The work of Palestinian artist, filmmaker and writer Shuruq Harb resists resolution. Moving across film, found photography, sculpture and text, she unfolds a practice that understands art as resistance, testimony, and civic tool. Drawing on oral histories, storytelling and the vernacular, her work sheds light on the peripheral or unnoticed, finding collective and political meaning in insular experiences as a way of engaging with Palestine’s rich, layered history.

Through her lens, public space, street signs, cheap prints, calendars and signatures become informal archives through which Palestinian time, memory and futurity are negotiated and continually interrupted. Stubbornly tracing how life under occupation imprints itself on the nervous system, Harb insists on the importance of poetry and imagination, both as tools for refusal, endurance and resilience.

In this podcast, we open up Shuruq Harb’s methodologies and research processes: from long, open-ended conversations and collective walks, to speculative readings of landscape and informal, poetic, playful gestures that make sense of the fragmentation of time, space and everyday life in Palestine. Across the conversation, editing emerges as a method of thinking: a slow, almost athletic practice of arranging images, voices and tenses so that information never overwhelms affect, and poetry does not abandon history. Harb insists on a cinema that is formally simple while being emotionally resonant and critically precise; a space where stories do not necessarily provide answers, but open onto shared zones of speculation, uncertainty and survival. With bedside radios and PASSIA calendars as companions, we also talk about the fuzziness of thinking amid the incessant bombardment of news updates, and about ways of overcoming paralysis and coping with the fractures of the present.