‘Walls Can’t Keep Us From Flying’: SkateQilya’s Hopeful Ontology of Shredding the Architecture of Occupation

Keywords: Skateboarding, Palestine, Hope, Space
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Skateboarding’s emergence in the Occupied Territories of Palestince can be largely traced to three instances of NGO-led skatepark construction in 2013. This paper examines how Palestinian skateboarding forms an ecology of embodied hope, spatialised freedom and everyday peace in context of the dehumanisation, forced immobility and affective violence endured by Palestinians under the Israeli settler colonial project. A micropolitical analysis focuses on the pedagogic, ludic and infrastructural operations of the Palestinian NGO SkateQilya within the walled-in enclave of Qalqilya. A locale entirely truncated by the Separation Wall in the Northwest Region of the West Bank and haunted by memories of the Second Intifada, landscape destruction and dispossession, Qalqilya provides an explicit microcosm into the Occupation’s everyday suppression of hope, freedom and movement that Palestinian skateboarding moves within and against. This paper uses the case of SkateQilya to argue Palestinian skateboarding in the youth-dominated demographic of the West Bank, albeit unable to Free Palestine, can partially ‘shred’ the Israeli architecture of Occupation along three main lifelines: space, body and the imagination. Therefore this paper contributes to discussions around geographies of hope and the ethical imperative of a utopic, decolonial geography to find and document the often unremarked upon spaces of improvisation and resistance emerging from landscapes of tragedy, injustice and violent ruination. In contrast to geopoliticised, technocentric scholarly accounts of the occupation that rhetorically hollow out the landscape of bodily relations, agency and hope, skateboarding is shown to provide an alternative cartography and embodied narration of ordinary Palestinians in the conflict.