Colonial Debris: Imagined Futures, Colonial Reckonings

This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.

Lilet Breddels (Archis/Volume) presents Gaza Travel Agency, a speculative project imagining the return of Palestinian refugees; Farah Saleh presents Balfour Reparations, a performance lecture confronting the UK’s colonial legacy in Palestine.

Lilet Breddels (Archis/Volume) presents Gaza Travel Agency: an imaginary travel agency that designs the return of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral towns. Conceived as a speculative and participatory design practice, the project invites visitors to visualize—rather than debate—the routes, logistics, and affective dimensions of return. Through collective imagination, it foregrounds the spatial, emotional, and political realities embedded in the idea of return.

Farah Saleh will discuss Balfour Reparations: a performance lecture that confronts the United Kingdom’s colonial legacy in Palestine. Drawing on a blend of history, fiction, and fantasy, the work examines the role of Arthur James Balfour—former UK Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, and influential academic figure—in shaping policies that systematically denied Palestinian political rights. Employing methods of Critical Fabulation and Afrofuturism, the performance brings archival materials—videos, photographs, and documents—into dialogue with imagined futures, opening space for reparative speculation.

Image credit: Imagining Gaza Travel Agency in the shopping street in Bethlehem. Image edited by Sally Tyson

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Host or Publisher Edinburgh College of Art