The Paris Review - Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums

Three Families & Three Families

Three Jerusalem Manuscript Libraries join efforts to preserve vulnerable Islamic and Arab cultural heritage in the city. Produced by Nun Films in collaboration wth the Khalidi Library and ALIPH.

Three Families & Three Families

Some good news courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation and (the very much missed Dawawine):

2022 marks the 11th – and final – year of the AIF in its current location in Gemmayzeh. After viewing more than a dozen potential spaces across Beirut, we’re delighted to share the news that the ground floor of the Aresco building in Kantari will be the foundation’s new home as of the spring of 2023.

Spread out across two floors and a mezzanine, our new 800 m² space will accommodate improved preservation and digitisation labs; a larger cool storage room (CSR) and a quarantine area for incoming collections; a work and display area; and a new space dedicated to library resources and to welcoming researchers.

AIF will collaborate with Dawawine, offering a specialised public library that houses both Dawawine’s and the foundation’s extensive book collections and audiovisual resources, which focus on photography, cinema, theater, and the performing arts. This new joint library and research center will be an important resource for artists, researchers, and scholars alike.

Please see Dawawine’s statement below about our new joint library.

Being alone and in the dark doesn’t agree with us. In this mad city, we found an ally in the Arab Image Foundation, and instead of reinstating a bookstore, we will be experiencing the permanence of a public library. We’ll be taking our books out of their boxes soon, and look forward to meeting readers, writers, art-makers, image seekers, and researchers at AIF’s new premises, where Dawawine’s books will find a home.
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​We also hope to resume our programme of film screenings throughout the year 2023.
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​There is so much more we’d like to say, but let us be patient; we’ll share more updates with you very soon.

It is our hope that this move will allow us to open our doors wide, welcoming different publics, conceiving diverse programmes, and becoming an open space where people can meet, exchange knowledge, engage with each other, and learn together.

Arab Image Foundation, Issue #2023.01

“This edition of the Biennale is said to be centered on decolonial engagement, to offer ‘repair … as a form of agency’ and ‘a starting point … for critical conversation, in order to find ways together to care for the now.’ Yet the Biennale made the decision to commodify photos of unlawfully imprisoned and brutalized Iraqi bodies under occupation, displaying them without the consent of the victims and without any input from the Biennale’s participating Iraqi artists, whose work was adjacently installed without their knowledge. Who is given agency in this form of ‘repair’?”

Rijin Sahakian, “Regarding torture at the Berlin Biennale“ (Artforum)

Day 4: AGHDRA. An excerpt from a film by Arthur Jafa. Film with introduction and conversation with Rinaldo Walcott.

writing-after-the-disaster:

Etel Adnan, To be in a Time of War (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005). Excerpt from page 1.

RIP Etel Adnan, 1925–2021.

The Beirut Urban Lab

 Beirut Urban Observatory

Today, August 4, 2021 marks one year after the catastrophe of the Beirut Port Explosion that killed more than 200 people and left thousands wounded. Massive moral and material losses were experienced by the Lebanese people, Arab people, and all friends and loves of Lebanon around the world. A year after the explosion, the investigation committee did not arrive to a conclusion, the economy in Lebanon has severely collapsed and Lebanon is currently experiencing a suffocating political vacuum. On this sad day, we will not mourn Beirut, that is stronger than death and destruction, and that has gathered its wounds and risen to continue to play its role in raising the torch of freedom, creativity, art, and culture. On this sad occasion we stand to salut Beirut, the capital of Arab culture, presenting friends with testimonies of that dreadful day.

Commemorating the Beirut Port Explosion, Institute for Palestine Studies

writing-after-the-disaster:

Walid Ayoub, George Floyd in Palestine (2020).

Beirut, March 2019

Measuring Life: Notes Toward an Impossible Exchange
PROJECT LAUNCH
WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2020
7 PM AMMAN TIME

Conceived in the aftermath of the pandemic, Measuring Life: Notes Toward an Impossible Exchange features a series of invocations (performances, screenings, interventions, etc.) that interrogate systems of value embedded in hegemonic representations of life and the economy. We look at the ‘anthropomorphisation’ of the economy in public discourse-the construction of the economy as organic matter- versus the constitution of life itself as a computable object, its reduction to a financial problem, or alas Mbembe, the ways in which life and matter are incorporated into “systems of abstraction and machinic reasoning.” Addressing the question of what value stands for, the project unravels the violent workings of dominant systems of representation, seeking to imagine new modes of measuring that bring into being a different aesthetics and a radical praxis affirming the powers of life. The launch features a lecture-performance by the curatorial team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51E1dUUgMAc

“When violence is perpetrated both with and through documents, that violence lasts and is reproduced through the mediation of the archive.”

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “Errata in retro-prospect,” the A-Line (1 July 2020).

Walid Ayoub, George Floyd in Palestine (2020).

“The uncertainty ranges represent the full range of our estimates. Changes are relative to annual mean daily emissions from those sectors in 2019 (Methods). Daily emissions are smoothed with a 7-d box filter to account for the transition between confinement levels. Note the different ranges on the y axes in the upper and lower panels.”

Le Quéré, C., Jackson, R.B., Jones, M.W. et al. Temporary reduction in daily global CO₂ emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement. Nature Climate Change (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0797-x

“The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus and Our Future,” The New Yorker (1 May 2020).

Maya Shurbaji, At Last, a Tragedy (2017). Video still.

After twenty years of civil war and enduring numerous conflicts since, the archival situation in Lebanon is, understandably, best described as decentralized. Though it is only rarely used by historians working in Lebanon, there is a National Archives (also known as the Centre des Archives Nationales) in Beirut in the neighborhood of Hamra. The National Archives is the repository for Lebanon’s various government ministries. However, because there is no declassification law in Lebanon, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what files the National Archives possesses. There is a website for the Archives, but as of the writing of this article, the website has not been updated since 2015 and the most recent catalog of its holdings was published in the 1980s. 

 If you are intent on making a visit to the National Archives, it is open to the public Monday through Friday during normal business hours. Researchers must present a passport and complete an application, in Arabic, listing their topic of study, affiliation, and basic personal information. The application then must receive approval from the General Director of the Archives. Once you have received approval, you will need to speak to the archivists, who will retrieve documents relating to your stated project. The archivists are knowledgeable but are reported to have essentially absolute power within the building, and reserve the right to refuse any request. If a request is not refused outright, it may often be met with the claim that the files you are looking for were destroyed during the civil war. This may or may not be true, but what is certain is the archivists are the gatekeepers, and a positive relationship with them is necessary for any productive work to be done there.

A Survey of Middle East Archives: Lebanon | Wilson Center

UBC, Wet’suwet’en Virtual Teach-In - YouTube (23 April 2020)

Title and Rights, State Action, and Media representation of Land Defenders 

During a time of separation and social distancing, join us for an opportunity to gather together for a virtual teach-in on the legal foundations of Wet’suwet’en Title and Rights and the treatment of the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and supporters in the media as a result of recent state actions taken against them.

 Moderated by Coll Thrush, Professor of History and Associate Faculty in Critical Indigenous Studies, this is your opportunity to hear from leading UBC scholars and learn more about the various human rights issues faced by Indigenous and First Nations people. 

Presenters, Paige Raibmon (Department of History), Gordon Christie (Allard School of Law), and Candis Callison (Graduate School of Journalism) will speak to their various fields of expertise and respond to questions from participants in this virtual space.

Zarina Hashmi, …these Cities Blotted into the Wilderness, Beirut (2003).

Zarina passed away yesterday, April 25, 2020.

“Memory is the only lasting possession we have. I have made my life the subject of my work, using the images of home, the places I have visited, and the stars I have looked up to. I just want a reminder that I did not imagine my experiences.”

Excellent recent research on the politics of containerisation and the logic of logistics (Levinson; Cowen; Sekula) has shown how these new modalities of trade have transformed not only the form and extent of circulation of goods but also the processes of production. The argument about logistical forms of capital accumulation trace its begging to the 1950s when containers were invented, and especially to the period after the 1960s, when their usage was normalised during the Vietnam war. However, many of the practices we now associate with containerisation – foremost among them the automation of processes of maritime circulation, and the transformation of urban landscapes around the ports – go back at least two decades before the 1950s, to the legal, engineering, and financial innovations around petroleum tankers. By focusing on the tanker terminals of the Arabian Peninsula since the 1930s and the subsequent burgeoning of tanker-ships plying the trade between the Peninsula and the rest of the world, I will illuminate the radical changes in political economy, labour, law and production the specificities of tanker trade has wrought. This includes early instances of automated workplaces; terminals far enough from port-city centres to isolate them from public scrutiny; and disciplining of workers aboard tanker-ships. Further, the shift in ownership structures and financing of tanker trades over the last one-hundred years either foreshadows or dramatically illuminates the transformations in financial capital itself. Finally, much of lex petrolea, the legal and arbitral corpus that sets the parameter of extraction and circulation of oil, itself provides the ground on which late capitalist legal property regimes are founded. 

 Laleh Khalili is a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies(Stanford 2013). Her Sinews of War and Trade, on the politics of maritime infrastructures, is published by Verso.

Aga Khan Program Lecture: Laleh Khalili - YouTube

Teju Cole writes:

One thing pretty much leads to another. For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking of Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, a useful rubric with which to think through my photography. The uncanny leads me to revisit surrealism, hence Breton. Then from Breton to Benjamin, though one never really leaves Benjamin anyway. But not so much Benjamin the scholar of surrealism as Benjamin the despairing refugee. The Benjamin who fled, like millions of others, for fear of his life.

June 1940. Europe, again. The Wehrmacht closes in on Paris. Benjamin leaves Paris for Lourdes. Then follows all the complicated moving from one place to another that is the refugee’s fate. He has a US visa. He crosses the Spanish border. The plan: to cross Catalonia, to cross fascist Spain, and on to Portugal, and on to America. He is still in Catalonia, at a hotel in Portbou. He is with a group of Jewish refugees now. Will they be let through? Will they be sent back?

The order comes that they are to be deported to France, into Nazi hands. And so, Walter Benjamin, our friend and helper, kills himself with an overdose of morphine. He is 48. What a waste. Worse than a waste: the order is evaded, and the rest of the party successfully moves on to Portugal.

Michael Taussig writes: “The receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay…includes five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress.”

The itemization reminds me of two things. Less, of the usual little list of what I drank or ate (mineral water, Toblerone), what I spent, when I check out of these frequent hotels of my life. More, of the little plastic bags I saw at the public morgue in Tucson, containing the last few personal effects of unknown travelers recovered from the Sonora desert in Arizona. A few dollars, a few pesos, photograph of a family, a mother’s passport to remember her by.

How many Benjamins died today? (It would sting if this were the news: Walter Benjamin died today! But this, indeed, is the news.) How many will die tomorrow? Remember all those who turned away the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, and the communists in the 1940s, and consigned them to horrible death. We are certain that we, with our contemporary wisdom, are not so monstrous as to turn away those at death’s door, the inconvenience to us be damned. Of course we aren’t. Of course. But let’s say we were. What would that look like?

Five sodas, four telephone calls. “I can’t talk for long, but I’m sure we’ll meet again.” The trains are moving across Europe. The trains are being stopped. Men in uniform come on and begin searching. The passenger looks straight ahead, but her heart pounds like a bass drum.

Every refugee is alike, but each generation fails refugees in its own special way.

Only one person dies at a time.

Canada warming at twice the global rate, climate report finds, The Guardian (2 April 2019)

Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, a landmark government report has found, warning that drastic action is the only way to avoid catastrophic outcomes.

“The science is clear – Canada’s climate is warming more rapidly than the global average, and this level of warming effectively cannot be changed,” Nancy Hamzawi, assistant deputy minister for science and technology at Environment and Climate Change Canada, told reporters on Monday.

The report, released late on Monday by Environment and Climate Change Canada, paints a grim picture of Canada’s future, in which deadly heatwaves and heavy rainstorms become a common occurrence. Forty-three government scientists and academics authored the peer-reviewed report.

While global temperatures have increased 0.8C since 1948, Canada has seen an increase of 1.7C – more than double the global average.

writing-after-the-disaster:

Filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini location scouting for his subsequent 1964 film Sopralluoghi in Palestina (A Visit to Palestine, or, Scouting for Locations in Palestine).

writing-after-the-disaster:

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Film “The Gospel According to Matthew” (Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il film “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo”) (1965). 52 min.

Mark Fisher, 2011

Mark Fisher, 2011

Mohamed Soueid, Tango of Yearning (1998)

“I wonder sometimes why many concepts and terms such as ‘reality’ and ‘authenticity’ have always been behind the fluid creativity expressed in the highlighted artistic works emerging from our region since art in general has always been the best response to all kinds of rupture imposed by oblivion.

In that sense, image could be nothing but a free, rather metaphoric, zone where memory can find its way to survival… In every film I’ve made, I was hopefully looking for the moment that revealed how much people were eager to reconstruct their own stories with their own language(s), as well as mine.”
—Mohamed Soueid

“Already now, after an average global warming of a mere 1􏱳C, the Persian Gulf is brushing the threshold. In July 2015, an unprecedented heatwave conspired with the humid air from the sea to push wet-bulb temperatures to a peak of 34.6􏱳C, leaving a margin of 0.4􏱳C to the limit of liveability. But that heatwave appears to have been surpassed by the one of July 2016, summed up worldwide as the hottest month on record on Earth. The global trend was spearheaded by the Gulf: in late July, the mercury – heat only – soared to 54􏱳C (129􏱳F) in Kuwait and Basra, probably the highest temperature ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere and possibly in the world as a whole. 

Zainab Guman, a 26-year-old university student in Basra, told the reporter from the Washington Post that she rarely left home during daylight throughout the summer, for stepping outside is like ‘walking into a fire’: ‘It’s like everything on your body – your skin, your eyes, your nose – starts to burn.’ A spokesperson for Iraq’s meteorological department attested to a fundamental shift in the country’s weather patterns towards longer, more intense, more frequent heat- waves. 

A refugee living in a tin hut outside Baghdad said: ‘Iraqis are strong people. But this heat is like fire. Can people live in fire?’”

Andreas Malm, “‘This Is the Hell That I Have Heard Of’: Some Dialectical Images in Fossil Fuel Fiction,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 53 no. 2 (April 1, 2017): 121–41.

Permanent Temporariness—DAAR

Permanent Temporariness is a book, a catalogue, and an archive that accounts for fifteen years of research, experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. It is the result of the profound desire of its authors, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, to look back in connection with the eponymous retrospective exhibition that was inaugurated at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on February 24, 2018, and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven on December 1, 2018.

Since their first work, Stateless Nation at the Venice Biennial in 2003, and throughout their more recent architectural interventions in refugee camps, the artistic practice of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti has explored and acted within and against the condition of permanent temporariness that permeates contemporary forms of life. In their ambitious research and project-based practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the re-definition of words, and the formation of civic spaces.

This book is organized around fourteen concepts that activate seventeen different projects. Each project is the result of a larger process of collaboration and is accompanied by individual and collective texts and interviews that contextualize and expand the reach of every intervention.

Contributors to projects and texts include Maria Nadotti, Charles Esche, Robert Latham, Salwa Mikdadi, Eyal Weizman, Okwui Enwezor, Munir Fasheh, Grupo Contrafilé, Murad Odeh, and Rana Abughannam. Edited by Maria Nadotti and Nick Axel. The publication of this book has been made possible with the generous support of the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery; Van Abbemuseum; and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.

George Souvlis: Your first study, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, deals with the ways which dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past. Could you tell us how about how this has informed the Palestinian nationalist movement? Why it was so crucial? In which ways it influenced the political struggles of the Palestinian people?

Laleh Khalili: I started off by wanting to do some sort of banal doctoral research project on “coping mechanism” of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon or some other such anaemic liberal claptrap. After arriving in the refugee camp that so generously hosted me, it became clear to me that history and memory were resources that were not only instrumentally used by the camp (and local and national) leadership but one which structured the way ordinary refugees told the story of themselves as political subjects. And it seemed to me that these narratives fit within particular narrative genres that were influenced by broader political attachments and structures of the time. When I was conducting my fieldwork, in the early 2000s, Palestinians were in a liminal moment. Oslo’s spectacular failure (so lucidly foretold by Edward Said) was somewhat irrelevant to the refugees in Lebanon who saw the whole process as a kind of betrayal of their right of return. The narrative structure of commemoration was tragic. The prevalent mood of the stories they told, they way my interlocutors framed stories of the past, was of defeat, even if people still celebrated the efficacy of self-sacrifice and the resilience of sumud (or steadfastness). By contrast, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s when Palestinian armed struggle had been ascendant, the genre of the commemoration was heroic, and both official and popular narratives celebrated resistance and struggle on and off the battlefield. For me the stark difference had to do not only with the crushing devastation of Palestinian political organizations in the Lebanese civil war but also with a global shift from the era of Third Worldist struggle and solidarity to one in which NGOisation had become the prevalent mode of advancing claims. This global shift from political to a decidedly depoliticizing ethos echoes also in the transformation of the genres of memory from epic to tragic.

Logistics, Counterinsurgency and the War on Terror: An Interview with Laleh Khalili (Salvage, 16 March 2017)

Helene Kazan, Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989 (2012)

“Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989 is a short film by London based artist and curator Helene Kazan. The film is entirely generated from a single archive photograph taken of the kitchen in the flat her family lived in, in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War.”

Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013). 34 min film. Still.

“The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).

Lamia Joreige, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003). 54 min film. Still.

“There is infinite hope—but not for us.” Franz Kafka

Lamia Joreige, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003). 54 min film. Still.

“Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investiga­ tion. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights-like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.”

Written ca. 1932; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 400-401. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, on the basis of a prior version by Edmund Jephcott.

Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory” in Selected Writings Volume 2: Part 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

“When we turned around to make our way back up the steps of the monument I was again taken aback. At the head of the stairs we saw what appeared to be the same rectangle of light as we had seen when we had first entered and looked down at the sea, only now, gazing up to that entrance from the inside it was of course not the sea but the clear blue sky. Inside our fosa común, this monument to the nameless, we were walking back from the sea into the sky. Later in the actual cemetery we searched for some sign of Benjamin and found a rock about waist high set on the ground. It was untouched by the mason’s chisel except for a plaque with yet another quotation from Benjamin’s writings. His texts seem to be full of pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two. Poor Benjamin. To have his pearls thus cast. This one read: ‘There is no document of civilization that is not a document of barbarism.’” Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33.

Beirut, January 2017. My photo.

“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. … The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.

“With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are called ‘cultural treasures,’ and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment.… There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 391-392.

“In short, cultural history only seems to represent an advance in insight; actually, it does not entail even the semblance of an advance in the realm of dialectics. For cultural history lacks the destructive element which authenticates both dialectical thought and the experience of the dialectical thinker.” Walter Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, eds. Michael W Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 268.

Image: Maasai tribeswoman Scholastica Ene Kukutia visits Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum. From The Guardian (4 December 2018)

writing-after-the-disaster:

Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance (2018), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles

Questions excised from MOCA text:

With his post-human artworks, Villar Rojas posits the question: What happens after the end of art?

When and where does a project actually begin? 

What if an invisible series of housekeeping-like tasks, part of a wide range of circumstances that have been dismissed since the very beginning of art as secondary, is, on the contrary, key to producing that optical illusion we call a “work of art”? 

What if we made a radical inversion and took the work of art as an excuse to do the housekeeping?

Joshua Clover, in an essay for Verso titled “The Roundabout Riots,” writes,

“The quest to discover the true subject of an insurrection always misses the variegations within the crowd. City dwellers and banlieusards have been present from the outset. Moreover, it is not the case that the French peripheries comprise a uniform populism with no commitments other than consumer shortfalls; this is simply what brings together actors with disparate concerns. People arrive at the movement without a direction, or with a hesitant intuition, and the events function as a sort of school for them. The inciting occasion of a riot, a movement, an uprising, is never identical with its meaning. Since the outset there has been a struggle within the struggle, a contest over its direction; it is always in this encounter that revolutionary possibility lives. While we are familiar with street movements drifting right — Brazil provides a disastrous example — the Gilets Jaunes have seemed to reverse this course at moments over the duration of disturbances, particularly as the weekly calls for Saturday convergences have meant a certain urbanization and have moved toward a broader proletarian base, including actors such at the Adama Committee. “The Truth and Justice for Adama Traoré committee” formed after Traoré’s 2016 death in police custody north of Paris — an event which sparked riots identical in kind if not scale to the three weeks of rioting that, in 2005, leapt from Clichy-sous-Bois to encircle Paris, landing in suburbs across France and beyond.

[…]

It is perhaps useful to think of the Gilets Jaunes events as an early climate riot, just as we understand much contemporary immigration to be driven by climate collapse. These two problematics — global circulation of populations and ecological crisis — will not simply serve as occasions to consolidate state power but are certain to converge, over the next decade, into something like “green nationalism” through a discourse of resource preservation and purportedly humanitarian provisions against climate refugees. There is no universalism that will not oppose this development through struggles for both open borders and for communal power in matters ecological.”

“Nestled among half-ruined buildings were the headquarters of institutions previously unknown to Saraqib: a poetry forum, a comedy troupe, a theatre company. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht, an ensemble of actors staged plays that broke the fourth wall, drawing the audience into tales that offered pointed critiques of war profiteering and other injustices. An activist collective painted over bullet-scarred walls around town, daubing the crumbling concrete in luminous greens and blues, and inscribing them with philosophical musings and fragments of verse. Before long, the town’s walls were covered in messages to lost loved ones, and locals began to call the initiative Lovers’ Notebooks. A wall near Hossein’s home was painted with a verse from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: ‘We’re alive, we’re here, and the dream continues.’”

Anand Gopal, Syria’s Last Bastion of Freedom, The New Yorker (10 December 2018)

BBC Sounds, Witness - The ‘Disappeared’ of Lebanon

Artes Mundi 7: Lamia Joreige

Artist Lamia Joreige discusses her project Under-Writing Beirut - Mathaf.

Plastered skull. Found in Jericho, Palestine (Neolithic, 7000 - 6000 BC), Jordan Archaeological Museum

“Benjamin’s ‘paper graveyard’—what I have wanted to call a photograph—tells us, if it tells us anything, that we must regard death. And it is there, in death, that Benjamin experienced what he had already experienced in life—death. The shock of his death—breaking in upon his own history and giving it, in this way, an end and a future—corresponds to the terrifying lucidity of his corpus. Death, corpse, decay, ruin, history, mourning, memory, photography—these are the words Benjamin has left for us to learn to read. These are the words that prevent his other words from being organized into a system, that prevents his writings and readings from being crystallized and frozen into a merely negative method. Words of light, they correspond to the cremation of his work, a cremation in which the form of the work—its suicidal character—reaches its most brilliant illumination, immolated in the flame of his own criticism.” Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 130.

AP Archive, Lebanon: Relatives Protest at Khiam Prison

06/01/2000

http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/d814c503a23e8fe3e9401ed8f62591e1

Lebanese and Palestinian families held a sit-in near to the notorious Khiam prison, which human rights groups say is the scene of torture, to call for the release of their loved ones from Israeli jails.

They carried pictures of their relatives who they say are imprisoned inside Israel.

Hezbollah guerrillas and their supporters also staged a drama enacting methods which Israel soldiers allegedly carry out.

The notorious Khiam Prison was the scene for a sit-in by relatives of prisoners held by Israel.

The event was organised by a government-backed committee that tracks Lebanese detainees in Israel.

The jail was a symbol of the Israeli-allied Southern Lebanon Army’s efforts over 14 years to punish guerrillas.

Khiam’s last 145 inmates walked free on May 23rd as villagers knocked down doors and broke locks after the chaotic flight of guards and interrogators.

But these people say they want Israel to release Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli prisons.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
“We’ve worked for years for those held in Israel, the hostages, and we will still continue our work especially for Mustafa Dirani and Sheikh Obeid that they will be released because we consider them hostages and to keep them is totally contradictory with all international law”
SUPERCAPTION: Elizabeth Hopkins, Amnesty International representative

Former prisoners re-enacted a dramatic presentation of life inside the Khiam Prison that human rights groups denounced as the scene of torture.

An actor called on the government to lock up every collaborator for a minimum of 10 years.

Some 1,500 former militiamen surrendered to authorities last week and await trials on charges of collaboration, which carry prison terms.

The brother of a prisoner jailed in Israel said they would continue to fight for the release of prisoners.

SOUNDBITE: (Arabic)
“We considered those held in Israeli jails as hostages and not prisoners. We urge the Resistance to continue the fight until all detainees are released”
SUPERCAPTION: Brother of Mustafa Dirani who is held in Israel

In the meantime, and along the  border point of El Dhaira, Palestinian families continue to flock to the fence separating the two countries to meet up with relatives they have not seen for decades.

This woman wept as she met her brother for the first time.  

He was born in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon.

She’s been separated from the rest of her family for 52 years.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Ansar (Panoramic image)

Video and photo installation
Photographic timeline, lambda print, Dibond finish (300 x 15cm)
Super 8 film, dating from 1985 and filmed in 2007, converted to DVD

During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, several camps were opened to incarcerate thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.

One of them, Ansar, opened in 1982 and closed in 1985. The Khiam camp that inspired our installation and film titled “Khiam 2000-2007” opened shortly after. In the second half of our film, “Khiam 2000-2007,” a number of ex-prisoners evoke the Ansar camp. When we asked them how to maintain a trace of the Khiam camp after its destruction, they allude to the absence of traces and outright oblivion.

Now, in place of the camp stand a restaurant, a theme park, a football field, a women’s pool, and even a zoo. Nothing to the right, nor to the left of these confines, as if these sites had been firmly implanted by Lebanese in lieu of the camp.

Beyond this façade is a scout camp, with tents set up among the remains of the Israeli army. We went on site to film the surviving traces, the physical ones linked to this history, all the while using material dating back to the camp’s existence… These super 8 images are odd, blurring documentary and timeframe notions, so as to create strange intervals. The result is a video and photography installation titled “Ansar recto/verso,” that questions the making of history when traces have vanished. What is a monument? What is an archive, a document, an image, an imagination? 

http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/ansar/

Still from Akram Zaatari, In This House (2005)

An unattributed blurb on the film notes:

Following the Israeli withdrawal from Ain el Mir in 1985, the village became the frontline. The Dagher family was displaced from their home, which was occupied by a radical resistance group for seven years. When the war ended in 1991, Ali Hashisho, a member of the Lebanese resistance stationed in the Dagher family house, wrote a letter to them justifying his occupation there, and welcoming them back home. He placed the letter inside the empty case of a B-10, 82mm mortar, and buried it in the garden. In November 2002, Akram Zaatari headed to Ain el Mir to excavate Ali’s letter.

“The story-teller has a peculiarly directive influence over us; by means of the states of mind into which he can put us and the expectations he can rouse in us, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)

A drawing of Benjamin. By who? Ceasefire Magazine, “Walter Benjamin: Politics of Everyday Life.”

Act for the Disappeared, Lebanon, Karantina - Testimony of Abu Mhamad:

We’ve been residents of this area for a while, since the 1300s when our ancestors used to live here. In 1975, the civil war started. Up until 1975 and the beginning of the war, we did not know who was Muslim and who was Christian. Honestly, I swear to God. When the Christian holidays came around, we used to celebrate with them. We were young and we used to join the other kids and eat sweets and they used to celebrate our holidays with us.

A lot of people died from our end and a lot of people also died from the other side. They retreated to their areas and so did we and for what? On that day, a lot of people died. They dug a big hole and they buried them all at once. Their bodies were never returned to their families; neither my brother’s body nor my aunt’s body nor my grandmother’s body were ever returned or even found. No one ever returned. If they dug up holes in the area for construction purposes and found bones, I’m certain that they reburied them again. There is a lot of desecration here.

Witness - Beirut Photographer

In 1981, George Azar, a Lebanese-American, crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon.   He carried a cheap camera and less than $100 and a desire to change the way the Arab world was portrayed by the US media. He began taking photographs. But within a few months Israel attacked Lebanon and war broke out. 

Wadad Halwani, The last picture… while crossing

augmented[archive] – Cairo Edition – the augmented archive

augmented[archive] is a digital art project, an iOS and Android app; a growing, expanding archive, a topography of the possible, a map of fragments from a city’s manifold presents.  The project takes the form of a spatial narrative, functioning like a speculative archaeological tool, leading you through real and virtual ruins of past, present and future of the city and its imaginary expansions. Its framework is a media architecture, a GPS-based archive that can be read and rewritten, open for your thoughts and interaction. A guide that speaks of the various contestations of the city and your personal encounters with and within them.

You will have to use a device to enter this virtual palimpsest, a smartphone, or a tablet and your imagination. Think of Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project in the digital age of transmission and real-time; a fragmentary poem guiding you through actual and potential disasters and desires; spaces and times of here and now. While walking with this device you will experience video documents—recorded at the same place at other times; performances—absent yet present;  associative story-telling—dreamlike yet hyper-real; suggestive instructions—asking for your own contribution and continuation of a story that is as conflicted, disjointed and elusive, as yourself and the city around you.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Lebanon: A Law for Missing Persons - لبنان: سن قانون للمفقودين , Apr 23, 2017

Thousands of people have gone missing during the armed conflict that plagued Lebanon from 1975-1990 and thousands are still missing them. Their families have the right to know their fate. The Lebanese authorities should pass a law for the missing persons in Lebanon.

Lamia Joreige, Museum Crossing (2013). Silkscreen photograph based on a 1976 photo by Ibrahim Tawil.

Lamia Joreige: Under-Writing Beirut

“When excavating specific instances or locations, whether from the past, present, or projected future, intertemporal continuities and ruptures surface via what persists, what has vanished, and the promise of knowing and imagining inherent in both.” 

Lamia Joreige, Under-Writing Beirut-Mathaf (2013).

Latent_Image.png 1,368×1,402 pixels

“Printed out” image on a 35mm B&W film, overexposed by approximately 24 stops (about two days of exposure at f/2), without any chemical processing, showing that the silver clusters can grow up to visible sizes without developing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_image#/media/File:Latent_Image.png

Meek Mill, 1942 Flows (2018)

Mahmoud Hojeij, Memories of Ras Beirut: wish you were here (2006). 51 minute video.

Thomas Nail writes, “This will be the century of the migrant not just because of the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon, but because the asymmetry between citizens and migrants has finally reached its historical breaking point. The prospects for any structural improvements in this situation are hard to imagine, but alternatives are not without historical precedent. Before any specific solutions can be considered, the first step toward any change must be to open up the political decision-making process to everyone affected by the proposed changes, regardless of status. The only way forward in the long march for migrant justice and social equality is status for all.”

Thomas Nail, We are entering a new epoch: the century of the migrant, Aeon Ideas (14 December 2016)

“In 1996, Syrian security forces in Lebanon detained Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees, who then disappeared. Some of these abductions began with short-term detention, interrogation and torture at Syrian intelligence headquarters at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Beirut, followed by transfer to Syria and imprisonment there without charge or due process. In one 1996 case, after a high-ranking Syrian officer called at the home of a Lebanese citizen and took him away, family members made inquiries at the local office of Syrian security. First they said that they didn=t have him, then they said that he was being questioned for a few days and would be released. After some days, they said that he was moved to Anjar [a Syrian detention facility inside Lebanon, near the Lebanese-Syrian border] and probably was in Damascus, a relative said. The family later was able to confirm this.”

from Human Rights Watch 1997 World Report: Syria.

Roy Samaha, Please Rewind Me Later (2007). 30 min film.

“This work wants a tool of research into its own past. It’s about linking places from childhood, dreams and VHS recordings. How can one make an auto-portrait without resorting to historical, archival shots? “You must understand: the memory of objects records and keeps human actions… so that future generations can inherit them… But you have also been asked to go, to leave everything behind you as if you had never come. Things, places possess a sort of memory. When you enter in an enclosed space, a part of you remains tied, you lose something. You must learn to leave without abandoning a piece of yourself… Learn to move around without leaving any trace.”

http://art-action.org/site/en/cat/sample.php?oeuvre=P31398&lang=en

“[Doris] Salcedo makes no claim that mourning will change the world, or even that art in itself suffices to enable mourning. The obsessive repetition that marks her work suggests rather the melancholia of an endless Penelopean persistence. There’s an infinity of repeated microscopic gestures that slowly reveal themselves at the textural surface of the work. Sometimes this materialises itself as a literal tracery of stitches, as if the mourning process—Freud describes this process in explicitly textile terms as a step by step unpicking or unravelling of the libidinal ties that bind us (knüpfen) to the lost object—is being interminably thwarted or protracted. And there’s an endless stream of objects, as if the warehouse of abandoned furniture is constantly being replenished. This is not only because the supply of corpses is seemingly limitless.”

Rebecca Comay, “Material Remains: Doris Salcedo,” The Oxford Literary Review 39.1 (2017), 44.

Benjamin Grosser, Computers Watching Movies

Benjamin writes: Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch the same things?

Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch it. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie Hall.

writing-after-the-disaster:

“The lacuna-image is a trace-image and a disappearance-image at the same time. Something remains that is not the thing, but a scrap of its resemblance. Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of annihilation: that something, therefore, bears witness to a disappearance while simultaneously resisting it, since it becomes the opportunity of its possible remembrance. It is neither full presence, nor absolute absence. It is neither resurrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. It is a world proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which, placed together in a montage, will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge, the kind Warburg called Mnemosyne, Benjamin called Arcades, Bataille called Documents, and Godard today calls Histoire(s).” Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 167.

writing-after-the-disaster:

Giséle Freund photograph of Walter Benjamin in les Bibliothèque nationale de France (1937).

“We have to distinguish between on one side quotation, remake, ‘repetition’ of oneself, and, on the other side of the surpassing disaster, resurrection. […] Past a surpassing disaster, and taking into account the withdrawal of tradition, as a historian and archivist of myself, I can imitate myself, ‘repeat’ myself, but as a filmmaker I cannot do so even if I wished since my previous work is no longer available—I have to resurrect it before being able to ‘repeat’ myself.”

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster.

Beirut, 2017

Beirut, 2017

Beirut, 2017

Beirut, 2017

Beirut, 2017

Beirut, 2017

Josephine Grace Gay was born in 2005 and shot dead seven years and three days later. She is one of the 20 six- and seven-year-old victims of the Sandy Hook massacre who should be tweens by now. They’d be canoeing across Candlewood Lake, competing at soccer tournaments, and wandering around the imagined kingdoms accessible to their parents by metaphor only. I know this because that’s what I did when I was a middle-schooler in a sluggish, boring, dumb suburb of Danbury, Connecticut, 15 minutes west of Newtown.

The Millennial Trauma of Sandy Hook

On the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Balfour Day, the Old City of Jerusalem, 2 November 1929. Palestinians and many Arabs commemorated the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917) with mourning, as indicated by the black flags.

From Walid Khalidi, Before the Diaspora: A photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948. http://btd.palestine-studies.org/content/mourning-balfour-day-2

oldbeirut:

Ashrafieh [1950s]

Fred Herzog, Two White Cars, Quebec City (1969)

fritzbooks:

September 2017, Cuddell Commons Butterfly Garden, in memoriam, Tamir Rice (2002-2014)

Nagasaki Medical College, Nagasaki, August 1945.

“If the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, are a surpassing disaster then beyond not only the immediate death toll and the manifest destruction of buildings, including museums, libraries and temples, and of various other sorts of physical records, but also the long-term hidden material effects, in cells that have been affected with radioactivity in the “depth” of the body, and the latent traumatic effects that may manifest themselves après coup, there would be an additional immaterial withdrawal of literary, philosophical and thoughtful texts as well as of certain films, videos, and musical works, notwithstanding that copies of these continue to be physically available; of paintings and buildings that were not physically destroyed; of spiritual guides; and of the holiness/specialness of certain spaces.”

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster.

Rayyane Tabet, Colosse aux pieds d’argile(Colossus with Feet of Clay), 2015, sixteen marble and sandstone columns, nineteen marble and sandstone bases, 292 concrete core samples. Installation view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, 2015.

Tabet writes: A year ago a friend and I went looking for old tiles to use for the renovation of her apartment. We were told of a parking lot on the outskirts of the city where a wholesaler sold findings scavenged from demolished historical buildings. Among the doors and the window frames, the stained glass and the piles of terrazzo tiles, lay broken marble and sandstone columns and bases. When I inquired about their origin, the wholesaler whispered: “Those are from the job we did a month ago.”

The story goes like this: A nineteenth-century single-family house sat in the middle of the city, on a piece of prime real estate coveted by a developer, but a legal dispute among the house’s eighty inheritors rendered its sale impossible. It sat abandoned for years. The developer, finally tired of waiting, hired a group of workers to clandestinely access the property and break apart the columns that supported the roof. This act accelerated the sale, as building laws in Beirut dictate that a house with no roof has to be either fully renovated or sold.

At the time the house was constructed, investors from Beirut had found a market for “goods from the East” among wealthy Italian families. The returning boats needed weight for stability, so they were loaded with marble columns, stairs, tiles, and balconies from a quarry in Carrara. Slowly, houses with stone from this quarry began to populate Beirut, adopted by a new social class that differentiated itself with a style borrowed from Europe. A century later, a glass skyscraper has arisen on the same spot.

Rayyane Tabet - artforum.com / in print

Partial installation view of Lamia Joreige’s Objects of War, 1999– , multimedia installation, dimensions variable, from the artist’s solo exhibition “Ici et peut-être ailleurs” at Nicéphore Niépce Museum, France, 2003.

via ArtAsiaPacific: Diagnosis Of The Present

In “Revisiting Hell,” a short piece on the exhibition Melancholia. A Sebald Variation currently on display at King’s College London, Houman Barekat writes:

The late-20th-century German author W.G. Sebald was in the habit of befuddling his readers by interspersing his prose with photographs – invariably sans explanatory captions, and all the more absorbing for it – so there is something rather apt about a Sebald-themed exhibition in which visual art is foregrounded, and the written word relegated to a tersely informative minimum. ‘Melancholia: A Sebald Variation’ presented at King’s College London’s exhibition space in Somerset House, the Inigo Rooms, marks two decades since Sebald gave the Zurich lectures that would appear in book form as Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) and later, courtesy of Anthea Bell’s translation, as the posthumous On the Natural History of Destruction (2003). These lectures looked back at the Allied fire-bombing of German towns and cities during the Second World War, and explored the reluctance of postwar German society – due to a mixture of shame, trauma and ingrained cultural diffidence – to speak openly about it. Sebald’s sensitive probing of the German collective psyche was jarringly juxtaposed with harrowing accounts of the carnage, such as this description of the bombing of Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah in 1943:

‘only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see …  At its height the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising hoardings through the air, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over 150 kilometres an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze.’

Sebald’s subject was not war per se, but memory. It is therefore fitting that the artworks in ‘Melancholia: A Sebald Variation’ do not, for the most part, bear documentary witness in the way we might expect of, say, a show at the Imperial War Museum. With the notable exceptions of Wilhelm Rudolph’s ink drawings from the ruins of Dresden made in the final months of the war, and photographs taken by Hermann Claasen, Erich Andres and Richard Peter of the wreckage of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden respectively – Claasen’s 1946 Fronleichnamsprozession, which captures a long line of nuns filing past a backdrop of Cologne’s utter devastation, is breathtakingly arresting – the majority of the exhibits are not contemporaneous testimonies but engage with the subject allusively, at a considerable remove in time and space.

[…]

The German electorate has this week returned Chancellor Merkel to power for a fourth term, but the rise of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which has just won its first parliamentary seats with some 12.6% of the vote, has raised the spectre of German nationalism for the first time in generations. Germany, it seems, is far from immune to the toxic populism that has swept across much of the Western world in the past couple of years. There is an old adage that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. It took the German nation – with the help of Sebald and the other German writers of his generation – decades to truly confront the suffering and trauma that resulted the last time Europe gave free rein to its basest impulses. Let’s hope their efforts have not been in vain.

Revisiting Hell | Frieze

Walter Benjamin’s grave at Portbou, Spain, with a newly added Palestinian flag. August 27, 2017.

Alain Badiou, “Anabasis” in The Century (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007).

Walter Benjamin, “The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis” (excerpted from the Trauerspiel), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 175-179.

or, a twelve-week seminar on a four page text, to be slowly developed here, writing-after-the-disaster.

“Our heritage was left to us without a testament.’ Hannah Arendt repeatedly borrows this formula (from René Char) to capture the predicament of revolutionary modernity. Without a testament, without any symbolic means of transmitting the event, there is no way to bequeath the treasure to future generations—to harvest its energy or even to bear witness to what happened. Here’s the thought experiment: what if Char’s formula needs to be reversed? What if the problem is not intestacy but rather a kind of hyper-testamentarity—not a deficit but a surfeit of testamentary protocol? The past confronts us as a thicket of injunctions, promises, exhortations, incitements—obscure messages from the dead, unsigned and undated but time-stamped and addressed to us uniquely. What if the testament itself were the heritage—or rather, if there were no heritage, only the pressure of a demand as enigmatic as it is insistent?”

Rebecca Comay, “Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin),” Mosaic 50, no. 2 (June 2017), 1.

A recommended essay that I’ve had the privilege of seeing Rebecca present in both Birzeit, Palestine, and Beirut.

Anna Gritz: The core structure of Also Known As Jihadi is based on the combination of two types of material. First, footage of land and terrain in the tradition of Masao Adachi’s so-called landscape theory or fukeiron, a strategy that Adachi implemented in his 1969 film AKA Serial Killer, which suggests the possibility of creating a portrait of someone through capturing the physical landscape that shaped him or her during their lifetime. And second, shots of judicial documents that follow the movements and actions of the lead character and his associates. This is not the first time that you have worked with the foil of Adachi’s landscape theory. It featured prominently in your film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (2011). What made you return to it for this project, and how do you see it working in relation to the legal material?

Eric Baudelaire: The important word in your question is “foil.” I am not interested in a dogmatic way in the so-called landscape theory. Not as a disciple. I am interested in its potential to raise questions about the social and political context of a place, and the relationship between this context and the kind of alienation that leads certain individuals toward trajectories of violence. It seemed like an interesting starting point to explore the journey undertaken by the young man who is the subject of Also Known As Jihadi. But the title is also important: it implies that the true nature of this person remains hors champs, outside of the frame. The film is about what he is “also known as.” I use the landscape theory as a foil because I accept the notion that it fails, that it is inexact, that it raises questions instead of giving answers, and this is the only position I feel capable of adopting for a film like this. The same ambiguity is true about the surveillance and judicial documents that form the narrative track of the film. They tell a story. But it’s the story told by the state surveillance and judicial apparatus in the face of a phenomenon it doesn’t really know how to process. A thousand French men and women have gone to Syria. Once there, it becomes very complicated to know who traveled in solidarity with the Syrian people fighting Bashar al Assad; who has followed the path because they felt they didn’t have a place in France; who traveled with hopes for martyrdom; who will return dejected and disappointed; and who will return intent on shooting up a crowd at a death metal concert. I combed through piles of court cases concerning returnees who were judged, often with a very heavy hand, in the aftermath of the November Paris attacks. I decided to look for trajectories that contained a certain ambiguity.

Empathy and Contradictions: Eric Baudelaire •Mousse Magazine

PFLP Bulletin 67 (Summer 1983), 48.

Where are your monuments, O Palestinian people?

Do they lie in the rubble of Beirut?

We take our monuments with us, friend.

We are the monuments, now.

August 30, International Day of the Disappeared.

Note that the video opens with a photograph of the disappeared, a trace left behind with the uncanny power to trigger remembrance.

ICRC - International Day of the Disappeared - YouTube

Susan Buck-Morss, Note on Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (New York and London: Verso, 2003), http://susanbuckmorss.info/text/note-on-thinking-past-terror/#fig:446.

The work featured both on the cover and here in the note is from the Wonder Beirut series (1997-2006) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

Jalal Toufic, Attempt 137 to Map the Drive

Keywords: videotaped in Beirut’s central district circa 2000; Toufican ruins; labyrinth; drive (also in the sense of Trieb); taxi driver in Beirut dying to figure out why his customer would specify the year of his destination, “the Central Business District, 2000”; potential lipograms; timely and untimely collaboration.

How to see: in the shadows, a total solar eclipse.

palestinasim:

Ghassan Kanafani, the famous Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, whose writings were deeply rooted in Arab Palestinian culture, inspired a whole generation during and after his lifetime, both in word and deed.

He was born in Acre in the North of Palestine on 9th April 1936 and lived in Jaffa until May 1948, when he was forced to leave with family first to Lebanon and later to Syria. He lived and worked in Damascus, then Kuwait and later in Beirut from 1960 onwards. In July 1972, he and his young niece Lamis were killed by Israeli agents in a car bomb explosion in Beirut.

By the time of his untimely death, Ghassan had published eighteen books and written hundreds of articles on culture, politics, and the Palestinian people’s struggle.

Although Ghassan’s novels, short stories and most of his other literary work were an expression of the Palestinian people and their cause, yet his great literary talents gave his works a universal appeal.

_______________________________________________________

غسان كنفاني أحد أشهر الكُتاب والصحافيين العرب. فقد كانت أعمالهُ الأدبية من روايات وقصص قصيرة متجذرةَ في عمق الثقافة العربية والفلسطينية. 

ولُد في عكا، شمال فلسطين، في التاسع من نيسان عام 1936، وعاش في يافا حتى أيار 1948 حين أُجبر على اللجوء مع عائلته في بادئ الأمر إلى لبنان ثم الى سوريا. عاش وعمل في دمشق ثم في الكويت وبعد ذلك في بيروت منذ 1960، وفي تموز 1972، استشهد في بيروت مع ابنة أخته لميس في انفجار سيارة مفخخة على أيدي عملاء إسرائيليين.

أصدر غسان كنفاني حتى تاريخ وفاته المبكّر ثمانية عشر كتاباً. وكتب مئات المقالات في الثقافة والسياسة وكفاح الشعب الفلسطيني. 

على الرغم من أن روايات غسان وقصصه القصيرة ومعظم أعماله الأدبية الأخرى قد كتبت في إطار قضية فلسطين وشعبها فإن مواهبه الأدبية الفريدة أعطتها جاذبية عالمية شاملة.

“The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits consists of an intricate network of histories, geographies and portrayals. Rather than narrating a story, however, the materials serve as props from which Abbas and Abou-Rahme set out to elucidate how – like the bandits before them – they find themselves ‘inhabiting a moment of full radical potential and disillusionment, in continual search for a language for the moment’. In many ways, the project responds to the sense of geo-political urgency around them. However, it also deliberately chooses playfulness as a form of creative freedom and as a tool to discover a language and an aesthetic for the political in their practice. A vector which is not locked into the bleak nobility of fatalism or the burden of national representation but which believes, in the artists’ own words, in the political’s need to ‘produce daily life’. With its heady mix of adventure and detective flair, the work of Abbas and Abou-Rahme liquidates the easy categorization of engaged artistic practice related to the Middle East. Their footsteps carry the distant echo of Michel Foucault’s words: ‘Do not think you have to be sad in order to be militant.’”

In Focus: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme | Frieze

404

https://catalyst-journal.com/error

Did Lebanese people know that the Ain El Remmaneh bus still existed somewhere in Lebanon?

Monika Borgmann: Not really. I know that there were exhibitions held in the past which involved the bus, but they always used replicas. Houssam wanted to do a show where he would work on the theme of the school bus. In the end this became the exhibition concept: when the school bus, symbol of a happy childhood, is interrupted by the collective symbol of the ‘war bus’. The Lebanese are extremely divided on the subject of the Civil War, but the bus is the only symbol that everyone can agree on. Past that point, they stop agreeing. Were the Palestinians sitting in the bus armed or not? Things like that. The bus is the official symbol of the beginning of the Civil War. We could easily have chosen another date — there was violence before April 13, 1975 — but it is the attack on the Ain El Remmaneh bus which became the official date.

You then transported it from Nabatieh to UMAM for the exhibition?

Monika Borgmann: Yes. It was an amazing experience to bring it from the south to Beirut. It was already dark when we hit the road. We drove with the bus in tow and the whole time we were asking ourselves what the people passing us could possibly think or imagine about our cargo. It was really a very special moment. And when we got here, we had a crane take it over the wall of the Hangar. The whole neighbourhood immediately crowded around — they were in a state of shock. They were asking “is this the bus from Ain El Remmaneh?” They wanted to touch it to be sure. One woman even told us, “my son died on that bus”. I am sure it was not true but she must have said it in an effort to appropriate the bus. It was physically palpable.

When were you sure it was indeed the bus from Ain El Remmaneh?

Houssam Bokeili: It was simple: when we saw the confrontation, the conflict between the current owner of the bus and the driver’s son, there was no further doubt. The son of the driver, visibly upset not to have inherited the bus, said to the current owner: “But why are you talking about my father? You do not know my father, it is our history.” The son very much regretted that the bus did not pass to him.

What kind of reactions have you observed among visitors?

Houssam Bokeili: Some people cannot believe that it is the real bus. A young woman said to me: “I was told that the bus was here, and it did not affect me at all until I saw it.” That is the real issue. It begins to really hit you that it has been 36 years. And, its presence forces you to wonder about the present and future: is the war over or not? Are we moving towards a better future, a stronger society? We also had visits from many schools, and all the teachers we met were very engaged in these questions. Sometimes when children see the bus, they are afraid because they did not expect to see it in this state after all these years, rusted to the marrow.

Looking for the lost bus

Thinking back, I believe that the game got its name based on an analogy between the ping-pong balls flying across the table and landing on the opponent’s side and an idea that the US should bomb Beirut as a result of the casualties in the area […] The name of the game reflects respect for the Marines and US losses in the region.
— Duane Kosten ‘86 , President of Theta Delta Chi₃, Lehigh University, 1985₄

Beirut, October 23, 1983
The first distant, soft tremor wakes me up. It is a bright morning and the sea outside my balcony is splashing in a friendly way against the promenade. Bomb explosions, shell-bursts, are heartbeats in Beirut now. I decide to sleep in. It is Sunday morning. A few seconds later, another gentle quake, a very slight, intimate change in the air pressure in the house. A second bomb. I lie in bed for another four minutes.₅

Location:
33º 49’ 45” N 35º 29’ 41” E
USMC Barracks of 1st Battalion 8th Marine₆, Beirut Airport

How to Play Beirut: Stories for Boys | Bidoun

In 2009, over 850 canisters of film were discovered in Amman, Jordan. We are asking for help translating the labels of each canister so we can determine the contents of the collection.

Fusing cutting-edge preservation techniques with Do-It-Yourself inspired crowd-sourcing, this project aims to create a collaborative community of experts, enthusiasts and general public who believe this collection of films is of significant value to Jordan, the region, and the international community.

Thus far, we have only been able to digitize 10 of these reels. In this small sample, significant discoveries were made, including:

• A documentary confirmed to be part of the PLO film archive, lost in 1985.
• Footage of HM King Hussein in 1968 addressing the United Nations in the aftermath of the Six Day War.
• Documentary footage of Jerusalem in 1968 and its aftermath.
• Unidentified propaganda films from Vietnam made to highlight relations between Vietnam, Russia, and political struggles in the Middle East in the 1960s and 70s.
• Russian feature films sent as part of a cultural exchange between Russian and Arab partners, ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s. 
  

‘A Film Archive’ Project

In Beirut, we often feel we live in a strange state, surrounded by latent or hidden images. Maybe certain conditions caused these images to withdraw, as the artist and writer Jalal Toufic would say. The pictures we explored for a long time in our own work are non-images, or the absence of an image that is evoked yet never shown, the latent photograph taken but not developed, that of an imaginary world without images. Much of our work refers to latency and evocation. To restore some power to photographs, to face the spectacular images that surround us, to withdraw our images from a flux, to fight the division of the world that has occurred since September 2001, to counter simplification and cliché, to make images of our present … these were also the reasons for the scarcity of the images we have produced over the years, based on the very definition of latency: ‘I am here even if you don’t see me.’

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: My Infuences | Frieze

This postcard triggered our work. We did not study art or cinema; we began our artistic practice in the early 1990s in response to the violence generated by the Lebanese civil war, and the way it officially ended. It seemed to us that the war had been put between brackets, considered as an accident, and that things were not really resolved. The fact that these postcards reappeared on the stands of stationery shops as if nothing had happened, although the buildings they represented had been defaced or destroyed by the bombing, prompted us to reject the dominant and nostalgic image that annihilated our actual experience. That was the beginning of our Wonder Beirut project (1997–2006) and our production of postcards of war. Burning those images to make them correspond to our present life may be considered an iconoclastic gesture, or rather, as Bruno Latour described it, an ‘iconoclash’, but it’s more about exploring the way history is being written and searching for images and representations we can believe in.

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: My Infuences | Frieze

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish

It is difficult to overstate the legacy of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s iconic poet, whose passing on 9 August 2008 has left behind a literary treasure. His was a voice that touched every Palestinian, and with it, Darwish delivered the Palestinian experience to a global audience. His poems have been translated into more than 20 languages, and continue to ring true for many Palestinians who long to return home. Indeed, exile was the central thread of Darwish’s poetic journey. And, while exile is often regarded as a political reality, Darwish’s experience reveals a far broader concept. As he said in a 1996 landmark interview featured in this month’s Special Focus below, “Exile is a very broad concept and very relative. There is exile in society, exile in family, exile in love, exile within yourself.” It began with an exile from his natal village in the Galilee, where Darwish lived under military rule along with 150,000 other Palestinians after Israel’s establishment in 1948. Then, came Moscow, Paris, Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Amman, and finally Ramallah, where he was buried. This fragmented living resonated with a broader Palestinian experience of displacement and dispersion.

Yet, for all his collective significance, Darwish was often reserved and his poetry was born from very personal experiences. For instance, he grew up convinced he was unloved by his family, especially his mother. But, when he was jailed in Israeli prison in 1956, he wrote “I Long For My Mother’s Bread,” which has become a Palestinian classic in the voice of Marcel Khalife. “I wanted to atone for my feelings of guilt toward my mother for thinking she hated me—as a poem of national longing. I didn’t expect that millions would sing it,” Darwish said. Indeed, for countless Palestinians estranged from place and family, this particular poem was embraced as a national resistance poem, where the mother symbolizes Palestine.

It was for his poetic mastery, which often inspired transforming the personal into the collective, that Darwish earned his title as Palestine’s national poet, though not without a cost. For him, this distinction was a burden that required an intimate understanding of the Palestinian cause, “to see how to develop its humanitarian meaning.” Indeed, like many of the great thinkers of his generation, Darwish never lost sight of his humanity and those around him—even those who inflicted the pain of exile on him and his people. And, while Palestine greatly influenced his poetry, as was the case with “Identity Card,” Darwish’s wide resonance is grounded not only in his humanist perspective, but also internationalist ideas that challenged borders and nationalism—certainly so in the post-Oslo period.

Exile, longing, identity, and humanity are the themes that are discussed at length in eight Journal of Palestine Studies articles* as part of this month’s Special Focus, including three translations of commentary by Darwish himself, as well as his statement on the 11 September tragedy. In one of them, dated May 24, 1974, Darwish recounts an experience at Brussels airport that is eerily familiar to the situation many Palestinians and their supporters face today at Tel Aviv airport when they seek to visit the holy land.

*The articles will be available at no charge for the duration of this month, August 2017. You can purchase a subscription for the Journal of Palestine Studies here.

Anti-Arab Prejudice in Europe
Mahmoud Darwish
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 3 No. 4 (Summer 1974), pp. 166-167.

The Madness of Being a Palestinian
Mahmoud Darwish
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 15 No. 1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 138-141.

The Cruelest of Months
Mahmoud Darwish
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 17 No. 1 (Autumn 1987), pp. 175-177.

Statement on the 11 September Tragedy
Mahmoud Darwish
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 31 No. 2 (Winter 2002), pp. 138-139.

Mahmoud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo
Sinan Antoon
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 31 No. 2 (Winter 2002), pp. 66-77.

A Love Story Between an Arab Poet and His Land. An Interview With Mahmud Darwish
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 31 No. 3 (Spring 2002), pp. 67-78

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish (1941––2008)
Rashid Khalidi
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 38 No. 1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 74-77.

“Exile Is So Strong Within Me, I May Bring It to the Land” A Landmark 1996 Interview with Mahmoud Darwish
Helit Yeshurun
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 42 No. 1 (Autumn 2012), pp. 46-70.

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish | The Institute for Palestine Studies

John Berger Reflects on the Life and Death of Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish

JB: There’s a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah, it’s at the end of Tokyo street. Near the top of this hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It’s not a cemetery.

The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city’s Cultural Centre, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

It was in this Centre that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time—though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

We went to visit the grave. There’s a headstone. The dug earth is still bare, and mourners have left on it little sheaves of green wheat—as he suggested in one of his poems. There are also red anemones, scraps of paper, photos.

He wanted to be buried in Galilee where he was born and where his mother still lives, but the Israelis forbade it.

*

JB: At the funeral tens of thousands of people assembled here, at Al Rabweh. His mother, 96 years old, addressed them. “He is the son of you all,” she said.

In exactly what arena do we speak when we speak of loved ones who have just died or been killed? Our words seem to us to resonate in a present moment more present than those we normally live. Comparable with moments of making love, of facing imminent danger, of taking an irrevocable decision, of dancing a tango. It’s not in the arena of the eternal that our words of mourning resonate, but it could be that they are in some small gallery of that arena.

I recently visited the grave of Darwish in April, 2017, when the first photo above was made; my third visit to the site in just under sixteen months.

Like the term eco-poetics, eco-mapping draws its discursive power from the oikos, whose etymological traces are manifest in both the ecological and the economic. We use it to signify a bio- rather than an anthro-pocentric approach to the complex relationships between cartography and planetary ecosystems. We agree with Donna Haraway that it is the capitalocene, and not the anthropocene, that figures the threat of mass extinction for all biotic and abiotic life. We need not return “to deep time and the end of the last ice age” to make this claim efficacious or, as Haraway argues, advance

the notion that human versus nature is as old as our species itself.  Stark nonsense. But we do need to go deeper in time than the mid-eighteenth century. I use this slide [figured above] simply to signal the formations of markets and accumulations of wealth in the great trade routes, many of which figured China as a major player and the Indian Ocean as a major player. I do this simply to signal that those metabolisms of the oikos and ecos — of economy and ecology, and of worlding and of trading and making need to be figured older than the mid-18th century, and that does not mean going back to some deep ecology.” (“Staying with the Trouble”)

Hence we begin with two assertions: first, the human is one element in a “multi-species being-with” that comprises and composes the continuous “worlding” of our planet. Second, it is capital that must be counter-mapped.

To this end, the term eco-mapping makes numerous conditions visible, among them

• climate change, extreme weather, habitat loss, & ecological crisis
• waste & pollution
• biodiversity, animal studies & human-animal cohabitation
• resource management & sustainability
• sensorial ecologies (e.g. tactile, acoustic, and olfactory alongside visual representations of geographic space)
• biotechnology & biocapitalism, and
• ecolinguistics, biosemiotics, & language loss.  

Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce, Eco-Mapping: Multiple directions | Jacket2

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman railway network connected the Middle East to an extent that is unthinkable today. Although it is found mostly dismantled across the region today, the traces of this former network are embedded with both the memory and possibility of connection.

Mobility in the region was initially provided by colonial powers that sought to facilitate transport for diverse purposes. The first railway route, constructed by a French firm, was inaugurated in 1892, connecting Jaffa and Jerusalem. This approximately ninety-kilometer stretch opened Jerusalem to European visitors arriving in Jaffa. Shortly thereafter, the Ottomans began building a series of routes that extended train service into the north of Palestine. This railway, named after the Hedjaz region, aimed to connect Damascus with Medina and Mecca, facilitating pilgrimage to the holy cities. Later it was also military-related transport demands during WWI that accelerated the construction of railways in Palestine. Both the Ottomans and the British created new routes while they simultaneously disconnected others, relocating the raw materials, the rails’ wood and iron, to the most strategic sites on different occasions. After defeating the Ottomans, the British took over the network and founded Palestine Railways, which reestablished civilian train service and intensified commercial and recreational use of the railway.

Geopolitical developments in the region have greatly influenced the network, such that the former lines and stations have become part of radically different contexts. With the creation of distinct, sometimes antagonistic nation states across the Arab world and the establishment of the Israel in 1948, the network was broken into isolated circuits that were soon dismantled. These remaining fragments situated within different countries only sporadically cross national borders. In Palestine, the sections of the tracks now within the State of Israel were partly reestablished under the Israeli public railway system. However, in what was once the core of the network—today the West Bank and Gaza—the lines are in ruin and out of service. The sites of the remains of this infrastructure tell the story of transformation resulting from the Nakba and ongoing occupation.”

 Ottoman railway | DAAR

“Since 2011 thousands have died in Syria’s prisons and detention facilities. With anyone perceived to be opposed to the Syrian government at risk, tens of thousands of people have been tortured and ill-treated in violation of international law.

In April 2016, Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture travelled to Istanbul to meet five survivors from Saydnaya Prison, near Damascus. In recent years, no journalists or monitoring groups which report publicly have been able to visit the prison or speak with prisoners.

As there are no images of Saydnaya the researchers were dependent on the memories of survivors to recreate what is happening inside.

Using architectural and acoustic modelling, the researchers helped witnesses reconstruct the architecture of the prison and their experiences of detention.  The former detainees described the cells and other areas of the prison, including stairwells, corridors, moving doors and windows, to an architect working with 3D modelling software. The witnesses added objects they remembered, from torture tools to blankets and furniture, to areas where they recalled them being used. The recollections sparked more memories as the model developed.

With next to no daylight, in particular in the solitary cells underground, the prisoners in Saydnaya develop an acute experience of sound. Detainees were made to cover their eyes with their hands whenever a guard entered the room and speaking was prohibited, so prisoners became attuned to the smallest noises.

To capture these auditory memories, researchers developed techniques to solicit “ear-witness testimony” and reconstruct the prison’s architecture through sound.

Witnesses listened to tones of different decibel levels, and were then asked to match them to the levels of specific incidents inside the prison. “Echo profiling” helped to determine the size of spaces such as cells, stairwells and corridors (this involved playing different reverberations and asking witnesses to match them with sounds they remembered hearing in the prison) while “sound artefacts” simulated the noise of doors, locks and footsteps, helping generate further acoustic memories.

Detainees at Saydnaya are generally transferred to the facility after spending months or even years in detention elsewhere. Such transfers often take place following unfair trials at secret military courts. Others arrive at the prison without having seen a judge and do not know the alleged charges against them or how long they will be detained.

The Saydnaya project is part of a wider campaign led by Amnesty International calling on the Syrian government to allow independent monitors into its brutal detention centres. Amnesty is urging Russia and the US “to use their global influence to ensure that independent monitors are allowed in to investigate conditions in Syria’s torture prisons”.

Saydnaya - Forensic Architecture

Jordan, May 2017

The Blue Vial: The Trees of Tarkovsky

Léopold Lambert: I would like to finish this series of the article with the emotion that was mine when encountering a few trees on the shore of Ajami (southern Jaffa) in a relatively new park whose small hills leaves these trees unprotected from the Mediterranean wind. Looking South (see photograph above), delusionally trying to distinguish Gaza, where Palestinians currently only have 2 hours of electricity per day, amidst extremely hot temperatures, surviving against all odds when Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Sisi’s Egypt somehow unite as wardens of what has been called “the largest open-air prison in the world.” Looking East at Jaffa itself, its sustained dispossession and, further, Jerusalem-Al Quds and the West Bank where the occupation applies its methodical violence in the daily lives of all. Looking North at the crying absence of the remains of the Palestinian villages evicted and destroyed in 1947-1948 and the fate of Palestinian Israelis considered as “a demographic problem” and a human currency in what many do not seem to see the cynicism of calling “peace talks.” These trees hit me as a symbol of Palestinian resilience: they bend but never break.

Palestine Report Part 5: The Colonial and Gentrifying Violence of Architecture in Jaffa - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

East Jerusalem / al Quds “enclaves” and settlements. Author’s archive.

Dani Karavan, Passages (1994)

The second image was taken by filmmaker Wim Wenders in 2014.

“When we turned around to make our way back up the steps of the monument I was again taken aback. At the head of the stairs we saw what appeared to be the same rectangle of light as we had seen when we had first entered and looked down at the sea, only now, gazing up to that entrance from the inside it was of course not the sea but the clear blue sky. Inside our fosa común, this monument to the nameless, we were walking back from the sea into the sky. Later in the actual cemetery we searched for some sign of Benjamin and found a rock about waist high set on the ground. It was untouched by the mason’s chisel except for a plaque with yet another quotation from Benjamin’s writings. His texts seem to be full of pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two. Poor Benjamin. To have his pearls thus cast. This one read: ‘There is no document of civilization that is not a document of barbarism.'”

Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33.

A loosely thrown together spotify playlist composed by fukerionpoetics / writing-after-the-disaster. 14.5 hours of drones, clicks and clacks, dissonant guitar strings, bleeps and bloops. With few exceptions, the selected albums were released in the past year. There is no set order; perhaps hit “shuffle” and let the magic do its work.

https://open.spotify.com/user/opacos/playlist/75hkx33GPyIXlGEerhthcV

AGRARIAN SETTLEMENTS AND ANNUAL PRECIPITATION
MARKERS ON TOP OF AN NDVI MAP, Prepared by Jamon
Van Den Hoek, Francesco Sebregondi/Forensic

Eyal Weizman: The state of Israel accepted the designation of the desert threshold developed by a German-Russian scientist named Wladimir Köppen in 1918 — the moment when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the “Orient” fell into European hands. Köppen’s classification established the “aridity line” at the 200 mm isohyet (isohyets are lines connecting all points that have the same amount of average rainfall per year). The rationale for this definition was simple: it’s impossible to cultivate cereals on a flat surface without 200 mm of annual rainfall. Or so it was argued. We know that this has never been true, since in fact the aridity line is not only a meteorological designation, but also one that depends on agricultural knowhow and seed types. That 200 mm threshold connects cereal cultivation with certain ideas of culture and permanent human habitation, with urbanization, economy, and the state. Between any two isohyets on meteorological maps there is a different translucent color band. In Palestine, these bands are darker blue in the north, where parts of the Galilee receive as much as 800 mm of rainfall per year. The gradient of blues thins towards the center of the country and flips over into a light spectrum of yellows over the 200 mm line, then thickens into a spectrum of oranges as one descends south. The line that crosses al-‘Araqīb is located on the same colonial meteorological shoreline that connects areas of South Waziristan to the lower Atlas Mountains in Algeria. There are different kinds of conflicts all along this line — most of them with colonial roots. More locally, Israeli land law does not acknowledge private land ownership of the people that lived and live beyond this line. They’ve developed an inescapable circular logic: it is impossible to cultivate south of this line, therefore the people living south of it must be nomads (which they’ve not been for generations), and nomads have no land rights. The Bedouins, of course, cultivated in the area for hundreds of years, but that agricultural activity was imperceptible by colonial scales of measurement.

The history of the threshold of climate zones/law cannot be confined within the borders of national states but cuts across them. So our story is at once both local and wraps around the earth like an equator, “the political equator” in the formulation of my friend Teddy Cruz. If we look along the political equator of the desert threshold we can notice an interesting process: while colonialists generally pushed the desert line south, recently another major force, desertification, which is a result of human-induced climate change at a global level, is pushing the threshold in the opposite direction, desertifying entire areas. From North Africa through to Syria we witness this counter force, which to a large extent is a consequence of the original force of colonization. The new desertification impoverishes the farmers, who in recent decades were encouraged by national regimes, from Libya to Syria, to expand cultivation beyond the desert threshold with promises of water where there was none. The progressive abandonment of these same areas today leads to urban migration, to the erection of slums, thereby contributing to urban strife. According to some recent research, the fluctuations of the aridity line — the long monster tail of colonialism — is one of the root causes for the havoc now being wreaked throughout the region. The southern Saharan Sahel — the word literally means shoreline — today represents another shifting line of conflict along its entire length.

It turns out there’s historical continuity to this phenomenon. We undertook our desert study shortly after Forensic Architecture studied drone warfare for the UN special commission Rapporteur, so we’d already gathered much of the relevant locational data about drone strikes. When I superimposed the locations of recent drone strikes in such places as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza onto meteorological maps, the result was surprising: all these attacks took place roughly on or just beyond the 200 mm aridity line. But perhaps it needn’t be so surprising that today’s aerially enforced colonization via drones perpetuates the double-winged type that was pioneered in the 1920s in these very places.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-desert-threshold/

Don McCullin, "Christian Phalange Gunmen in the Holiday Inn Hotel, Beirut" (1976)

Author’s photo, Holiday Inn Hotel today (2017)

Don McCullin, "An Old Palestinian Couple Allowed to Leave the Massacre, Karantina, East Beirut” (1976)

Author’s photo, Karantina today (2017)

thekanon:

September 2016, initial write-up

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) (2000)

Original Declaration of Independence of Palestine, written by Mahmoud Darwish. Author’s photo, April 2017, Ramallah, Palestine.

Dziga Vertov Group (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Miéville), Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), filmed in 1970 prior to the “Black September” of 1970 in Jordan; released in 1976. In 2015 I screened this film in Bethlehem, Palestine, at the local art university. Reception was mixed.

Associated Press Photo, “A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940″

“A young boy sits to read, a month into the Blitz, amid the ruins of a London bookshop after an air raid hit the area. The photograph gives few clues as to the location or the identity of the boy, and he doesn’t appear in any subsequent images in the set of photographs from the locale. 

Many variations of the picture have appeared since, with differing historical details and accuracy around what he may have been reading and who he was, but in truth we know little about this remarkable wartime scene. The original caption speculates that he may have been reading a book on London’s history whilst experiencing what was to become such a large part of it, likely unaware of the photographer immortalising his moment of concentration amongst the chaos. 

The image bears striking parallels to one of a bombed library at Holland House, with readers apparently choosing books regardless of the damage around them. This image, held by English Heritage, has attracted speculation that it could have been a staged morale boosting exercise but, as with many visual artefacts of the time, it’s difficult to know more.”

The Times (October 8, 2013), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/on-this-day-in-1940-a-boy-reads-amid-ruins-of-the-blitz-v5q0srh26tp

Masao Adachi, The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, 1971

Masao Adachi, The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, 1971

Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 years without images, 2011 (66 min).

Emily Jacir, detail from Material for a Film (2004)