Current Projects
If you have been to the Opening page you will be familiar with the various kinds of video. So here below are some further examples of current work: Ikons, Haiku, Etudes and Opus. For more examples of current work, check out the videos on Openings, Past Projects and Collaboration.
For information on the HARK Collective’s most recent project, Asylum Diaries, visit the Opus section of the website.
Ikons
Ikons are sounded glimpses of some feature of our environing world, small passing miniatures.
Haiku
Haiku are short, usually 4 minute, invitations to dwell a little longer with sound and images.
Etudes
Etudes are longer pieces which take a particular subject or theme, for example deep geological time in Cosmosis or link a series of visual elements — light, surface, pattern — in others. I have finalised one, Cosmosis and am working on three others at the moment and they are all being worked on by composers to develop the sound tracks for them. I show them here silent/unscored to give a sense of the visual materials. Flow has a number of episodes, from Fall and naturalistic beginning at the Hermitage Falls at Dunkeld, to Object, rocks. to and explores movements, flows of water, cloud. patterns. FishEye River is a study of the surface of the River Tay whereby the world is reflected on and in the surface, depths appear, light create ripples, and what can be seen o the banks seems to be what a fish might see. GrassRustWind is a compilation of shots of organic movement, first in fields where the uniformity of planting feels regiments and only lightly disturbed by breezes; a central interlude is a visit to a farm machinery graveyard where the mechanical beasts lie rusting and disused, cockpits are deserted, grass grows around deflated tyres, and clanking machines are silenced; the third episode tries to capture the wayward and unpreditable movement of the wind running through and away through the grass, the final shot is a memorial image — poppies come unbidden year after year, nature is always naturing, and post covid this seems like an optimistic thought.
But first, Cosmosis, the full version of the Haiku: Porous which opened this website. Here the sound and images take us into deep geological time (see the story of the piece in Sounding Stones in Past Projects). Cosmosis moves from the green surface that is disturbed by the scraping and striking of stones, to rhythmic rocking cascades of scree, to volcanic grindings, through meteor showers, tectonic explosions and an immersion in the creation of the sounded matter. Cosmos and osmosis — our composition as star dust and our waking porosity to the world imagined as the image/sound membrane where mind mingles with matter. The water surfaces bounce light around the sounds. Our immersion in the fluid molecules is like a sensory conglomeration prefigured in the small interstices of porous stone. A whirlpool is created by the struggles of a wasp caught in the surface tension of the water and it spins itself deeper and deeper into oblivion. The ‘Big Bang’ was actually silent, and here we feel its energy rippling out as waves, becoming sound. Your ear-drum attuned to the rock beats in a regularity like a summoning bell, and sound recedes into deep space as an echo. The hum of the cosmos: hairs of the inner ear. The ear drum moves less that an atom to hear this world. This is what I try to create — Atmosphere, through sensory elements that constellate into some idea or impression of the world.
Opus
insert images
Asylum Diaries
Programme Note
The HARK Collective’s most recent project, Asylum Diaries, is in five parts and four Atmospheres: Prologue; Exile; Running; Capture and Witness. The Prologue introduces the theme of , exile, displacement, loss and memory, and asylum seeking through the poetry of Mahmut Darwish and Hannah Arendt. The following first three Atmospheres are an imaginative, sensory narrative of a refugee journey. Atmosphere 1: Exile begins on the seashore, leaving by boat into exile, to the sound o of engine and prayers. Atmosphere 2: Running is the imagined experience of arriving in a strange country, landscape, and being pursued, running and being captured. Atmosphere 3: Capture is an imaginary of bring imprisoned, maltreated, yet surviving to continue the journey. These parts are made as the memories of a traveler using an iPhone, capturing fragments of the journey and producing a chronicle that helps us imagine their experience. In Atmosphere 5: Witness, the approach changes from a sensory imaginary narrative to a realist documentary approach. Witness is narrated by the Angel of History a figure from the work of Walter Benjamin. It includes images of the Nakba and ruined villages from the work of Ahmad Al-Bazz a photographer from the West Bank who has collaborated with us on our work. The Palestinian genocide here is central in Witness and also to our universal understanding of violence and inhumanity. Witness asks us to do just that, to honour the dead and the living and points towards ‘survivance’ – a word that express the emotional and intellectual burden of living with and after these traumas, and the refusal to be de-humanised by them. The piece lasts just under 1 hour and was premiered in November 2025 at the Advanced Research Centre of the University of Glasgow, Scotland. I made this piece, collaborating with others, because I believe that the creative arts can make the ‘unimaginable’ imaginable – by opening hearts to the plight of others, through the experience of compassionate imagining. When their voice is heard, when we accept that we are witnesses, when we moved by our imaginative compassion to their condition, our actions can be empowered.
As preparation before, and reflection after, viewing the video we provide the following texts:
Seven Reasons Why the Palestine-Israeli Conflict matters to us all.
The Performance script in the from of a prose poem.
The References to, and the sources of, the 38 Images in the Atmosphere Witness
Biographies of Performers in the live Performance at the ARC November 2025.
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Seven Reasons Why the Palestine-Israeli Conflict matters to us all.
Asylum Diaries makes references and links to a range of genocides, and makes central the present genocide in Gaza. In working on this piece, in the current unfolding tragedy, we have become aware of the universal relevance of this conflict. Here I try to offer seven perspectives of our universal human predicament that the Gaza genocide embodies and sadly exemplifies.
Adania Shibli writes:
Palestine is a mode of living, an experience. But it's also a position of witnessing, from a position that can teach us. If you are listening, it becomes so natural that you care, and you create a connection of care toward others that is not limited to the borders of the nation-state or to Palestine as such. This is an ethical point for me — what I am as a human being who has lived in this place under these conditions, what I can carry away from this place on a personal level — and what it created in terms of literature.
Killing People
There is a categorical imperative, basic to human and civil life that we should not kill one another. All ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ must subject to intense ethical scrutiny. ‘Just War’ theories or Biblical justifications of vengeance must be scrutinised. ‘Killing’ causing needless death and suffering is a broad spectrum of actions: from war, violence, torture, mass incarceration (2,800 Palestinians from Gaza are detained in Israeli prisons without charge (NGO Public Committee Against Torture in Israel), hostage -taking, to annihilation. Killing people entails a process of demonization, the denial of personhood and the right to life, stigmatisation, displacement, and ‘othering’ such that those we despise lose respect, are stripped of rights and can be treated therefore as sub-human. These drives combine to create a cult of death, perpetual conflict and inform the military and political apparatus as forms of power. Resistance to oppression, the actions of resistance to tyranny cannot avail itself of a justification for murder. There can be no side-taking in adhering to this categorial imperative. Human life, culture and civilised co-operation and the application of the rule of law depends upon accepting its non-negotiability. The fundamental right to life and the prohibition on killing are always fused.
Didier Fassin 2024 Moral Abdication How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. Verso
Pankaj Mishra 2025 The World After Gaza Penguin Random House/Fern Press.
Gore Vidal 2002 Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How we got to be so hated, Cause of Conflict in the Last Empire Clairview Books
Operation al-Aqsa Flood: A Rupture in the History of the Palestinian Resistance and Its Implications https://www.setav.org/en/operation-al-aqsa-flood-a-rupture-in-the-history-of-the-palestinian-resistance-and-its-implications
Paul Mason 2025.This Deal is a Calamity for Gaza. New World Issue 456 October 16th
Rights to Life: Destruction, Displacement and Erasure
Displacement and apartheid is the dispossession of home. Destruction of the land itself, its toxic poisoning eco-cide makes agriculture impossible. The destruction of family and civil life and the materials for culture and its artifacts is not collateral damage of a war it is the very means by which war is being waged. The very basis of lived life is weaponised, destroyed and is a central part of the death-dealing process. This ‘death-cult’ fuelled by vengeance kills also the means of survival: by killing doctors, destroying hospitals and a generation of children. It is the erasure of the necessities for life and the erasure of culture. Displacement, ethnic cleaning, in adding to the established forms of apartheid continues with the illegal infiltration and takeover of land and agriculture. One cannot read the history of the Palestinian people since 1948 and not understand the progressive nature of these imposed strategies their purpose full and pitiless prosecution leading to the immiserating of a whole people. To understand this plight is where we have to begin a review. What happens when all remedies fail, when the world turns its back? The following submission to the ICJ expresses the historical and legal basis for Palestinian sovereignty
Dr Ralph Wilde, Feb 2024. Submission of the Arab League States on Palestine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrLQES3TmY
Rebecca Ruth Gould. 2023. Erasing Palestine. Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. Verso.
Desolation where no law applies: the uses of International Law; the failure of religion.
When a sovereign power creates a state and place of ‘exception’ they tyrannically suspend laws, customs, rituals. No regulatory, ethical or juridical frames of reference are allowed to be applied to the territory that has been made a place and space of ‘exception’. This sealed off wasteland allows little contact with the external world, journalists are killed. The spectacle is then broadcast by satellites, to screens as a theatre of power, a warning. What is International Law in such a situation? The exception may prove the rule, but who enforces the rule? Hiding behind the final and delayed findings of the ICJ on disputed definitions of ‘genocide’ is simply an abrogation of both moral and political responsibility.
In such states of exception both existential and transcendent dimensions are located. The latter, in the form and presence of an immutable enduring human spirit may constellate in mind, heart and soul as the place of truth and justice, and indeed the nurture of the soul for survivance. All major religions have incubated at their margins extremist factions, that appropriate texts and tradition in fundamentalist ways. Are we seeing here the failure of religions to offer a coherent collective ecumenical witness to the validity of the categorical imperative and doing do in terms of this Spirit?
The Strengths and Weaknesses of International Law.
The AI killing machine
Gaza has become the laboratory for the development of a spectacle of digital warfare waged impersonally from a distance by algorithms with minimal and well defended operators with indifference. The spectacle on our screens so immediate, vivid and fast moving and the war-gaming of the players is a new and potentially terrifying method of warfare. The gathering, information processing and the algorithmic calculus of target selection is de-humanised, ethically outsourced to the AI killing apparatus. No-one pulls the trigger’ it happens’ automatically because it is programmed, thus a strong psychological defence against the horror of killing intentions, and against responsibility and guilt is created. This scenario also creates the laboratory for military development to be sold across the world.
In 2023, in the opening weeks of Israel’s bombing campaign a new set of AI systems was deployed. It had been developed by Unit 8200, Israel’s version of US National Security Agency. The ‘Lavender’ system would use swathes of data to predict who was an appropriate target connected to Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At its height Lavender identified as many as 37.000 Palestinian men. These had to be vetted by a human operator, but the procedure was brisk, about a twenty second check before bombing approval. Another AI system called ‘The Gospel’ would identify buildings and facilities that were most likely used by targets. The targets were then tracked and a third algorithm called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ would alert the Israeli military when targets had arrived back at their homes and were ready to be assassinated
Luke Kemp, 2025, Goliath’s Curse. The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Viking Penguin. Random House.
Also see the comprehensive review of these issues in: Anthony Loewenstein 2024 The Palestine Laboratory. How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Verso.
Controlling the Narrative and the Importance of Testimonies
The shaping of a vengeance justification narrative has proceeded. Selective slices of history are used to make claims to homeland. Biblical references are extracted and applied. The battle of definitions is stoked by constant contestation in the search for a conceptual purity. Complex descriptions are weaponised. The meanings of what should be the words of dialogue are polarised: antisemitism; genocide (for history and definitions of this term see: https://journals.law.harvard.edu and Baghdassarian A, 2022 The Legal Significance of AS recognition of the Armenian Genocide: Implications for Strategic Litigation. https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2022/05/the-legal-significance-of-u-s-recognition-of-the-armenian-genocide-implications-for-strategic-litigation/); Zionism; Islamism; terrorism, and become toxic and inflammatory. The ambiguity of slogans (From the River to the Sea) adds to the confusion The proscribing of Palestinian organisations, conflating proper dissent with support for terrorism is a category error. Even matters to do with the word ‘Palestine’ has been so treated in some quarters. The Palestinian resistance movement will have to be very clear and precise in articulating their narrative, and how this shapes and informs public meanings. Therefore writing and testimonies are vitally important for Palestinians to have a voice and to tell their story, for example:
Nathan Thrall. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.
Adana Shibli 2020 Minor Detail Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Colum McCann Apeirogon 2020 Bloomsbury.
Omar El Akkad 2025, One Day….Everyone will have always been Against This.Cannongate Press.
Yasir Suleiman 2016 Being Palestinian. Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora. Edinburgh University Press.
Trauma
Trauma is the cumulation of the stresses on mind, body, community and the possibility of survival. It is a state of chronic ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. Sufferers wake with a dread of continual pain, oppression injury and more suffering. Life itself becomes unbearable anxiety and its physical and mental aspects pervades every waking moment and indeed also those times of fitful semi-sleep that can be snatched. The world becomes malign, day and night merge into a liminal nightmare. This conflict and it horror is often referred to as ‘unimaginable’. It may be that this description is a useful apparently sympathetic defence again facing a reality that we witness. It is the opening our hearts in imagination that will allow compassion to arise. The mental health consequences of this conflict will traumatise whole populations and this is will flow down generations thereafter. Collective cultural trauma takes other forms in other places, some commentators suggest that Israeli society is “under a ‘social psychosis’ in the grip of militarism and victimhood” (Haim Breseeth, see reference below)
“The Day After”: Suspension, Limbo and Purgatory
The political theatre of magically announcing ‘peace’ through an imposed ceasefire now leaves a state of exception in a past-apocalyptic limbo. People return to rubble, diseases spread, no water, no means of sustaining normal life has reappeared, nor is likely to soon. The pilgrimage home to desolation has to be made, to honour the dead to be in the place from whence we have come, where we once had a life. What will my house be worth now when the real estate reconstruction company comes calling? Who is helping reconstruction? ‘What will be reconstructed? Will it include the basis of a flourishing personal and family life, an economy, and civil society related to a coherent form of governance in a land that is recognised as Palestinian.
‘The annihilation may end, but the occupation continues as it did before October 7th 2023. The blockade remains, settlements expand and daily oppression persists……we must reclaim our rituals: let plates return to tables, the road regain it calm on the way to school. People need life, nothing more. Gaza has endured pain, betrayal and neglect and deserves a real chance at living, a genuine one, not fragile ceasefires’
Sondos Saba We return to gangs, bombs, rubble and Fear. Guardian Newspapers 17/11/25.
See also the interviews with:
Eran Etzion (Former Deputy Head of Israel National Security Council) Netanyahu did not Want this Agreement. SKY News UTube.
Yuvul Noah Harari on The New World Disorder on Middle East Eye UTube
Professor Haim Breseeth (former IDF soldier, writer and academic) What the Gaza Peace Deal is all About. On Crispin Flintoff UTube,
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The Performance script in the from of a prose poem.
Asylum Diaries Script
Prologue
Exile
Running
Capture
Witness
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Prologue
Being Palestinian is to be possessed by going back, no matter how many walls are built on the beautiful land that our ancestors tilled, we walk in the shoes of your ancestors and carry a burden too heavy to ignore.
Being Palestinian is missing something you have never had,
and loving it even more
If you are exiled
Don’t expect an open field,
A smile, a new home-
Most likely you will always be a stranger
But stand close enough to see their eyes
Yet far enough to protect your heart
We travel like other people,
but we return to nowhere.
As if travelling
Is the way of clouds…
We have a country of words.
Speak, speak, so I can put my road on the stone of a stone.
We have a country of words.
speak,… speak so I may know the end of this travel.
Eventide descends once more.
Night falls down from the stars
We stretch our limbs, reaching out
To those near, and those far
Distant voices, nearby sorrow–
The voices of those dead
The messengers we sent ahead
Gentle whispering melodies
Sound from the darkness.
We listen so we can let go
Finally break rank
Let compassion flow
Atmosphere 1:Exile
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The sand, where prints of others have been left
They left Before us
A rope Offers us some hope
Is this our life line?
We follow its twisted journey
Its end frayed
We are afraid
It leads only to the sea
It leads only to the sea
The dirty sea
The dirty sea keeps coming
Pushing us endlessly back
Pushing us endlessly back
The dirty sea keeps coming
Pushing us endlessly back
Pushing us endlessly back
We huddle beneath the pier
We huddle beneath the pier
we wait poised for the boat to leave
we cling on even as the tide ebbs
JUMPS
JUMPS
We cling on breathing
One of us is gone
In the wake
We sing our songs of hope
Still the waves come at us
We sing our songs of hope We do not know what to fear
Let us leave behind
the metal of our prison pier
to which we have clung
like barnacles,
and left our names
scratched upon its columns
and left our names
scratched upon its columns
scratched upon its columns
upon its columns
Hope hangs in dumb time
We climb the latticed metal
When will we be gone?
When will we be gone?
When we are gone
Hope hangs in Dumb time
Where will we be?
Strangely slow and calm
We will be gone
We go
Invisible in the gentle swell
We hear our music
Slow
Slowly letting go
Strangely slow and calm
Heads down
Invisible in the gentle swell
we hear our music
The moment is here
We go
We go
the moment is here
we go letting go
Strangely slow and calm
Heads down
We hear our music
The boat passes
The boat passes
We see the horizon
The boat passes
We see the horizon
Atmosphere 2: Running
We watch
We lie in wait
Here through the undergrowth
Our hearts beat
We watch
We lie in wait
Here through the undergrowth
Our hearts beat
Faceless
Silence
Birds crying
Time running out slow
Keep a rhythm
Walk with the beat of the earth
Walk with the beat of the earth
Walk upon the earth
That is also ours
look at the sky which is also our
Walls
when will it end?
Walls
Walls
Endless walls
Is there an end?
We are lost and
dare not be found
We are on the move
The underground railway
Hypnotic heart beats
Hypnotic beats
Sleepers
Sleepers
We have direction
We are on the move
Sleepers
Yea
We snooze
When will it end?
We are lost in the tracks
to endless destinations
They are waiting for us
We are taken
We are taken
The bells
We are taken
Down inside
Down inside
Then up to the hall
Up to the hall
Our faces
for searching
recognised
Our faces
recognised
Our faces
Recognised
In transit there are no ways
To escape
Our faces
Recognised
free man leaves
some others are let go
there are no ways
to escape
some others are let go
no ways to escape
Our tears flow
Our tears flow
We remember the grass
All is lost again, now, not in place
But in our hearts
From behind the wire
We remember the grass
All is lost again
Atmosphere 3: Capture
Feel the darkness
enter your body
Try to keep breathing
Try
Try
To keep breathing
stay fixed
Try
On the light
Try to keep breathing
Breath in, stay fixed on the light
Actual Breathing!!
breath in the chains
feel the darkness enter your body
keep
breathing
[make breathing noises]
The precipice
Stay fixed on the light
Waling up to a green light
Ripples
Ripples
unregistered time
slow inner music
slow in water
staring at ripples
staring at ripples
a trance in the water
inner music
a trance in water
Why
Why
Why
Why
UHH, the drill
The drill!
Why
Why
It enters my mouth
What good am I?
AH..AH AAAAH!!
What good is this?
what good am I?
Uh Uh
The drill enters my mouth
AH AH
AAAAH>>>>>>>>>>>>
Noises
[Coughing]
[spluttering]
[choking]
Alive it seems
They want me ….alive
Is this the afterlife?
Ah..the Sweet music of life after death
Comes dropping slow
Breath and live
In the falling cadences of time…
If I should die
The sound will carry me
to paradise
Release me
For I am more afraid of life
than death
yet I breathe
the breath of deliverance
I hear faint voices of the living
crying for me
weeping for the world
Atmosphere 4.Witness
My name is Walter Benjamin
I am a wandering spirit, an Angel,
Angelus Novus,
a watcher, who bears witness…..
In the afterlife there is no death,
we as spirits are everywhere
airy presences beside you. ….
My face is turned towards the past,
a storm is blowing from paradise,
you feel this pressing wind as time,
a chain of events
a seeming progress, which…
presses wreckage upon wreckage………
EPISODE 1.
(Desolation of the gifts of creation)
At this fold in time, now,
in the declination of the present moment,
here on an edge,
come with me to seek those who have sought sanctuary.
The dead will teach the living,
I am your living memory, and you
the living witnesses
What did we do with the gifts of creation?
fire for warmth yet the earth burns,
hurricanes for gentle breezes,
Cities Flood,
We polluted rivers,
We burn our Bridges
We have no roof to lay our heads
ice melts
we are parched as deserts.
bombed cities
deserted habitations
haunted places
Who are the people who have gone?
These remants wander the earth,
I will take you in their footsteps
These nomad souls
To what was once called….. the Holy Land
EPISODE 2.
(Palestine)
(Stones as holding Memory)
Come with me along the tide rubbed pebbles of the shore
where the deposits of songs
are preserved In the sound of tides.
Stare….. into the center of the earth
See the preserved weathered, libraries
our sedimentation of wisdom….
In which we survive
in deep geological time
Come to the raked courtyards of the mighty
onto which leaves as past lives fall,
and untidily intrude upon their tidy consciences.
Walk with me amongst those gathered leaves,
shuffling
disturbing their muffled voices…
loves haunting dry,
come in the dry season.
EPISODE 4.
I am the Angel
seeking those who refuse
the lessons of history,
speaking for those who have suffered it.
As the emissary of the unforgotten dead
Here is their litany….
EPISODE 5.
(A Litany of Displacement)
EPISODE 6.
(Incarceration)
Through passageways, down corridors,
you are disoriented…….
Wars are won and lost in tunnels…….
There are levels of depravity:
houses razed above ground,
mind tortured below,
the ragged body…
imprisoned….
In walls that have no solidity..
Solitude ebbs into isolation,
into the interiority of your mind
where your gibbering shakes,
part words part groaning (are)
garbled prayers to a deaf God.
You talk to yourself,
you are beside yourself.
I am a witnessssss….,
you are a witnessssss……
he/she will witnessssss….,
we have witnessed…..
they will witnessessss…..
let us walk amongst the living, unseen, and whisper messages of hope…..from the dead
EPISODE 7.
(Memory)
Remember
Remember
Remember/forget
Remember me…..repeat each voice
For ever………………repeat each voice
Remember us………repeat etc
Not forgetting but remembering
remember
EPISODE 8.
(Candle Prayer)
Let not let my disintegration go to waste,
put my suffering to some
use….
make of my dust,
atoms for the fashioning of a birds eye
EPISODE 9.
Epilogue
So our journey continues
For you my friends there is survival.
Perhaps you have,
in your mind’s eye,
A place wherein the Spirit dwells,
where you can rest,
where those who came before you
sat down under the sky,
left their inscriptions
and buried their dead.
I have led you, as your Angel
to the sanctuary of the heart’s imaginings,
to the suffering of others
where compassion dwells,
Where living memories arise
from the voices of the dead.
But you are not yet amongst them,
you are destined as the remnant
to: return;
to the desolation of home and heart;
to exhume the dead;
to rebury even a single found bone;
to the rebuilding of war-torn lives.
They have been martyrs
You, sharing their suffering
are a living sacrifice
I am with you forever
your immutable symbol of resurrection,
Bearing your burden as the scapegoat of history.
You may pass away: I will not
I will be your living memory, your witness, for
When the sun rises on every new day
Your testimony will always be true.
What is loves work among the ashes?
In the limbo and purgatory that is offered us as peace?
Let us Resist! Arise and Live!
In the face of destruction…..
We will be as one
In truth.
How small a thought it is to fill a whole life.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The References to, and the sources of, the 38 Images in the Atmosphere Witness
Prologue
1. Weaving
2. Strangers Everywhere Venice Biennale 2024
Witness
www.dark-tourism.com
Tezenas, Ambroise 2014 Tourism de la Desolation. Actes Sud
References In the order they appear in Witness
1 The tomb of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin died trying to cross over into Spain during WWII to escape the Nazis. He was buried in a common grave in Portbou cemetery. The memorial shown here is called “Pasajes” and is by the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan. It evokes the pain and deep sense of tragedy suffered then and now by those who are exiled from their own lives. The cemetery in Porbou was visited in 1940 by Hannah Arendt a close friend who was instrumental in enabling this memorial. The link with Arendt is important, for in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she noted that ‘the plight of the Jews could be resolved only in solidarity with other oppressed groups. She had a deep investment in Zionist politics what she hoped for was not a Jewish nation state but a “Jewish national home” within a binational Palestine. With the creation of Israel as a “colonised and then conquered territory” she wrote in The Origins..”the solution of the Jewish question” had now produced new victims, Palestinians now becoming “stateless and rightless” and forced to chose between “voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship” she condemned a Zionism “that felt no solidarity with other oppressed peoples whose cause was essentially the same”. The resonances with today’s debates and conflicts are clear’. Hannah Arendt’s poem about Walter Benjamin is recited in the Prologue to Asylum Diaries.
2 Clip from unknown France24 TV documentary
3 Namibian desert. The persecution and expulsion, into the Namib desert, of the Herero people in Namibia by the German imperial colonial power is generally regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century (NYRB)
4 Earthquake. Wenchuan in Sichuan Province China. Tezenas, Ambroise 2014 Tourism de la Desolation. Actes Sud (from now on TdelaD) Both natural disasters and human created climate change contribute in complex ways to migration and the movement of refugees. In 2019 the US Congress recognised China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide.
5 Pripyat town near Chernobyl (TdelaD
6 Ditto
7 Ditto
8 Wenchuan in Sichuan Province China (TdelaD)
9 Depopulated village Al-Nabi Rubin near Ramala. Pre 1948 the site of a famous religious and social festival Almad-al-bazz. (from now on Nakba.Aalbazz) Ruin near Machrie Standing Stones Moor on Arran, Scotland
10 Al-Khan al-Ahmmar, Wadi Og. December 2018 Olin,M & Shulman,D. Intellect Press
11 The depopulated village Al-Khalasa near Bir Al-Saba (Be’er Sheva) a prominent Palestinian Bedouin village in the South.
12 The fenced off shrine and mosque of the depopulated village Shaykh Bureik east of Haifa
13 Remains of the site of the depopulated village Uja Al-Hafir near Bir Al-Saba. The site used to be a vital train station in the south of Palestine
14 A school in the depopulated village Isdud, near Ashod settlement (Nakba.Aalbazz)
15 A house of Deir al-Quasi village in Upper Galilee, near Akka (Acre). Today the Israeli settlement Elkosh is built on the village land. (Nakba.Aalbazz)
16 The Hebrew sign reads ‘access is forbidden, violate at your own risk’ on a fence surrounding the graveyard of the depopulated town of Beisan, the resting place of Almad-al-bazz’s grandmother.
17 The mosque of the depopulated village Bayt Mahsir near Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The entrance is blocked.
18 The depopulated village of Al-Qubayba, near Ramla. The owner of the house was expelled to what became Gaza.
19 The classroom in the elementary school of the depopulated village Al-Salihia in the Upper Galilee Safed district.
20 Artist’s impression of future settlements
21 Meteorite hole in Armenia, not far from Mt. Arrarat. Armenia sees itself as the first victim of genocide in the C20th. at the hands of the Turks, then the Ottoman empire (but see the Namibia note here). The denial of this genocide has become a defining trait for Armenians particularly the Diaspora. Part sf Armenia are now in Turkey eg. Ani the ancient former capital of western Armenia. This denial, and the fact that the genocide was only recognised by the US Congress, and President Biden, in 2019. The legal significance of this and the relationship to the status of other genocidescan be found at https://journals.law.harvard.edu and Baghdassarian A, 2022 The Legal Significance of AS recognition of the Armenian Genocide: Implications for Strategic Litigation. https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2022/05/the-legal-significance-of-u-s-recognition-of-the-armenian-genocide-implications-for-strategic-litigation/ .the UN within the last 20 years has created what the Armenians refer to as a ‘cultural genocide’ and this is echoed in the practice of ‘erasure’ of Palestinian culture and artifacts , see: Rebecca Gold 2023 Erasing Palestine, Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom Verso. The production of artworks, poetry, literature is the way in which culture can be preserved and deepened even in exile. The real-time media chronicle of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the artworks and literature are already producing an historical account that will preserve, memory, archives, and testimonies which will haunt those who have remained silent.
22 The crossing point from Spain to France in the Spanish Civil War through the Colera south of Portbou.
23 An internment camp in Southern France during the Spanish Civil War
24 The remains of a British armed car under a Canadian Division, from the Inns of Court Regiment, of Lt. Robert Lloyd Richards, blown up by a mine in August 1944 after the D-Day invasion during a progress towards Falaise in Normandy.
25 The village of Oradour in France was virtually wiped out on 10th of June 1944 when SS soldiers (of the “Das Reich” unit) massacred nearly the entire population and all but razed the village to the ground. The ‘operation’ is said to have been a reprisal for increased resistance in the area (since the Normandy landings on 6th June) yet must have been and out of control killing frenzy. Most of the women and children died locked in the church. The SS men then set the church ablaze and blew up the spire which crashed into the nave. The male villagers were mostly shot. The death toll was 642, mostly women and children. A handful of villagers escaped.
26 As 23
27 Survivors of camp getting food deliveries, unknown source.
28 Palestinian children in Gaza waiting for food Guardian News.2025
29 Mleeta Lebanon, Musee de LA Resistance (TdelaD)
30 Latvian Naval Hospital.
31 Latvia Prison de Karosta (TdelaD)
32 Lithuania Parc Grutas (TdelaD)
33 Cambodia/Cambodge. Musee du Genocide de Tual Sleng (TdelaD)
34 Rwanda. Chambres Funeraires Kigali Memorial Centre (TdelaD)
35 Cambodia Memorial de Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields) (TdelaD)
36 Memory Gravestones St Fagans Churchyard Trecynon Wales.
Testimonies
Nathan Thrall. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.
Adana Shibli Minor Detail
Colum McCann Apeirogon 2020 Blooomsbury.
Omar El Akkad One Day….Everyone will have always been Against This.
Commentaries
Yasir Suleiman 2016 Being Palestinian. Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora.Edinburgh University Press.
Rebecca Ruth Gould. 2023. Erasing Palestine. Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. Verso.
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide Eds. Bhutto and Faleiro
Chapters from recipients of the Palestine Book Award, Arab American Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Emmy Award, National Book Award, and Gandhi Peace Award, this collection illuminates the enduring psychological, physical, and generational toll of state violence. Together, these works bear witness to the vast and ongoing destruction inflicted on the Palestinian people—their lives, their land, and their future.
Poetry
Mahmoud Darwish 2024 A River Dies of Thirst. Diaries. SAQI
Mahmoud Darwish 2010 Absent Presence Hesperus
Maher Massis Poems for Palestine Hesperus
Palestinian Film
200 Meters (2002) by Ameen Nayfeh
The Present (2020) by Farah Nabulsi
Blacklisted (2021) Mohammed Almughanni
Omar (2013) by Hany Abu-Assad
The Dupes (1972) by Tawfiq Saleh
'A State of Passion', a film about Ghassan Abu Sittah, a renowned British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon and Rector of the University of Glasgow.
After 43 horrific days working around the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, emerged to find himself as a face of Palestinian resistance. With news footage of him pale and shell-shocked reverberating around the world, he spoke of a catalogue of horrors from lacerated bodies, to amputations without anaesthetics, orphaned children with no surviving family, and the deliberate targeting of medics and hospital facilities. This was Ghassan’s sixth and most horrific Gaza “war”. Why does he do it? Where does he find the strength to face it again and again? How does it impact his family? How do they process the risks he takes? The answer lies simply in their shared passion: Palestine, a passion they articulate through their support of his perilous humanitarian work. Filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi, close friends of the Abu Sittahs, share that same passion. They were waiting anxiously for Ghassan to emerge from Gaza, following a long and terrifying journey through the night, to meet him in Amman. Determined to capture his raw emotions, they began filming him the moment he arrived through the door. Following him to Beirut, Amman, London, Kuwait, and Dubai, they and he explore their common State of Passion.
Legal and Historical
Dr Ralph Wilde. Submission of the Arab League States on Palestine Feb 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrLQES3TmY
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Biographies of Performers in the live Performance at the ARC November 2025.
Musicians
Bede Williams trained in brass bands in New Zealand and moved to Scotland in 2003 to study at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He currently works at the Laidlaw Music Centre in St Andrews. See www.bedewilliams.com for more information. His practice as an improvisor was established in 2010 when he led performances of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen for the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust which Michael Tumelty of The Herald described as ‘visionary’. He has subsequently released a wide variety of recordings with numerous collaborators and has developed a specialism of working in site-specific and interdisciplinary contexts.
Robin Mason is a freelance cellist and composer based in Fife, Coming from a core classical background, he has performed/composed/recorded in diverse fields: visual art (HARK, Fortsunlight Animation, Jane Brettle), many Theatre/Contemporary Dance companies including National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Dance Theatre, Matthew Bourne, Catherine Wheels. He is currently recording an album as part of exciting new folk band, Hegeduk, and is playing with the legendary Cauld Blast Orchestra. Robin teaches cello at the Laidlaw Music Centre, St Andrews and Edinburgh Napier University.
Actors
Mark Coleman is a veteran theatre actor and director. Mark has of late played historical luminaries such a philosopher David Hume, post-impressionist artist Paul Cezanne, film mogul Louis B Mayer, and Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Earlier this year he payed Otto Frank in ‘Dream of Anne Frank’, and the poet Giovanni Pascoli in The Badly-behaved Poet Society (Supernova), which will tour extensively in Scotland and Italy in 2026. Mark is currently President of the Glasgow Shakespeare Society
Ibrahim Bakhait is an Edinburgh based actor and since graduating from Glasgow Clyde College in 2017, has gone on to appear on stage and in film and television alike. He also has experience doing voice acting and has most recently appeared in a few commercials.
Wendy Barrett is an actor of Armenian descent based in the Scottish Borders. She studied English & Drama at Edinburgh University, and has acted extensively in theatre and film. Stage roles include Juliet's Nurse in ‘Romeo & Juliet’, M’Lynn in ‘Steel Magnolias’ and Hazel in Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘Wildest Dreams’. Films include 'Good Intentions', ‘Tommy’s Honour’ and ‘Patrick Swayze: Ghosts and Demons’. Wendy can currently be seen touring in her critically acclaimed one-woman show ‘Glimpses of You'.
Consultancy and Video editing
Jonathan Charles is an experienced filmmaker and creative app developer. He uses his deep knowledge of film, animation and CGI, to produce: cross-artform projects, digital films and engaging programmes for a wide variety of people. Moving confidently between creating large scale projections for theatre productions, to the smaller delights of apps on mobile devices. He is passionate about film and its power to facilitate change, both encouraging young people to make their own films and working with organisations who genuinely make a difference.
Director and Writer
Huw Lloyd-Richards
Huw studied theology, has a PhD in Social Anthropology and was a Fellow of the Kings Fund in Leadership Development. His seminal paper ‘Ways of Listening’ led to the creation of HARK: Listening Research, at St Andrews University, where we are supported by the Music Centre. HARK projects have included: “An Ethnography of Listening” an exploration of ekphrasitic creative processes – a dialogical ‘libretto’ was created using 60 listeners’ responses to Errollyn Wallen’s piece, Photography; “Soundings” an exploration of ‘deep time’ which was performed by the percussionist Alex Waber on a lithophone constructed using 13 types of rock gathered from across Scotland, and is titled “Cosmosis”. A sound-music album was made –“HARK at the Silo” from improvisation in a resonant acoustic, a disused grain silo, and is available on Spotify. After Asylum Diaries, the HARK Collective will work on two further projects, ‘Derive’ which is based on the work of the Situationists, and the ‘Oracle of Sophia’, which explores nomadic displacement leading to an extinction event.
If you want to know more about the background to this work, the influences upon it and more detail on the Atmospheres please click on the link here to go to the paper on Hiraeth.