The Parachute Paradox

For Steve Sabella, the occupation attaches each Palestinian to an Israeli, as if in a tandem jump. The Israeli is always in control, placing the Palestinian under threat in a never-ending hostage situation. The latter has two options: either surrender or unbuckle the harness. Sabella’s new book, The Parachute Paradox, is an imaginative memoir telling the life story of the artist born in Jerusalem’s Old City and raised under Israeli occupation. After living through both intifadas, being kidnapped in Gaza, and learning to navigate Palestinian and Israeli culture, he feels in exile at home. Blurring fact and fiction, love and loss, the memoir traces one man’s arduous search for liberation from within, through a confrontation with his colonized imagination.

The artist talk marks the recent publication of Steve Sabella’s latest book, The Parachute Paradox. A screening of Nadia J. Kabalan’s short documentary In the Darkroom with Steve Sabella will shed light on Sabella’s perception of image  and imagination. He will read excerpts from his new book and discuss the meaning of exile and migration for his work with Alya Sebti and Almút Sh. Bruckstein.