The first volume of LIFTA, themed Future Palestine, is an art book of exercises and experiments that play with futurist anti-narratives on Palestine. It’s an anthology of poems, blueprints, stories, essays, conversations, sketches and photographs.
The book features the work of artists, poets, writers, architects, students, activists and educators. It’s a step away from the past and present, from the limitations of current affairs, memory and rhetoric––a step towards intangible possibilities and impossibilities.
It examines all the things that bind Palestine to Palestinians: time, land, exile, nationhoods, falsehoods, things lost, found and held onto, ideals of return, and for those that remained, ideals of exit. This brings forth the question: how much of history, reality and experience can we shed in the realm of the imaginary?