Text for session 4, Saturday 10th October, 2-4pm - John Berger letter

Follow link to http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=415 for a full copy of the letter.

John Berger's letter of 2006 followed Israel's attack on Lebanon. It called for a cultural boycott directed against Israel's regime of occupation and was signed by 93 other writers, artists and filmakers. It was published in the Guardian that year.

The discussion will raise the question of the necessity and validity of a Boycott, particularly when applied to cultural events, institutions, works and artists, as well as the role that artists can play in the campiagn against the occupation and in activism more generally.

The venue for this session will be Goshka Macuga's installation at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Nature of The Beast, which centres around Picasso's great anti-war painting Guernica and the way its image has been variously employed, appropriated and fought over, not least of all serving as a rallying point and protest image for anti-war activists over the years. Continuing that vein in the picture's dispersal, Berger also included a drawing after Guernica with his letter. Check out http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-bloomberg-commission-goshka-macuga-the-nature-of-the-beast for images of the installation and more details about its history.

Btw there is also an interesting documentary about the occupation in Hebron (http://www.welcometohebron.com/film.html) which is currently screening in the installation .

For directions see http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit

Till the 10th!

Text for session 3, Saturday 19th of September - Illan Pappe talk in London!

The 3rd reading group is planned for this coming saturday (the 19th) to coincide with the national Stop the War Coalition student conference. Illan Pappe (author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the text for the first session) will be speaking so instead of a text, Pappe's talk will be the starting point for the discussion.

The talk starts at 10am. The reading group will meet at 1pm in Russel Square gardens. (See http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&tab=wl for directions).

Details of the conference can be found at http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1429/1/ .

Entrance is free but you need to book ahead - just email office@stopwar.org.uk with "Stop the War Student Conference" in the subject line. You need to provide the name of your uni but don't worry if you're not a student - I have asked about this and recent grads are welcome + they won't be checking ID. See you there!

Text for session 2, Thursday 11th September - Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land

Eyal Weizman is an architect based in London. He teaches at Goldsmith's College and is a member of

'Decolonizing Architecture', an architectural collective whose premise is the reappropriation of Israel's architecture of occupation. For more information and further articles see:

http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/?page_id=2
http://roundtable.kein.org/user/3
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislative-attack

The following pages are taken from the second chapter of his book 'Hollow Land' (Notes included). Apologies that all the pages are sideways - working to fix that but should be easy to print them off.