preface

early spring 2025

For many that belong to diasporic, displaced and/or marginalised communities, there is an undeniable desire to ‘return,’ characterized by the distance (real or imagined) we feel from homelands, stories and relationships that help us explain where we are and what comes next. It emerges as a need to keep our ancestors (however you may come to define this position) and their dreams, lands and infrastructures alive and well-tended to. To deal with “unfinished business” as Mamadou Diallo phrases it.

And it is exactly this need to address unfinished business that embodies this itching that brought me to Platform’s Archive as Catalyst grant programme in Spring of 2025.

For years I had wanted to better inquire about my great grandfather and his role in deterring french imperialism in Syria. But not confined to the parameters of an academic paper or teach-in or visual ode, but as a devotional engagement, as a cultural producer AND an organiser AND a researcher. And the faith Platform’s staff had in my vague idea for a speculative letter-writing workshop turned an immaterial longing into a material project.

Below I outline very loosely and semi-chronologically the overlapping processes and trajectories that the project took, from the material experiments to prototype the workshop, to my reflective time with family in Libnan to the workshop itself.

act one

late spring // early summer

Cultivating Homeland(ing) owes part of its moniker (and it’s conceptual basis) to the beautiful words in the collaborative publication for Rheim AlKadhi’s exhibition ‘Templates for Liberation.’ Having focused on this exhibition in my master’s dissertation — particularly around abolitionist politics of refusal embodied in Alkadhi’s withdrawal from the ICA in solidarity with ICA worker’s strike — I wanted to make sure I at least had a material copy of what the exhibition stood for and against, and what it is trying to tell us about refusing to be folded back into the institution’s complacency and about autonomous practice.

I was moved when reading Kali Rubaii’s chapter on templates for resurgency from Anbar, Iraq, and specifically on the idea of ‘homelanding’ as the process in which repair is pursued by affected and damaged bodies in order to return to the homeland, using methods and praxes that subvert the ‘master’s tools’ as hauntingly articulated in Audre Lorde’s reverberant essay. This way of thinking on repair and liberation, as approachable through material, incremental and reconstructive practice, amalgamated with my thoughts from an essay I was writing on the ‘form’ of collective life and naming the components that make a communal infrastructure.

It was from here, and many other little epiphanies compounding together, that I came to the idea of a speculative letter-writing, a futurist investment and a communication that transcends linear ‘T’emporality to really reflect on what unfinished business, seeds, possibilities await us and how the interpersonal blends with the systemic and what is required to really deeply heal the land in the context of colonialism, sectarianism, and urbicide/memoricide.

On infrastructure, leaning into what it means to be a builder and who is responsible and can take part in repair (seeing collective building as an entry point for interpersonal repair/relationship building) and unearthing my family’s oral/written/heirloom archives

act two

A key part of this process was working with House of Annetta, which is where the workshop would be hosted. It was important to define this work as mutually beneficial, and not a passive and trasacitonal ‘venue booking’. The stewards at HoA were so generous with their time and wiht meeting me over a delciious meal cooked in their shared kitchen to dicuss the vision for the workshop, and offer me an impormptu search through Annetta’s archives (this gave so much continued inspiration around the possibilities for writing prompts, orders and templates).

partnering with Slow & Dirty Press to design the letter-writing material , the project became an experiment in bringing together the openness of decolonial world-building with practices in tactile learning and communal gathering to engage in liberatory struggle through embodied & infrastructural dreaming.