Nation Estate

In her unusual and sublime sci-fi trilogy, Larissa Sansour delved into the dystopian to depict the future Palestinian existence in an alienating and agonising abyss, further and further away from their homeland. The first part, Space Exodus (2008), imagined the arrival of the first Palestinian on the moon, configuring the satellite as a forced destination for a people without a homeland or help on Earth. This was followed by Nation Estate (2012) —now with Søren Lind as co-director— which took a humorous prism to show another delirious solution to the conflict: the location of all Palestinians in an immense skyscraper, a high-flying ghetto, isolated from the rest of humanity but caressing the infinity of the sky. He closed the triptych In the Future, They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016), set in a devastated Palestine, in which a group of resistance fighters bury porcelain crockery that will serve as vestiges of a people that existed, the memory preserved in the face of systematic destruction and global neglect. It is terrifying that Sansour's sophisticated and imaginative apocalyptic works stand as the most realistic and lucid reflections on the situation in the Middle East today. The duo then delved into the trauma of an identity in the abyss marked by exile and diaspora with In Vitro (2019) and the eternal intergenerational union of the Palestinian people in As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night (2022). JAVIER H. ESTRADA