YK = Question of Funding member Yazan Khalili—an architect, artist, and cultural producer currently pursuing a PhD at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and formerly the director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, a Palestinian arts and culture organization in Ramallah
YK: We knew about Eltiqa for a long time, but we had never met their members in person. I live in the West Bank, they live in Gaza; it’s nearly impossible for us to get to one another. They’ve been working together in one of the most intense places on earth for around 20 years—and they’ve done so without becoming an NGO. The NGO-ization of cultural institutions is highly contested in Palestine. If you want to receive international funding, you have to register and become an NGO. And then you are stuck with structures that make you dependent on the funding. You have to show growth. You become high maintenance. You need budgets all the time. You have to spend the money, so you make enormous projects and employ a huge number of people who then become dependent on you.
Eltiqa proves that you do not need to become an NGO to have a sustainable artistic practice. They have a communal space. They apply for big grants, and they have received over a hundred thousand dollars in funding. They created a model rooted in many economies, where they don’t depend only on funding to support the space but also on local resources and on their individual incomes.
https://jewishcurrents.org/can-the-palestinian-belong-to-a-universal-history
