Countless Palestinian Futures
Year: 2021-current • Type: Research Project/Card game • Collaborator: Sarona Abuaker • Commissioned by: The Mosaic Rooms, London, UK • Award: Research Fellowship, £8,000 • Funder: Centre for Lebanese Studies University of Cambridge • palifutures.com
Working with poet and educational outreach worker Sarona Abuaker, we collaborated on developing Countless Palestinian Futures for the public programme of the Stateless Heritage exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms in London, UK in October 2021.
Countless Palestinian Futures (CPF) is a discussion-based game that creates tangible ideas around Palestinian futures. It centres imagination as an educational tool to build ideas of liberation and cultivate conceptual and material alliances between the very people who are systematically denied their return. Featuring 70 questions framed around near, medium and long term futures under six themes, CPF aims to generate conversations about Palestine amongst fragmented diasporic communities globally about liberation and return.
The project has gained institutional and press interest: we were invited by the SOAS Middle East Centre to speak about the project, hosted a second iteration of the game at MayDay Rooms with AntiUniversity, published a chapter for the book Producing Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2024), and CPF was featured in several media outlets.
We piloted the game on six occasions which produced different results and interactions – twice in London, once in Lebanon, twice in Chile (simultaneously in English/Spanish), and in Amsterdam. It is inspired by Umberto Eco’s notion of the open work, as it can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the participants bring, and they inform the future iterations. The project was supported by a fellowship from the University of Cambridge in 2023.
Visit palifutures.com for more on the game.
Outputs:
- Card game
- Website
- Book chapter: Abdulla, D. and Abuaker, S., (2024). Imagining Return: Countless Palestinian Futures. In: H. Tawil Souri and D. Matar, eds. Producing Palestine. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp.27-37. R
- Six game workshop events: Mosaic Rooms (London, Sep 2021), MayDay Rooms (London, Sep 2022), Centre for Lebanese Studies (Beirut, June 2023), Santiago, Chile (x2) (August 2023), Amsterdam (June 2026)
- Four public talks at School of Oriental and African Studies (Feb 2022), Newcastle University (May 2023), University of the Arts London (May 2023), Amsterdam (June 2026)
- Featured in Amalgam Journal, Al Shabaka Podcast, Institute for Palestine Studies, and Skin Deep Magazine
Game photos by Danah Abdulla | Event photos courtesy of the Mosaic Rooms