening alliances and strategies for what lies ahead. It is being conceived across public and closed sessions with the aim to articulate (link) strategies of Sumud (steadfastness) across current times of emergency with examples from the past, namely apartheid South Africa and institutional responses in the Netherlands that is the focus of de appel’s current research. These articulations will, we hope, allow for a moment of reflection and consolidation across different practices and trajectories of study that will be generative for the future.

The programme includes public sessions by Elke Uitentuis, Chad Cordeiro, Charles Esche, Rana Issa, Learning Palestine, Rasha Salti and Françoise Vergés, as well as closed sessions by Layal Ftouni (on the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death, both human and environmental in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine); a conversation between The Black Archives and Subversive Film (On archives of struggle and solidarity), as well as the participating artists of Every Act of Struggle: Chad Cordeiro, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Lara Khaldi (on their archival research for the exhibition).