Concern over the armed conflict unleashed on October 2023 in the area known as the Gaza Strip has led to mobilizations, takeovers of public spaces and performances around the world. Although it is part of a long-standing territorial conflict between two ethno-national groups, it has become a global concern for different student groups, religious, human rights and political activists who are speaking out against a war that has contravened international agreements and has increased hate speech and attacks on civil society - mainly children and women, the elderly and journalists.

During 2024, the war intensified and expanded its territorial radius beyond Palestine. This situation has given rise to multiple demonstrations that make use of ritualized symbolic expressions to demand a halt to the war and denounce the horrors it provokes. Pro-Palestinian committees have been formed in different cities to oppose the war and denounce what Amnesty International called genocide. On the other hand, tensions have also shifted to public spaces, which has led to police repression of protests.

Due to the importance of this topic in today's time, the magazine Encartes launched an open invitation to participate in the vi photography contest with images capturing objects, subjects, places, landscapes, symbols and aesthetics that have accompanied the mobilizations and demonstrations around the Israel-Palestine war conflict taking place in different universities, public squares, in front of embassies, in national festivities, in political and religious ceremonies and even in parades and other festivities.

The call stated that the images had to cover the following contents: to show the processes of aesthetic creativity that generate anti-war and anti-nationalist manifestations, denouncing violence, using not only words but also staging, installations and shots of emblematic sites and stylistic interventions of symbols, as well as the creation of an iconography of denunciation or the metaphoricity (deconstruction of signs of power) with which the conflicts of race, nation, ethnicity, territory, religion and gender are expressed.

The call was extended to visual artists, filmmakers, researchers, communities, collectives, students of social sciences and humanities to send their photographs accompanied by a descriptive title and caption data (emphasizing the event, the place where it took place, who are the participants and the date), and a short text explaining the expressive meanings of the demonstration.

 The response was very good. We received 105 photographs from 21 participants. The photographs received document demonstrations around the Israel-Palestine conflict in nine different cities, showing the impact that this issue has had on a global scale: Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Mexico City, Tijuana, San Cristóbal de las Casas (Chiapas), Santiago de Chile, New York and Los Angeles (United States) and Uruguay. Due to the quality of the images and the strength of the situations they were able to capture with their cameras, it was not easy to make the selection and even less so to decide which ones would get the first places. Thus, we had to establish several criteria to make a selection of 17 photographs: first, we considered the quality of the photograph (framing, aesthetic composition, image resolution); second, we took into account the expressive force of the image (that in itself could generate a message); third, the members of the jury had in mind the narrative as a whole and tried to ensure that the photos chosen would allow us to form a visual narrative that would account for the diversity of situations, places and actors involved in the demonstrations. In this way we were forced to avoid repetition of content and to choose only one photograph when this happened. Five members of the editorial team participated in the selection committee.

We decided to award first place to Elizabeth Sauno's photograph, which shows a demonstrator depicting a Palestinian mother carrying a bloody baby in her arms. The photo was taken during the March for Palestine on December 17, 2023 in Mexico City. Second place was awarded to Rodolfo Ontiveros for the photograph "Fences" which generates the metaphor of the body as a territory lacerated by barbed wire; it was taken on September 5, 2024, during a demonstration on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. We decided to award third place to two photographs: one by Charlie Eherman and the other by José Manuel Martín Pérez. The first author's depicts "Two men, a Palestinian (left) and an Orthodox Jew (right), show peace signs next to the White House in Washington D. C., USA, during a national demonstration" (June 8, 2024, Washington). The second photograph presents how the global action of solidarity with Palestine is articulated with the feminist demands that took place in the already named Plaza de la Resistencia in San Cristóbal de las Casas during the march of March 8, 2024, in the framework of International Women's Day.

Each of the four winning photographs documents a different face of the demonstrations, but, when seen together, they allow us to recognize that the shared symbols give a single voice to people of different nationalities who may not speak the same language. At the same time, they help us to recognize how their installation in different places deploys multiple enunciations, making photography a resource of metaphoricity as a productive matrix to redefine the social (Bhabha, 2011) from the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and against the war actions in the Gaza Strip. 

The idea behind the photographic contests organized by Encartes seeks to assemble the images in order to generate a meta-narrative. Each image captures a different local scenario that, when put in relation, allows the narration of different realities articulated by a global aesthetic. These are articulated because they occur in the simultaneity of a historical time even though they are replicated in multiple distant places. At the same time, the singularity of each shot accounts for the multiplicity of actors, scenarios and symbolic expressions that are manifested there. The exercise allows us to circumvent the paradox of political homogeneity and heterogeneity of identity belonging.

The pro-Palestine movement is undoubtedly a transnational mobilization that has produced its own slogans and symbolism. These aesthetic marks and emblems are the lingua franca that articulates a global communitas of an imagined moral community that shares values, although they will never meet or interact face to face (Anderson, 1993); that has in common a sense of grievance and at the same time a sense of commitment. Different pro-Palestinian committees exist in different countries, cities and towns. The slogans of denunciation and symbols are shared representations and build a single voice in simultaneous time throughout the world. For example, kite flying is already an act of empathy with the children of the Palestinian people; the use or representation of the kufiya covering head and neck is already a distinctive element of the Middle East and wearing it places the enunciation of an activist body. The watermelons, whose colors match the Palestinian flag, go hand in hand with the choruses and banners of free Palestine, as do the Palestinian flags. 

The interesting thing about representation is that these symbols do not appear in a vacuum: they dress bodies, they are installed in key scenarios to intervene places. The symbols have acquired a powerful metaphoricity with dissident force. For example, the kite reaches its flight in the emblematic building of the National Autonomous University of Mexico or flying over the concrete slab of Mexico City's zocalo (photo by Dzilam Méndez Villagrán). The flag is placed on the sand of a beach, metaphorically restoring the slogan "From the river to the sea" (photo by Pilar Aranda). The flag is intervened with the phrase "Nunca más, nunca nadie" and "ni un@ más" by a Jewish population that places the slogan of opposition to the holocaust on the Palestinian flag, to generate a hybrid of opposition to the war and to dissociate itself from Zionism (photos by Charlie Eherman).

The flag is used to conquer territories. Its placement constitutes representativeness in a regime of unrepresentability (Rancière, 2009). In the different photos selected, the flag generates a regime of visibility of solidarity for Palestine that, when placed in iconic places such as monuments, acquires a metaphorical enunciative power: In front of the Angel of Independence on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City (photo by Elizabeth Sauna), in front of the Glorieta de la Minerva (symbol of justice) in Guadalajara (photo by Christophe Alberto Palomera Lamas), placed on the border wall that divides Mexico and the United States today in what used to be the same territory inhabited by families that were divided by the wall (photo by Marco Vinicio Morales Muñoz). It even extends the enunciation of genocide to other realities, as is the case with the placement of the sign "Stop genocide" on the wall that divides Mexico from the United States (photo by Priscilla Alexa Macías Mojica), extending the clamor to the tightening of immigration policies. Symbols also move to occupy spaces and change their vocation, such as the emblematic Central Station in New York, taken over by demonstrators from the Jewish community (photo by Charlie Eherman); or their presence in the plaza of San Cristobal de las Casas (photo by Jose Manuel Martin Perez) with a wooden cross in the background, representing the indigenous Catholicism of the area.

The flag transgresses territorialities that also leave their territories traced by the States to configure mini-domains in other countries. This is the case of embassies. The photographs of a demonstration outside the Israeli embassy reproduce scenarios and experiences of violent confrontation (photo by Gerardo Vieyra). We see homemade bombs, police fences, fire, fallen bodies. This did not happen in Gaza, but in Mexico, in the territory of the Israeli embassy; but also in the center of Mexico City, in front of the Guardiola building, which houses the Bank of Mexico (photo by Ana Rodríguez). Territories are made by practicing them and the doors of the Guadalajara International Book Fair during the last month of November acquire the notoriety of an international forum and, therefore, of visibility beyond the local (photo by Pilar Aranda).

Symbols linked to different bodies also generate intersections between various activisms: they gain and expand the demands when they are linked to the feminist movement or when they are articulated with the demands for the recognition of transsexuals; or the resymbolization achieved by placing the already recognized mustache of Hitler, the exterminator of the Jews, on the portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu, current Prime Minister of Israel.

We invite you to sharpen your gaze to read the multiple realities generated by the aesthetic interventions in favor of Palestine captured by the lenses of photographic cameras and, at the same time, to allow yourself to enjoy the marvelous photos that make up this visual essay.

Renée de la Torre

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Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict (1993). Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.. Mexico: FCE.

Bhabha, Homi K (2011). The place of culture. Buenos Aires: Spring.

Rancière, Jacques (2009). The distribution of the sensitive. Santiago de Chile: lom.