Against systemic violence: Beyond symbolic solidarity: In conversation with Iman Aoun, co-founder and director of ASHTAR Theatre

Drawing on more than three decades of work under occupation, Palestinian theatre-maker, actor and pedagogue Iman Aoun, co-founder and director of ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah, reflects on theatre as an ethical and political method that exceeds representation, functioning instead as a lived infrastructure for resilience, testimony and social imagination amid systemic violence, oppression and dispossession. The conversation addresses the role of Theatre of the Oppressed in Palestine, the urgency of amplifying voices from besieged and marginalized communities, feminist pedagogies of care and the limits of cultural production in the face of genocide – while refusing resignation and neutrality. Positioned as an outstanding theatre practitioner and thinker, Iman Aoun challenges artists, institutions and international audiences to confront complicity, rethink universality and engage in sustained, accountable, long-term solidarity beyond symbolic, performative gestures of togetherness. This conversation with Iman Aoun follows the publication of the Anam Cara performance collective’s video-reading of the New Gaza Monologues, situating it within a sustained practice of theatre as resistance, performance as political intervention and storytelling as collective agency.