MAHMOUD ALSHAER: WRITING AS A SITE OF POSSIBILITY

Tuesday, 13 January, 2026 – 7:00 pm
Writing as A Site of Possibility is the ninth session of Material Voices: Feminist genealogies of the work of making exhibitions. With Mahmoud Alshaer in conversation with Isabel de Naverán.

MAHMOUD ALSHAER: WRITING AS A SITE OF POSSIBILITY
What I want to share in Bulegoa z/b is not a fixed idea of Palestinian literature, but an experience of writing as a cultural practice that exists in tension with institutions, representation, and visibility. The project of 28 Magazine emerged not as a literary platform, but as an artistic and cultural gesture: a space to experiment with language, form, and voice beyond political utility and expected narratives. It was an attempt to treat writing not as cultural production, but as a site of risk, vulnerability, and possibility. 28 functioned less like a magazine and more like an open rehearsal space for literature — where texts could fail, fracture, resist form, and remain unresolved. A place where writing could exist alongside art, performance, and theory, without needing to “serve” a cause or perform identity.

I’m deeply interested in how writing operates as a cultural practice similar to performance or visual art: how it carries the body, memory, and gesture; how it occupies space; how it creates encounters rather than objects. In this sense, contemporary Palestinian literature — as I experience it — is not a genre, but a field of experimentation under pressure, shaped by exile, surveillance, and emotional density, but refusing heroic clarity or symbolic closure. This, for me, is less about presentation and more about exchange: a shared inquiry into how art and writing can exist inside political reality without being reduced by it, and how cultural spaces like Bulegoa z/b can host practices that do not seek consensus, but create room for complexity.

To take part in the encounter, please contact bulegoa@bulegoa.org

Mahmoud Alshaer is an editor, curator, and poet who was deeply involved in cultural work in Gaza, leading initiatives such as 28 Magazine and Gallery 28 and coordinating the cultural program at Al Ghussein Cultural House in Gaza’s old city. He is a member of Dahaleez Collective. He co-edited Letters from Gaza (2025) with Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and wrote I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza (2025).

Isabel de Naverán is an independent writer and researcher. Her work is situated at the intersection of art and choreography and consists in projects involving curating, publishing and writing. Her interest in the passage and use of time underlies her investigations, which are focused on bodily transmission and the revision of the concept of historical time from the perspective of ephemeral and fleeting practices. In 2010, together with con Beatriz Cavia, Miren Jaio and Leire Vergara, she founded Bulegoa z/b, an office of art and knowledge located in Bilbao, a project with which she was linked until 2018.