David Wall, Composer/Community Worker – Toronto
David Wall is a composer, singer, and community worker. He has written scores for a long list of film, television, and experimental projects, working with collaborators such as Bruce Mau Design, Naomi Klein, and Alan Zweig. His audio installation work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, Toronto History Museum, and elsewhere. He currently works as Cultural Programmer and Developer for the United Jewish People’s Order where he co-created the film festival Split Screens: Israeli Filmmakers Face Colonialism, playing at the OCAD University auditorium on four consecutive Sundays from October 22 to November 12.
- Between the Covers/Adania Shibli
(photo: Hartwig Klappert)
David Naimon is a remarkable interviewer and his podcast Between the Covers is a great trove of mind-expanding literary chats. This conversation between Palestinian author Adania Shibli and Naimon is particularly timely, given the recent decision by the Frankfurt Book Fair to cancel the award ceremony for Shibli’s novel Minor Detail – sadly only one example of the international silencing of Palestinian voices these past two weeks. Here is a link to a letter supporting Shibli.
- Forensic Architecture/Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is a shining example of a brilliant innovator – in this case, in the discipline of architecture – crossing over into realms of social justice and human rights. His Turner Prize-nominated research agency Forensic Architecture uses spatial and structural analysis to explore and document human rights abuses around the globe. Weizman describes his work like this: “Perhaps the best way to understand it is, just like a pathologist reads a dead body – looking at the bones – forensic architecture looks for evidence of these crimes in walls, in foundations, in buildings, in plans, in bridges, in roads etc in a way that they’re conceived sometimes, in order to survey and control us.”
A super-addictive binge-watch starring comedian Mo Amer about a Palestinian-American struggling to make a living in Houston, Texas. Hilarious and moving. Can’t wait for Season 3.
- Jumana Manna/Foragers
Foragers is a compelling, and poetically shot and paced documentary depicting the challenges facing Palestinian vegetable foragers as they chafe against restrictive laws established under the guise of land conservation, but effectively cutting a people off from nature – a subtle form of colonial theft. Directed with wry humour and gentle experimentalism by Jumana Manna.
My most favourite magazine in the world. It has been platforming progressive, even heretical, expressions of Judaism since 1946 through brilliant political analysis, art criticism, poetry, comics, and short fiction. JC is currently edited by the likes of Arielle Angel and Peter Beinart, both towering figures of the American Jewish left.