No good life without progress. Nature is a resource. Land is property. Violence begins where people are harmed and bleed. Male Palestinians are Islamist terrorists, Muslim women are suppressed women. There are scripts so deeply ingrained in our current thinking that they are hardly recognizable as such. Operating beneath the surface, these narratives determine how we speak about the world. They define what is a crisis, and which disasters, in turn, receive little attention, what calls for action, and what is accepted as inevitable. But scripts can be changed and narratives rewritten.
This, however, requires being able to identify and name mechanisms in society, such as (neo-) colonial land grabbing, expropriation of people, exploitation of landscapes, and the systematic destruction of both societies and ecosystems, making them visible and comprehensible. We must recognize these forms of violence as insidious standard procedures, as repetitive codes of necropolitical decision-making, and condemn them in the same way we did with terrorist attacks and wars – in the past. The event series (Re-)Writing Scripts shines a light on these patterns and asks how they arose, how they perpetuate, and how they limit our thinking, feeling, and acting. How can key terms such as security, defense, terror, or conflict be reinterpreted, shifted, or overwritten in order to foster other forms of discourse and understanding?
(Re-)Writing Scripts is an attempt to enrich binary-coded scripts with more complex narrative layers. The aim is not to deliver definitive answers but to create new bases for discussion. In these encounters, we pursue pattern recognition as a political and aesthetic practice. When recurring logics become visible, they lose their claim to be a given and open up spaces for change. Line by line. Pixel by pixel. Solidarity gatherings for gathering in solidarity.
(Re-)Writing Scripts #1
Curated by Kino Palestine, Prague
Film screening and discussion
March 20, 2026, 6 pm
(Re-)Writing Scripts #2
Christian Ghazi, Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1972)
Curated by Huda Takriti
Film screening and discussion
May 29, 2026, 6 pm
(Re-)Writing Scripts #3
Mohamed Abdelkarim
Film screening and discussion
October 9, 2026, 6 pm
Notes on the program: It would certainly be possible to bring together works and positions from many regions of the world, but we have deliberately chosen to focus on cinematic and artistic works by Palestinians and Arabs. The media coverage of Israel and Palestine in recent years has clearly shown how crucial it is to consider who is given a voice and who is denied the right to tell their own story. With our selection for this event series, we do not intend to play the State of Israel’s right to exist off that of Palestinians. Rather, we feel committed to a value system in which not national or religious affiliation determines who we show solidarity with but the question of whether human rights are being respected or not. We also see (Re-)Writing Scripts as an opportunity for us Austrians to confront our own historical responsibility. Precisely because antisemitic prejudices continue to prevail in our country, we must not ignore anti-Palestinian resentment, Orientalist stereotypes, and Islamophobia.
Gudrun Ratzinger & Franz Thalmair