Futuristic Heritage: Palestinian Craftculture in the Context of Settler Colonialism

Abstract: Through the study of the creative practices of young artisans in Palestine, this thesis addresses the symbolic and lived time experiences in the context of settler colonialism. It is based on interviews with seven craftspeople from Ramallah and Jerusalem who practice artistic forms of reproducing and rethinking heritage. It investigates how and why they do what they do on a daily basis, with a focus on their treatment of space, materials, and particularly time, as well as the narratives they share through their works. These artisans’ daily practices, creative art forms, and cultural productions are framed and analyzed here as a kind of slow activism and visual resistance to the settler-colonial regime which locates independence and decolonization as futuristic endeavors in their world-making projects. As a result, this study contributes to time studies by providing contextualized knowledge on aesthetic slow activism. I propose that, while heritage practices are often associated with the past, they can also be used to tell futuristic stories. The heritage practices and craftworks featured in this thesis hosted numerous time experiences, including the past, present, and future. As actors in the Palestinian heritage movement, young artisans introduced new practices and narratives that challenged traditional production structures such as family, gender, and location, and they were also self-sufficient in terms of governmental and non-governmental support. More importantly, the way they reworked traditional crafts was delicate and respectful, yet it allowed for the emergence of a new visual vocabulary in which previous heritage narratives were challenged, and multiple signposts of time interacted inside the same craftwork.