Resistant Energies

Resistant Energy: Infrastructures of Solidarity and Struggle

April 24-25 in Amsterdam, 2 different but interconnected situations:

1:

SPUI25

24.04.2025

Spui 25-27, 1012 WX Amsterdam

Resistant Energy: Infrastructures of Solidarity and Struggle

This panel examines the shifting infrastructures of resistance and repression that define contemporary Palestine solidarity, focusing on legal frameworks, social and material infrastructures, and social justice archives. As international legal institutions such as the ICC and ICJ intervene in unprecedented ways, we ask how these shifts recalibrate the global framing of Palestinian liberation—legitimizing perspectives from the Global South while also reinforcing imperial modes of governance. Concurrently, other vital global institutions, including universities, have become key battlegrounds where students and faculty engaged in Palestine solidarity efforts face increasing policing, surveillance, and repression. From bureaucratic restrictions and disciplinary actions to targeted harassment, the infrastructures of repression extend beyond state mechanisms, infiltrating educational spaces that have historically been sites of radical critique. Such systems are not new or exclusive to Palestine; they are part of a settler-colonial genealogy that has long weaponized infrastructure to enforce segregation and control, as seen in apartheid South Africa.

Our discussion explores the social infrastructures that resist imperial forms of governance and institutional repression, mobilizing networks of solidarity and counter-surveillance. Together, Miriyam Aouragh, Omar Salamanca, and Karl Moubarak will reflect on these intersecting struggles, drawing upon their learnings from developing Resistant Energy, a forthcoming booklet published by the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). The booklet compiles a year-long investigation into archival visuals of infrastructure and apartheid—from South Africa to Palestine—exploring the material and symbolic energies that sustain resistance. Through this conversation, we situate contemporary struggles within longer histories of decolonial resistance, tracing how infrastructures of power are both dismantled and repurposed in the fight for justice.

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2:

DE APPEL

25.04.25

3:00-4:30 pm

Resistant Energies: Research sharing and study session

[with Miriyam Aouragh, Karl Moubarak, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Sofia Boschat-Thorez and Femke Snelting]

Infrastructural resistance is the abolitionist work of breaking down oppressive infrastructures and at the same time imagining, organising and/or building up new structures and institutions. But what does this look like? How are infra-struggles presented visually as part of historical legacies? What visual lexicon and quotidian aesthetics could transform affective and political relations to infrastructures?

In this conversation, Miriyam, Karl and Omar will speak about the deep dive they are taking into the archives of IISH, The International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), exploring visual evidence of creative strategies, community organising, publishing, and concepts for and of infra-resistance. The archives contain rich materials, including posters, flyers, stickers, photos, maps, diagrams, architectural plans, performances, banners, and objects. Based on the conviction that visual practices can energize the building of everyday infrastructures for communication, caring, learning, sharing resources and creative life otherwise; their research has focused on both the recovery of images that help situate, politically sharpen, historicise and create imaginative strategies for resistance against digital depletion, and on the violence waged by computational infrastructures collaborating with corporate and state actors on genocidal technologies and supply chains. They will share archival material and images specifically pertaining to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

The Resistant Energies research trajectory was initiated by The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists committed to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making.

+ info & reservations: https://www.deappel.nl/en/archive/events/1294-every-act-of-struggle-openingsprogramma

Bios

Miriyam Aouragh: Professor Miriyam Aouragh (Westminster University) has a background in cultural anthropology and non-Western sociology and completed her PhD in 2008 at the UvA, on how the introduction of the internet related to the outbreak of mass uprisings in Palestine. Aouragh subsequently focused on the political role of new digital tools and spaces, and she has ethnographic fieldwork were conducted among grassroots activism in Lebanon and Palestine. Aouragh relates critical theory with online-offline dialects

Omar Jabary Salamanca: Omar Jabary Salamanca (ULB, Belgium), studies histories, geographies and theories of development, political economy, political ecology, and science and technology studies in colonial contexts. His work spans urban infrastructures, settler colonialism, and anti-colonial movements, culminating in a forthcoming book on the political lives of infrastructures in Palestine to be published by Verso Books. Formerly at Ghent and Columbia Universities, he's held visiting fellowships at Sussex and SOAS. Salamanca contributes to multiple editorial and advisory boards, including Antipode and Jadaliyya Cities, and co-founded the Eye On Palestine Arts and Film Festival.

Karl Moubarak: Karl Moubarak is a designer and tool-builder whose practice is rooted in the digital sphere and focuses on the research, development, and social activation of experimental interfaces, infrastructures, and on and offline sites for exchange. Collaborates with artists, collectives, researchers, and cultural organisations on projects that pay critical attention to the processes, tools, and mechanisms that co-constitute them. Enjoys working with free, libre, and open-source software and hardware with a particular interest in accessibility, sustainability, and experimental methods of liveness and dissemination.