After the last stitch: Palestinian dresses and anticolonial feminist filmmaking

This practice-as-research project comprises a film, Inti Samida (She the Steadfast) and accompanying thesis. It is a feminist and anticolonial investigation into embroidered Palestinian dress cultures, which interrogates the contemporary relationship between indigenous dress as a gendered heritage object and young women living in urban society under settler colonial occupation and global patriarchy. I argue for collaboration through local modes of knowledge production as a basis for anticolonial research. Viewing Palestinian dress cultures as liquid assemblage objects within a rhizomatic culture of women’s knowledge production, I locate Palestinian dress as an expression of both the individual woman’s life and body, and their identity within indigenous collectivist society. Inti Samida is centred on five Acts made in collaboration with women living in the West Bank through Palestinian theatre-making methodologies. These performances are premised on the act of dressing in an object that connects women’s lives and knowledge across time and space. The Acts are correspondingly ‘dressed’ in a patchwork assemblage of archival and found audio and visual material from Palestinian film, literature, poetry, music, academia, feminism and activism, as well as documentary material by ally makers, to contextualise and examine the epistemologies and histories informing the collaborations. The symbolism of embroidery can thus be found emulated in the symbols and collisions that these patches contain and create. I also include short samples of audio from international media commentary, imagining these as cheap imported lining fabrics, offering context but lacking in nuance, and locating dispersed Palestinian narratives within permeable and precarious epistemological borders. As a White British maker, I endeavour to decolonise knowledge production through centring Palestinian voices. To achieve this I use evolving debates in Palestinian feminist anti-colonial resistance to guide the narrative as video editor in arrangement of assemblage materials sourced from primarily Palestinian makers, writers and commentators. I use Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s publication After the Last Sky (1986) and Elia Suleiman and Jace Salloum’s short film Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990) to inspire a transposing of assemblage Palestinian dressmaking structures into a hybrid patchwork filmic structure. I also draw on Yara Hawari’s notion of Palestinian indigenous time (2019), treating Palestinian temporality as fluid and rooted in the trauma of the Nakba, allowing numerous histories and temporalities to rhizomatically connect, repeat and collide in the edit form. The accompanying thesis contextualises the filmmaking process, exploring the historical research, working relationships and anticolonial feminist thought that informed the development of the film. In this, I argue for a de-centring of the PLO’s nationalist and patriarchal icon of the Embroidered Woman in dress culture histories, focussing instead on histories of inherited dressmaking cultures as a form of women’s knowledge production that incorporates both collectivist and individual identities. Palestinian women’s diverse and subjective identities, lives and resistances to colonial and patriarchal abuse can thus be viewed within an open-ended and non-linear history of gendered agency, activism and power. from primarily Palestinian makers, writers and commentators. I use Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s publication After the Last Sky (1986) and Elia Suleiman and Jace Salloum’s short film Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990) to inspire a transposing of assemblage Palestinian dressmaking structures into a hybrid patchwork filmic structure. I also draw on Yara Hawari’s notion of Palestinian indigenous time (2019), treating Palestinian temporality as fluid and rooted in the trauma of the Nakba, allowing numerous histories and temporalities to rhizomatically connect, repeat and collide in the edit form.