LOCALES presents You Have Come Among Our People and Your Life Is Safe, a lecture, a screening, and a conversation with Palestinian artist Emily Jacir. The event is dedicated to the influence and impact of Italy – and particularly Rome, where Jacir has lived intermittently since the age of 14 – on her artistic practice. It focuses on two decades of projects and interventions developed on Italian soil, including three permanent installations in Pietrapertosa (Basilicata), Palermo, and Milan. Often staging or permanently installing her works in public space, the artist has worked with photography, film, sculpture, installation, and performance, reflecting on themes such as collectivity, memory, migration, exclusion/inclusion, visibility/invisibility, and on how these elements are negotiated through the body and within public space. Following a short introduction and the screening of a selection of her film works, Emily Jacir will be in conversation with Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo of LOCALES, tracing shared reflections and urgencies around public space and silenced historical narratives.

The event will take place at the Cinema Hall. 
The event will be held in English.
Free admission until capacity is reached.

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From March 6 to 11, a selection of film works by Emily Jacir presented by LOCALES will be screened in the first-floor room dedicated to UNAROMA LIVE. 

The selection emerges from more than eight years of building, collaborating, exchanging and cultivating a large network of dancers and musicians between the Southern West Bank and the South of Italy, insisting on our shared Mediterranean heritage. This has resulted in a variety of community-building processes such as workshops, performances, music, singing, and dancing. These choreographic and musical pieces are a translation of the encounter with Bethlehem and its agrarian, musical and dance traditions. 
 
Emily Jacir with Andrea De Siena, Laura Esposito, Luca Rossi, Paesaggio Umano, 2022 
Video, 6’45’’ 
 
In Paesaggio Umano, led by Emily Jacir, Andrea De Siena, Laura Esposito and Luca Rossi in September 2022, a group of dancers and musicians who had previously attended workshops at Dar Jacir in Bethlehem created new work related to land, farming and memory. Their research was presented in the form of movement, gesture, image, poetry and an elder singing a song about the earth. They built together a new dance piece and an original music score. This work is dedicated to Moataz Zawahreh, killed by Israeli snipers on October 13, 2015 during a protest in front of Dar Jacir. Footage was shared of his body being carried through the terraces of Dar Jacir immediately after he was shot. 
 
Emily Jacir with Andrea De Siena, Wherever you sow grain, 2022

Video, 6’5’’  

Wherever you sow grain, the grain grows was informed by site visits to Bethlehem’s agricultural areas with educator and activist Baha Hilo. The artists witnessed the impossibility of reaching one’s own olive trees, the difficulty of harvesting and the longing to be on one’s own land. The olive tree is not the symbol of this work, it is the theme. The original music composition drew inspiration from the tammurriata or ballo e canto sul tamburo and the dabka. In both traditions, the symbolic gestural aspect is connected to the relationship of the body with the land. The choreography reworked elements connected with agriculture and working the land: the castagnette, wrist movements that simulate sowing and arm movements used in cultivation. 
 
Emily Jacir, Il Mare in Mezzo – Suoni e canti dal Mediterraneo, 2023 
Video, 3’29’’ 
  
This work is the documentation of an event which took place on Sunday September 10th, 2023 at 7 PM at Dar Jacir in Bethlehem. The evening brought together the close network of dancers, choreographers and musicians from Bethlehem and Southern Italy organized and led by Emily Jacir, including the Amwaj Choir, Andrea De Siena, Fabrizio Piepoli and Giulia Pesole.  
 
Emily Jacir, NOI, 2021 
Projected image 
  
In 2021, Emily Jacir hung a red banner with the word “we” printed in Arabic on the Palazzo della Regione in Piazza Vecchia in Bergamo. The work reflects the artist’s ongoing research on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean geographies and temporalities, her work with public space and the body’s experience of the meaning of being together in the face of structural efforts to fragment time and space. At MACRO, the same banner is presented in the form of a digital projection that acts as an interlude between the three film works that stage an encounter between musicians and artists from Southern Italy and the West Bank. 

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LOCALES is a curatorial platform aimed at activating critical reflection on the public sphere through artistic practices. Through a series of site-specific programs involving the commissioning of new artworks, explorations of public space, learning moments, and performances, LOCALES addresses the complexity of contemporary urgencies starting from the political and social history of symbolic places in the city of Rome and the communities that inhabit them. LOCALES was founded in Rome as a curatorial project in 2020 and is currently co-directed by Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo; the team also includes Marta Federici, Chiara Pagano, Giulia Caruso, and Alice Albanese.

EMILY JACIR, Mediterranean, lives and works between Bethlehem and Rome. Her  interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, installation, performance, sound, and text. Her work explores both personal and collective movement through time and public space, examining its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-mediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through rigorous historical and archival research, Jacir’s layered and resonant body of work is rooted in gathering, community, and in social affiliations. For the last twenty years, she has been working in southern Italy, primarily in Salento but also in Basilicata and Sicily. Her most recent work, We Ate the Wind, features a large cinematic installation that combines new and archival material, addressing questions of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, hospitality and exclusion, exploring specific migration policies and their consequences on individuals and communities.