From our friends at REORIENT, today we bring you an interview with Palestinian video artist Larissa Sansour. Author Abdellatif R. Abdeljawad talks with Sansour about rewriting histories, science fiction as a vehicle to explore the Palestinian condition, and the inherent political nature of art. Abdeljawad says of Sansour’s most recent work, In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, on view at Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai through March 3: “Sansour’s film (made in collaboration with Søren Lind) blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, and myth and reality, championing Palestinian identity in the depths of time and space.” This article was originally published on February 16, 2016.

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. In The Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2015 (film still). Courtesy of the Artists and Lawrie Shabibi.

Abdellatif R. Abdeljawad: Do you eat yourself from the finest porcelain?

Larissa Sansour: Well, I guess the whole premise of the film is that this rebel leader narrator is setting up an elaborate operation in order for the future generations of Palestinians to obtain the basic privileges that history has so far denied them; so, it is basically a revisionist historical comment. Am I eating from the finest porcelain? Right now, maybe in my mind … but not according to the rest of the world. I want the rest of the world to see me as a person who is doing so.

This work is very much about who tells history, and how much myth and fiction are really a part of writing history. If the world does not realize that we exist, we might as well just bury some porcelain DNA for future archaeologists to find, as a stick in the wheel on currently accepted versions of history. Maybe the revisions that this porcelain will cause will tilt the balance in favor of the Palestinians at some point in the future. The film is also a commentary on how Israel uses archaeology as headline news, and how it has been instrumentalized, rather than been seen as a scientific method … Israelis wants to prove something, and therefore they dig to find evidence supporting a fiction already having taken the form of fact; they use archaeology towards their own political ends, and it is becoming a means by which to prove a continued historical presence entitling them to territories currently belonging to others.

Read the full article here.