Tal al-Zaatar in Tuscany: A Folio from Past Disquiet

The questions of solidarity in the arts, of its myriad creative manifestations, of the mechanics of its mediation and the transmission of experience, and of memory are at the center of our research-based exhibition Past Disquiet. For this contribution to Critical Times, we have excerpted materials from Past Disquiet revealing the actions undertaken by groups of artists in Tuscany in 1976 to rally the general public in solidarity with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, caught under siege in the Tal al-Zaatar camp.

Past Disquiet is a long-term research project that has taken the form of a touring archival and documentary exhibition¹ (beginning in 2015), seminars, presentations, and a publication² that revisits and reanimates intersecting histories of militant, artistic, and museological practices that connected to tricontinental, anti-imperialist solidarity movements between the 1960s and the 1980s. Early in the research process, we encountered the notions of the museum-in-exile and the solidarity museum. Consequently, we dedicated considerable effort to understanding the origin of these two notions and their mechanisms by studying the traces of four collections of art whose histories had significant intersections. These are the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which was presented in Beirut in 1978; the Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende (MIRSA), which was organized by Chilean exiles and their supporters after the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, as well as its earlier incarnation, the Museo de la Solidaridad, which was in existence from 1971 to 1973; the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano en Solidaridad con Nicaragua, prompted by the first Sandinista government; and the Art Contre/Against Apartheid collection, which toured internationally in the years leading up to the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In addition to sharing a core idea, these four museums-in-exile or solidarity collections demonstrate notable overlaps in terms of the artists who participated and the people responsible for their organization. Amid this worldwide mobilization of prominent voices to encourage and lend support to international solidarity, the impact of the MIRSA initiative, in particular, led to reverberations around the world that continue to this day.

Past Disquiet tracks one thousand and one stories of artists, militants, visionaries, and dreamers who organized exhibitions, intervened in public spaces, and built art collections in support of the causes they were fighting for: museums of solidarity without walls, and, more often than not, museums that were in exile. Each edition of Past Disquiet comprises stories culled from memories, from yellowed newspaper clippings, magazines, and other publications, most of which have long stopped being in circulation, or from pamphlets that proclaimed revolutions that have lost their fervor, or from photographs stored in boxes not opened in decades. It stitches together transnational histories, bound by solidarity, whose connections have been otherwise lost or attenuated. Further, it maps networks of artists who were the heralds of political change and who believed that art should be at the heart of everyday life (in streets, schools, and public sites) emancipated from class privilege, and their connections to militants who believed that political change is impossible to imagine without artists.

Our inquest began with research into the 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine. We came across the catalog of the exhibition in the library of Agial Gallery in Beirut and were intrigued by the exhibition's scale and scope: approximately two hundred works were donated by almost two hundred artists from thirty countries. The main text of the catalog stated that these artworks were intended as the seed collection for a future museum for Palestine. Organized by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) through the Plastic Arts Section of its Office of Unified Information, the exhibition opened in the basement hall of Beirut Arab University on March 21, 1978. The director of the Plastic Arts Section was Mona Saudi. And yet the exhibition is not mentioned in any local, regional, or international art-historical accounts; neither is there any reference to it in exhibition histories. In 1982, the Israeli army advanced from south Lebanon to Beirut, holding the city under siege with the objective of forcing the PLO to leave Lebanon. The building where the collection of artworks had been stored was shelled, along with the offices of the Office of Unified Information, which housed the Plastic Arts Section and the exhibition documents. All that remained of the story of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine were the memories of those who made it happen and who visited it.

The word “disquiet” in the title Past Disquiet serves as an indication. It points to the unsettled nature of this past, to its wounds, deceptions, and betrayals, and yet at the same time, it points to its refusal to lay quietly, to be folded into silence, or to be dismissed and boxed up. “Disquiet” portends our indulging nostalgia. The exhibition is an invitation to a reckoning with, and reflection on, the failures and spoils of such impressive mobilizations of imagination, of creativity, and of audacious action.

One of the chief motivations that have carried us throughout these years is our desire to make these histories visible and tangible and to transmit a memory all too easily eluded. Past Disquiet contains a vibrant and endlessly proliferating archive intended to be shared and appropriated. The second motivation is to decenter art-historical narratives of the second half of the past century and to complicate narratives of the East-West divide during the Cold War by shifting the paradigm from which we revisit artistic practices—namely, from the perspective of the agents and actors from the (so-called) South, and from the perspective of solidarity. A very potent notion that today reclaims streets and headlines, “solidarity” manifests in myriad actions, symbols, and expressions across our exhibition and is in constant regeneration and reinvention. What we want to offer is what the images and documents show: artists from Botswana, Japan, Morocco, Cuba, France, and Chile resisting oppression and indignity and together conceiving another, better world in resonant ways. They dislodge art from its “conventional” sites and relocate it to other realms of political and social life.

Our research methodology was close to detective work, replete with fortuitous encounters, providential accidents, surprising coincidences, and epiphanies. We went in circles, and back and forth, allowing stories and characters to lead us. In presenting the outcome of the research in the form of an exhibition, the scenography partially reenacts our forensic process. A linear dramaturgy with a clear beginning, middle, and end would have denied the complexity of the histories unveiled and prevented visitors from threading narratives for themselves.

In this folio for Critical Times, we highlight a series of actions conducted by artist collectives from Italy and France in 1976, directed at mobilizing people to pressure their governments to relieve refugees trapped inside Tal al-Zaatar camp, located in the northeastern suburb of Beirut. Tal al-Zaatar was a Palestinian refugee camp established in 1949 that, by 1976, occupied approximately one square kilometer and housed approximately fifty to sixty thousand people. On January 7, 1976, Tal al-Zaatar became a battleground between fighters from the right-wing, Christian-dominated Lebanese Front coalition and Palestinian fighters. In the month of June, with support from the Syrian army, the militias from Lebanese Front placed the camp under a complete siege. Civilians no longer had access to food, medicine, water, or basic amenities, and the Red Cross was stopped from entering the camp. On August 12, 1976, the camp surrendered. An estimated three thousand Palestinian civilians were killed. Others died because of the shortage of water and medications. The Red Cross evacuated survivors, while the Lebanese militias leveled the camp. Not a single trace remained. Twice displaced, surviving refugees were resettled in other Palestinian camps across Lebanon.

Although news of the eighty-eight-day-long siege made headlines in the international media, this was insufficient to generate political will to stop the siege before its surrender. In Europe, PLO representatives and pro-Palestinian militants took to mounting protests, collecting donations, and staging events as a grassroots mobilization effort.

The siege of Tal al-Zaatar drew the attention of militant artist collectives active in European cities. Such collectives to whom bringing art to public spaces was at once organic and fundamental to their political engagement expressed their commitments through making banners, posters, and placards, staging interventions, and publicly painting murals in collective fashion. Past Disquiet is focused on recovering their microhistories. One such collective, L'Arcicoda, was based in Tuscany, Italy, formed in and around San Giovanni Valdarno in 1973. Between 1973 and 1976, it its member artists included Luca Alinari, Stefano Beccastrini, Giampiero Bigazzi, Renato Bitoni, Aurelio C., Fabio de Poli, Enzo Dei, Walter Falconi, Giuseppe Giachi, Franca Gori, Valeria Gori, Mirko Gualerzi, Giancarlo Marini, Graziano Martini, Piero Nincheri, Nicola Pagallo, Enzo Sciavolino, Simonetta Partorelli, Claudio Resti, Enrico Roccato, Emanuelle Romanelli, Daniela Rossi, Sergio Traquandi, and Venturino Venturi. The collective was cemented around the conviction that art should be produced against and outside the gallery system and the market. The collective organized exhibitions and interventions in independent and public spaces, looking for direct, antielitist contact with the public. Interventions in support of Chile and Palestine were among the international causes they supported.

The Collectif de peintres des pays arabes (also known as the Collectif Palestine) was founded in Paris in December 1975. One of its most enthusiastic and engaged founders was French artist Claude Lazar, who was a very close friend of Ezzeddine Kalak, the PLO representative in France between 1972 and 1978. As with hundreds of other artists, the student uprising of May 1968 in France radicalized Lazar's political convictions. He gravitated to the circles of the left that were frustrated by the French Communist Party and joined several collectives and groups that fought for the social and economic rights of artists. The Palestinian struggle was also central to his political subjectivity. Between 1976 and 1977 members of the Collectif de peintres des pays arabes included Khouzaima al-Alwani, Achraf Bakleh, Farid Ben Yahia, Brigitte Dustmann, Yasmine al-Hakim, Ilhem, Rachid Koraïchi, Claude Lazar, Moustapha Nachar, Ahmed Said, Mohamed Saci, Samir Salameh, Gouider Triki, Nicole Vennat, Marc Weirich, and Marc Zuate. Created to overcome the isolation experienced by individual artists, the collective was forged from shared political convictions, theoretically and practically. The collective participated in a “Palestine Day” event organized on the campus of the University of Vincennes in 1976, in which they presented paintings and screen prints and produced a three-by-six-meter banner dedicated to the Palestinian revolution for activists’ use during events. They also exhibited individual and collective works to a couple of editions of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, of which the collective was a part. In 1977, the Collectif de peintres des pays arabes disbanded, with some artists leaving France and others focusing on their own practice.

Claude Lazar was the crucial link between these two collectives, Collectif Palestine and L'Arcicoda. A few years earlier, he had traveled to Tuscany and attended several events organized by militant artists (including L'Aricoda) who were close to Lotta Continua.³ The Collectif Palestine decided to join forces with L'Arcicoda in Italy during the siege of Tal al-Zaatar. They also rallied worker unions to organize a series of public actions in solidarity with Palestinians. These public actions varied from town to town, but at their core was a collective painting practice that invited people to gather and participate, and during which the artists discussed events in the Tal al-Zaatar camp. Artists placed a large canvas (or edges of one) on the ground and stood at each of the four corners. Using a stencil drawing of a face of a fida'i who had been injured in the shelling, the artists invited members of the general public to participate in painting the image until the surface was covered entirely. The gathering occasioned discussions of the situation in Tal al-Zaatar and that of Palestinian refugees. The painting intervention was often accompanied by exhibitions of artists’ work, infographics, discussions, and music. The most memorable of these actions took place at the Piazza Ferretto in Mestre on September 7, 1976, as an event coinciding with the Thirty-Seventh Venice Biennale. Contemporary music composer Luigi Nono performed live music and Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi painted the words Tal al-Zaatar in Arabic when the canvas was covered. The Mestre event was produced in collaboration with the political organization Lotta Continua, the Partito di Unità Proletaria (Proletarian Unity Party), and the Federazione dei Giovani Socialisti Italiani (Federation of Young Italian Socialists) and was supported by the Municipality of Venice and the Venice Biennale.

Past Disquiet is an exhibition of stories collected over a decade of research. The past we refer to is recent, and a number of its protagonists are still alive. Nevertheless, for the most part, these stories narrate undocumented chapters in the history of modern and contemporary art that chronicle the actions of groups of artists to engage with political change. Throughout the various iterations of the exhibition, we have asked ourselves about the significance of reviving images and stories decades in their aftermath—after the Pinochet dictatorship was defeated, after South African apartheid was ended, and after the PLO had created the Palestinian National Authority. This aftermath has its own set of problematics, unresolved internal conflicts, and scars that have not yet healed, but if we zoom out, we understand that ours is a time in which utopias have lapsed and struggles for liberation have not met their promise to the fullest, yet. Some might even argue that ours is the time in the aftermath of defeat. The histories we have unearthed have scant, dispersed archival traces, few of which still exist in institutions. And some archives have been destroyed. The raw material of the exhibition consists of interviews, archival documents, images, and moving image footage. When we interviewed artists and militants, we were aware that we were in fact asking them to harken back to historical moments when hope and aspirations were still vibrant. The images (photographs, posters, artworks) and documents had “survived,” while the political, discursive, and ideological framework in which they had produced had subsided. This kind of time travel has its traps, the most obvious being the lure of nostalgia, and thus it was necessary to look at the images historically.

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