Larissa Sansour on rogue histories, speculative futures and reclaiming the power to narrate Palestine.
21 August 2026
In ‘Rogue Agents of History’, Larissa Sansour collapses the boundaries between past, present and future to confront the forces that shape Palestinian memory, identity and survival. Moving through science fiction, archaeology, maritime mythology and the charged space of the museum, her work rejects history as fixed or neutral. Instead, it becomes a contested terrain where ghosts return, objects resist, and imagined futures emerge as acts of political agency.
In this conversation, Sansour reflects on the emancipatory possibilities of fiction, the limitations of documentary representation, and the responsibility of museums to address the histories embedded within their collections. She also discusses her new film, A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, in which a ghostly Palestinian pirate captain reclaims looted artefacts and the stories they carry. At a moment when images of Palestine are frequently reduced to evidence of catastrophe, Sansour insists on complexity, ambiguity and the radical right to imagine beyond erasure.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Rogue Agents of History’ moves across Ottoman histories, contemporary geopolitics and imagined futures, refusing a linear understanding of time. What draws you to fractured timelines in exploring Palestinian history, and what possibilities do they open beyond conventional historical narratives?
Larissa Sansour: Palestinian history was never straightforwardly linear. The past is not really in the past, just as the future, in both its dystopian and utopian incarnations, has already been with us for so long it already seems like a thing of the past. In Palestine, all temporalities are present at the same time, with the Nakba and the colonial violence from back then not just still ongoing, but accelerated and intensified beyond belief. The past is not a closed historical chapter; it still shapes the present very directly, and, surrounded by devastation in the present, collectively confines Palestinians even further to that idea of future statehood as a sanctuary. Further away now than ever, it seems, but, nonetheless, a necessary ambition. My work interacts with these floating and interdependent temporalities, often positing the initial cataclysm as the First World War rather than 1948, with the transition from Ottoman rule to British mandate essentially paving the way for the current tragedy. With all of these historical elements at play, moving between the Ottoman period, the present and imagined futures allows me to bring different moments into conversation with one another. It also creates space to think beyond the idea that Palestinian history is moving inevitably towards disappearance. Speculation can reopen possibilities that have been closed down by official narratives. It allows Palestinians not only to be remembered, but also to act, intervene and imagine themselves into the future. In this way, the construction of counter-narratives is a way of reclaiming agency.
Science fiction has become a defining language in your practice, yet your work remains deeply rooted in lived political realities. What does speculative fiction let you say about Palestine that documentary or realism cannot?
My early work was documentary-based, as the need for proof of existence and documentation of being, places, and people appeared crucial at a point where erasure was accelerating. It felt like creating an archive for things about to be lost. A lot of very good and necessary documentaries were made back then and to this day, but I started feeling that this immense focus on documentary also came with limitations, in the sense that it reduced Palestinians not only to politically disadvantaged subjects, but also confined them to the current political dialogue, forced upon them an eternal burden of proof, prompted to argue for their rights to their own land and their own being. The perpetual acuteness of the present at any given time made it difficult to remain within the realm of documentary and even realism, I felt, without giving up agency in favour of a set structure with pre-distributed roles. Once I relocated my film to the future, certain doors opened, and it gave me the chance to explore concepts that far too often fell between the cracks. In a sense, this move brought me closer to the present-day reality by allowing me to reconfigure it and expose its absurdities, inconsistencies and contradictions. It also gives Palestinian characters access to a much wider imaginative space. We are so often represented through catastrophe, victimhood or humanitarian crisis. Science fiction allows for a reframing of the Palestinian identity, not just politically, but also cinematically. By using a language previously associated with Hollywood, Palestine as such started looking different. That shift is important because it gives us access to complexity, not only testimony. Ultimately, it is limiting to expect that politics should only be addressed through a documentary lens – fiction, poetic meditations and a broader creative approach may allow just as much space for reflection.
The exhibition introduces pirates, ghosts and guerrilla archaeologists as figures who disrupt official histories. What interests you about these protagonists, and how do they reshape resistance, memory and agency?
What connects all of these characters is their quest for reclaiming narrative agency under difficult circumstances. They are also all marked by a certain degree of instability or unreliability. The guerrilla archaeologist, for instance, reveals her ambitions in a dialogue with her therapist, questioning her credibility, and the pirate captain operates under the constant threat of being hanged. There’s a radicalism to their behaviour, underlining the extent to which they are willing to go in order to reestablish some semblance of justice, order and sanity. The tasks they undertake are Herculean, yet that doesn’t deter them, all driven by an untameable urge to set things right. They allow resistance to happen through unusual means: through haunting, storytelling, memory and the reappropriation of objects. A ghost can collapse the distance between past and present. A pirate can interrupt the routes through which wealth and culture circulate. An object can refuse the meaning a museum has assigned to it. In that sense, these figures do not ask permission to enter history. They take hold of it and redirect it.
Your new film, A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, follows a ghostly Palestinian pirate ship as it recovers lost objects and forgotten histories across centuries. What inspired this maritime mythology, and how did it become a framework for displacement, cultural inheritance and return?
When I received the invitation from the Wereldmuseum to create a new work in dialogue with their collections, I was already developing the framework for a project about the maritime history of Bethlehem, a film about Bethlehem’s souvenir industry and how it went international in the late 19th century. The Wereldmuseum commission gave me access to hundreds of thousands of artefacts, and my first inclination was to use this collection to further develop the souvenir story as originally intended. But as the Dutch never had much of a colonial stake in the Middle East, the collection didn’t produce many Palestinian souvenirs. And the more I explored the collection, the less I found myself fascinated by any singular objects, but rather by the sheer volume of objects. So that was where the story was: the bulk of artefacts looted from the colonies. The souvenir project became a restitution project. And that realisation eventually led to the creation of the pirate character, a thorn in the eyes of the imperial powers, on a crusade to reclaim the looted objects and hand them back to their rightful owners along with the stories they hold. As soon as the pirate captain evolved into this anticolonialist character with an ambition to reclaim heritage, restore narrative agency and set history straight, it became clear that she had to be Palestinian. And as soon as the premise for the story had been mapped out, the original souvenir idea made its way back into the storyline, represented by a souvenir merchant on his way to the 1900 World Fair in Paris, allowing him and the captain to present differing views on the value of artefacts and the stories they tell.
Throughout the exhibition, museum artefacts, personal heirlooms and cinematic props coexist, deliberately blurring the line between fact and fiction. How do you see objects as storytellers, and what responsibilities do museums carry when presenting contested histories?
Objects are never neutral; they carry personal and collective stories alike, stories of heritage, ownership, cultures, nations, imperialism. They serve as representations of memory and belonging. The most private artefacts in the exhibition are items from my own childhood home, most of them intrinsically meaningless knickknacks that don’t stand out for any single story they tell, but only for the overall storyline of outlining the contours of belonging to a place about to vanish due to a foreign power’s colonial ambitions. These objects tell the story not only of my own family, but of families across Palestine. That narrative potential of the objects is what ties them to the museum artefacts and the cinematic props. Whether original, authentic, factual or fictional, these objects all contribute to an overarching story of the perpetual reframings and recontextualisations of historical events and the construction of personal, collective and national identities, and of historical understanding as such. A prop may be fabricated, but it can still express a historical truth. Meanwhile, an authentic artefact can be used to support a highly constructed political narrative. Bringing together all of these artefacts in a single exhibition questions the hierarchy between them and draws attention to the narrative privileges that come with the possession of these artefacts and any artefacts like them.
You have spoken about developing a new visual language for telling Palestinian stories. In a moment when images circulate faster than ever, and truth is increasingly contested, how do you create work that resists simplification while remaining emotionally resonant?
Palestinian images are often expected to do something very immediate. They are asked to prove an event, document suffering or produce a political response. Those images are vital. Now more than ever, these images are crucial to building the case for holding the perpetrators accountable for the ongoing genocide in Palestine. But they are also consumed at an incredible speed and then replaced by the next image. My work tries to move at a different pace and attempts to carve out a space for exploration of concepts and consequences that perhaps aren’t easily digestible. I use constructed cinematic images, speculative narratives and ambiguity to slow down the viewer’s response. I do not want the political content to be unclear, but I also do not believe political clarity requires formal simplicity. Emotional resonance often comes through contradiction. Humour can sit next to grief. Something can feel monumental and absurd at the same time. And that complexity is not a retreat from urgency. It is perhaps a way of resisting the simplification that makes political narratives easier to negate and people easier to erase.
Your long-standing collaboration with writer and filmmaker Søren Lind has produced richly layered cinematic worlds where mythology, archaeology and politics intersect. How has this creative partnership evolved, and what conversations shaped ‘Rogue Agents of History’?
Søren and I have worked together for many years, so the process has become very fluid. We usually begin with conversations around an image, a contradiction, a historical detail or a philosophical question. From there, the writing and visual language develop together, with Søren being responsible for the scripts, while I am in charge of visual development, although both script and visuals are very much the result of an ongoing exchange. We come from different backgrounds and positions, and that is productive because it forces us to explain our assumptions and keep questioning the material. Søren’s background in philosophy and fiction has been especially important in shaping narratives that can carry political content without becoming too illustrative or didactic. With ‘Rogue Agents of History’, we kept returning to questions of who has the authority to narrate history, and how archaeology, museums and evidence can become political tools. We became interested in rogue figures and unstable objects—things that could move across periods, categories and systems of meaning. Collaborating with curator Nat Muller was also essential in that aspect.
‘Rogue Agents of History’ asks not only who owns history, but who has the power to imagine its future. What do you hope audiences leave with after encountering these speculative worlds, when memory, justice and cultural survival feel so urgent?
I hope people leave with a stronger sense that history is not simply something we inherit. It is constantly being produced, edited and institutionalised. The struggle over history is also a struggle over the present and over who is allowed to have a future. And you are right, of course, justice and survival have never felt more acutely urgent than now, but this is perhaps also why the need to understand the mechanisms at play is more important than ever; questioning the storylines that allow for historical and political manipulation, challenging the fictions that maintain the status quo, challenging the narrative superiority of the oppressor, forcing a reconsideration of accepted historical truths, exposing the fabrications that continue to resonate with especially right wing governments and their supporters even in countries still passing for enlightened democracies. Speculation and fictionalisation can facilitate such an understanding by sidestepping the at all times contentious and polarised political rhetoric. Speculation can interrupt the idea that the current political reality is inevitable. So in that sense, fiction can be emancipatory. When a people’s future is being systematically denied, imagining that future despite the odds becomes a political act.
This exhibition is on view at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam until 27 September 2026.
