Essay | Space, people, and the digital extensions of protest by Ola Hassanain

Department

Year

2020

Tutor documentation 2020-01-13

Ola Hassanain, tutor at new Temporary Programme Blacker Blackness (2021-2023) wrote essay Space, people, and the digital extensions of protest published by The Hmm 12 December, 2019.

Ola zooms into the urbanscape of Khartoum under the recent revolution in Sudan and speculates on the role of social media platforms in the collective reimagining of space.

I write this as the chanting of demonstrations from neighbouring streets echo above the city of Khartoum. Just shy of five months after the June 3rd 2019 massacre dispersed the sit-in area, demonstrators have yet again taken to the streets of Khartoum to protest the lack of response to the killings. The sounds of the chant—freedom, peace, and justice!—drawing us all together. The ‘sit-in’ was an area occupied by protestors in Khartoum that was located across from the army headquarters; the location chosen by protestors to make clear their anti-military governing and call for change. The sit-in ran from the 11th of April 2019 until it was forcibly dispersed, in the early hours of the 3rd of June 2019, by use of deadly force from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—culminating in the killing of more than 700 individuals, in what is called the Khartoum Sit-in Massacre.

The collective feelings of anger and disappointment at the events of that day, at the fact that there is still no one being held accountable and no justice, leaves one wondering about how the boundaries of the sit-in area have simultaneously created boundaries where state terror managed to unfold. What makes the pursuit of well being, justice, and equity through political actions and audible demands by protestors constantly manifest a byproduct that inflicts pain on oneself? I mean, we know why but do we know how the built environment and its public spaces were implicated in processes of state terror? How can we channel inquiries that would enable us to survive the inevitability of state terror; to carry our concerns outside of the futile political dialogues saturating the aftermath of such devastation?