Return to Elsewhere
The Image on the poster is taken from a newspaper clipping archived by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. It depicts an explosion in Beirut during the Lebanon War in 1982, a period marked by Israel’s invasion and subsequent 18-year occupation of Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah liberated the land on May 25, 2000, a historic moment that affirmed the possibility of decolonization and sowed seeds of hope for the eventual defeat of occupiers.
The phrase “Return to Elsewhere” is inspired by a Sadiya Hartman quote, where she writes “So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination”. It is the colonizer's goal to erase hope, to make you feel like a better world is not possible. The phrase "return to" and "elsewhere" may seem contradictory, yet they are combined to evoke the idea of journeying back to a utopian world—the "elsewhere"— where colonization never occurred. The prospect of a “return” provides a sense of hope for the displaced and colonized. This hope becomes a necessary tool of resistance against colonizing powers. The feminist drive should be that of abolishing oppressive structures of power and imagining an alternative condition, free of discrimination.