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A tuning of sensitivity Joana Rajkowska in conversation with Bogna Świątkowska This wasn‘t your first visit to Palestine. You‘d been there before, several years earlier, so you have a wide and multi dimensional perspective. I‘d like us to start our conversation by discussing the notion of resistance. Does it evoke any particular feelings or connotations for you? Perhaps a sense of defiance? It hurts me to think that you need to keep inventing new strategies of resistance. That after all these years the steel grip of occupation has only tightened. I can‘t compare myself to someone who was born in Palestine, grew up there, and constantly got smacked on the head by the Israeli authorities. But I‘d like to redirect this tension, this anger and the energy of, well, not so much resistance as aversion, which is how it basically feels now. When you press from above, it exits through the side. And it happened in me too. I felt that I‘d like to exit through the side. Escape into the past and possibly into the future. Use an emergency exit. A mix of cultural and environmental themes will be inevitable here, if only because of climate change which brings us all closer in a dramatic way. But which also originates from everyday rituals, whether we want it or not. While in Ramallah, I searched for “extraordinary” ways to cope with reality, ways that combine different themes, and mix climate change with the rituals of daily life. As far as I could see, your sensitivity there was recording everything that was happening in the landscape, in the
scenery. You were highly receptive to the unspectacular. Why and to what extent is it important for you to divide your attention between things that are intense and those that lack the intensity? I‘ve been generally less and less interested in resistance expressed directly, on the political scene. I guess we‘ve hit the wall and felt that it‘s hard, and that the existing forms of resistance aren‘t working. That‘s why I‘m talking about extraordinary ways. About unspectacular extraor dinariness. I admire activists with all my heart, but I guess in my case it‘s better to be working in what I call the forefield. To direct my energy, thinking, and attention towards a different kind of intensity. This, perhaps, is a slow-working strategy, but I believe it to be more effective in the long-term. I mean developing a sensitivity before you start acting. Before you even start thinking about acting. Adopting such an orientation towards the world where you activate certain regions not only of your mind, but above all of your body. A tuning of sensitivity. That‘s where rituals very often have access. They‘re not new, they‘re as old as our culture itself, and in some inexplicable way they touch upon the most significant registers of our existence. There they are potent and will forever continue to be. Only then comes the time for reflection, for conclusions to be drawn from rational analysis – when we‘ve prepared and tuned ourselves. Then is the time for activism and direct-action strategies. Today our ability to influence reality is extremely limited. This is because as a culture we have stopped to believe in the possibility of working through different channels, we have let them become closed, abandoned, just empty. I inhabit those channels readily. The project you did in Ramallah highlighted all what you‘ve just said.
