from: Migration and Location: Transcultural Documentary
Practice
(forthcoming, Wallflower
Press: London, 2005 (N. American dist. Columbia Univ. Press)
the
video installation as an active archive
Last
night of spring break. I was a couple of days into the week when I realized
that my plans to get lots of work done, and get lots of rest were essentially
incompatible. I opted for rest, with a little work. Now, I can't imagine
walking back into the classroom tomorrow. It was interesting to see the Soha
tape along with the tape of the older man telling his story. It made for a
complex layering of the notions of home and loss. The older man is narrative.
And, the piece made me think about how narrative is a useful way to structure
knowledge. The scene seemed almost pedagogical -- he tells the story while the
younger men listen. Narrative is also portable - it's what he's carried with
him, and what he can give to those who are younger - a story of loss. The Soha
piece is non-narrative - like any conversation, its about breaks and pieces,
interruptions and turning toward what the other said. I see that this was a
good way to pull away from the narrative that dominates her - the martyr's
narrative. Made me think of the problems with narrative, the fixing of one
meaning (she resists the titling). This tape made me think differently about
fragmentation, loss, and home. So, anyway, they were interesting together.
Couldn't remember if I'd rambled this to you or not.
Love,
Anne
Postwar
Lebanon,
January 1992, months after the city is open and traversing from East to West is
made possible again (at least for us more distant from the recent war and the
still remote occupation in the South) without fear of kidnapping or worse.
Driving around the city, the slightly battered Fiat 128 looking somewhat the
worse for wear, silver of sorts but covered in dust from years in the garage
makes its way hesitantly down one of the arteries leading into the core of
Beirut, or one of the cores as there are many centres here, old, new,
destroyed, demolished, rebuilt, each act of construction part and parcel of a
previous one of destruction..
Walid drives, I shoot, video, gazing through the camera at the passing
layers of modern and ancient architecture, using it like an appendage, it
inhales[3]
inadequate images of people, place.. sites of historical and social
signification, the fruit vendors, the shattered lives being pieced back
together, and more tattered buildings and ruins upon ruins..
Posters
of her[4]
are everywhere, lamp posts, shop windows, private homes. She is framed on one
side, the wounded Lahad[5]
on the other, floating on a pinkish background. The photograph on the right is
from 1988, the year Soha attempted to assassinate the guy, came close, close enough
to be an instant heroine, but not close enough to kill him. She was thrown into
the living hell hole of Khiam. Those who referred to it as a prison knew
nothing about it, others who knew and would raise troubling references referred
to it as a concentration camp, colloquially here (or there) it was called
something more benign, a detention centre.
Before
coming to Lebanon and during the year there, the occupation of the South was a
predominant concern in our minds. I decided to focus one of the videotapes (Up
to the South) on this occupation[6],
the terms of its representation inherent in the discourse surrounding the
issues, (i.e. terrorism[7],
post-colonialism, occupation,
collaboration, experts, spokespeople, symbols, resistance, the land), and
the history and structure of the documentary genre in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in
documentary, ethnography and anthropological practise and the predicament
involved from the perspective of the subjects viewed and the practitioners
practising. Up to the South.. challenged
traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a
politicized practice. We worked with the material and our experiences of living
and working in Lebanon with the insistence on a visible resistance to the acts
of aggression that documentary partakes in and the violence that is inherent in
its means. The videotape developed a mediating language of transposed
experience in the guise of a reluctant documentary. These methodologies are refined and developed further in
some of the untitled videotapes[8]
which incorporate them in their own strategies and means.[9]
A clandestine evening
in Paris
At some
point in 1995 Moukhtar Kokache who had recently moved to New York led me to his
friend in Paris, Mireille Kassar, who arranged a clandestine screening of Up
to the South.. one evening at the
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA). You see, IMA tries to avoid the overt embracing
of politics at all costs, at least it attempts to place itself in a space of modernist
neutrality without seeing the obvious impossibility of this and its position
of complicity, co-dependency and conservatism. No responsibility for the affair
was taken by IMA however the theatre space was quietly donated and one dark and
stormy night we arrived to a packed house and a heated post screening
discussion. Fortuitously much of the audience was well versed in the issues the
tape engages with, it presupposes certain assumptions and proceeded to contest
them and their understanding. Somehow it managed to spark or contribute to a
spark that led to something much larger than the tape itself..
In
the meantime
Concurrent to the production of the Lebanon projects[10]
I was gathering vast amounts of
research materials since 1982 which in themselves and the process of
accumulation became the subject for an installation, Kan Ya Ma Kan/There
was and there was not[11] (1995). It was a transposition of a working studio, an
exhausting study paralleling and exposing my projects in Lebanon and
challenging the immense history of the construction of knowledge of the Middle East.
It called into question notions of history and research methodology, their role
in the effacement of histories, and the
mediated process inherent in the representation and (mis)understanding of
another culture while examining Lebanon
as a site of production constructed in our collective and individual psyches. The audience was encouraged to have
a hands-on[12] encounter
with the volumes of material in the seemingly endless threads of archives
presented. Although the fields and parameters were set out, viewers became part
of the process choosing their own paths, initially seduced, compelled and
confronted, making decisions and in this manner being responsible for
visualizing and re-constructing their
own cultural/political perceptions[13].
Kan ya ma kan (installation detail), the dossier on
bottom right hand corner of the desk
A dossier arrives
Several months later a dossier arrives from Paris. Mireille
had sent a substantial book of documents that was being used to solicit
international support for the release of Soha and the other detainees of Khiam.
I add it to the central desk element of Kan Ya Ma Kan...
The first version
1998.. I am invited to participate in an
exhibition that will take place at our national Museum of Civilization[14].
The theme is something to do with immigration. It seems a dry concept with an arbitrariness that has an
opportunistic ring to it in the Canadian political climate and its history of
turning back asylum seekers, an escalation of closed borders (to people, not
goods), and a less than repressed racism. There is also a renewed orientalism
at play, or a neo-orientalism. It is
increasingly more fashionable to have a token show with an Arab or
Middle-Eastern theme, one that avoids the complexities of subjectivity and
identity outside of an indexical vein. I initially reject participation in the
exhibition. A short time passes then with continued requests from the curator I
contemplate it more and see the opportunity to engage with a public outside of
the normative gallery or art museum mold, and the potential for an experiment
in community association. From the proposed theme of immigration I decide to do a project dealing with concepts of movement (where it is permitted/restricted, desired or forced) in
terms of specific histories, looking at something that is common to all of our
lives and at the base of this entity called globalization. Subsequently I moved
into considerations of transition,
however we have devalued this term/position as if it is going nowhere. The ends
in and out of sight, or what it is we are coming to, are usually given utmost
importance but not the inbetweenness.
This led me to focus on the notion of interstitiality, the interstitial subject and site, and the beginning of untitled.
part
2
March 24, 1999, the NATO bombing
of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) begins. I have been thinking a lot
about interstitiality. Towards the end
of summer I foresee that I will have a break between exhibitions in Vienna and
Brussels. I decide to take a trip from the top of the FRY to the bottom with
enough time to visit the capital cities of each soon to be, once more, new republic. I start planning, emailing all individuals and
lists[15]
I know with any connection to the region. My searching through taping begins at
home, for what I do not exactly know; conversations with a friends mother
Zenona Sava describing her survival of WW2, and Carmen Aguirre, a
Chilean-Canadian actor about her struggles during the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet and her current cultural battles in Canada. I intend to look at/record
sites of emigration, places that people had left or were currently leaving from[16]
or immigrating to, and meet people that were living and/or theorizing these
threads of movement and change in trans/cross/intra-cultural settings. On my
way to Vienna I stop off in New York and meet up and tape an architect, from
Belgrade, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Ammiel Alcalay who discusses the Balkan
region he knows so well, and Ella Shohat who speaks about the colonization of
the Americas, neo-colonial politics of the Middle East and the limits of an
identity based politics. In Vienna, I tape exiles from the FRY, activists,
artists, and writer/theoretician Boris Buden, and finally I am on the train
heading to Ljubljana, Slovenia, with subsequent stops in Zagreb, Sarajevo,
Belgrade, and Skopje. I offer to tape in any language but generally the
preferred language of address is English. The conversations open a space for
the contemplation of the present, the recent and further past, and implications
for the future. We circulate around life during Tito, after Tito, what is far
and still remains close, and the current reign of Milosevic and what will..
what may be coming. The subjects speak through the camera, through me, to some
imaginary audience..
western.. somewhere else..
or speak to formulate and send off missives, inquiries, and speculations on
what has happened. I have space to pause in the evenings and the between times
finding routes and transportation from person to city to new encounters. I tape
these moments as well, the foggy indeterminate landscapes[17],
the jotting of notes while the bus bounces up and down, the passing through
check points of new, old, and reformulated borders, time and space stretch out
for moments, clarity is fleeting, elusive but not impossible [see DVD clip #7].
The juxtaposition of speakers stimulates patterns of thought, utterances of
something that this might become. Points of focus start to emerge through the
cycles and repetition[18].
When
finished in the Southern reaches, Skopje, Macedonia, which is closer to the
Middle East in feel and look then I imagined, I make my way to the airport
which is filled with NATO troops, and fly[19]
to Germany followed by a couple of trains to Karlsruhe. The lecture I give
there is on my yet unbuilt website (rrrr.net) that could link up issues of
representation, resistance, revolution, and the discursive realities that
enable or prevent such processes.
part 1
Brussels
a few days later, Mireille phones, she tells me there is an exhibition in Paris
of artworks from Khiam detainees and other Israeli detention centres, objects
that were smuggled out for 10 years and later brought out when the Red Cross
was eventually permitted to visit in 1995; delicate carvings of soap, prayer
beads and chess sets out of olive pits, embroideries from threads pulled from
their clothes, fragile sculptures assembled from all kinds of scrounged
materials, and drawings made with
burnt wood.. These are tentative objects, clandestine cravings imbued with hope
and faith signifying more strength than holds them together. Mireille asks me
to come and screen Up to the South..[20] at the gallery, she says Soha has been released months
earlier and that after the screening Rabab (one of the former detainees in the
tape) and Soha could speak about the ongoing detentions in Khiam and Israel.
Its a great surprise to find that Soha was released, I had no prior knowledge
that this was even close to being achieved. I make a deal with Mireille that if
she comes to my opening well discuss what can be done.. it could be the rare closing of a
circle that started in 1992 with the work in the south. Mireille arrives, she
pulls me aside at the opening to discretely mention that after the 1995 IMA
screening of Up to the South..
she instigated the forming of a committee to free Soha and had worked to
solicit world wide support, newspaper ads in the major journals in Paris, and
help from activists and human rights lawyers in Europe, the Middle East and N.
Africa. Somehow the tape was complicit, adding to the momentum of the movement,
as a catalyst for what was undoubtedly already emerging.
A couple
of days later were in Paris. After the screening Rabab speaks about the
ongoing torture and interrogation that is inflicted upon the detainees, her
present freedom, and life after Khiam. Soha discusses the continued need to
fight for the release of those left behind, the resistance to the occupation,
and the struggles that are still going on. When the discussion ends I head out
with her to get away and we talk over a Lebanese feast. At the end I am
reluctant, I ponder whether to ask her to be taped, I am so ambivalent.. she is
being interviewed to death by the European and Arab press over the details of
her captivity, the minutiae of her surviving it, the conditions in Khiam, and
the resistance. I can imagine her fatigue from all of this after the ordeal of
Khiam, and the pressures of a living martyr. We get along well for the first
time meeting so I succumb and ask, she thinks its no big deal and invites me
for breakfast the next day.
I go to
her small dorm room on the edge of Paris (she was studying international law at
the Sorbonne), not much bigger than her cell except for one large window. She
sits on her bed, I ask her about the distance lived between Khiam and Paris,
and Beirut and Paris, what she left in Khiam and what she brought with her, a
story about flowers and how she never puts them in water [see DVD clip #2], how
it felt for her to be under such demand now, who she was [see DVD clip #5], and
a few other things.. I didnt ask her specifically about the torture she
underwent or the trauma of detention. I was more interested in herself, her subjectivity and agency, her will to survive or as
she corrects me, to live, how she enunciates her history and position,
accounts for all that has happened, and her philosophy of resistance then and
what it means now on a daily basis [see DVD clip #4]. I tape her before
breakfast, Kishk (a Lebanese yogurt and bulghar soup, something I grew up on
and loved on special Sunday mornings.) In the end I didnt know what was there
but I felt that there was something. It wasnt until six months to a year later
when Sohas text was translated that I could read what had transpired. I didnt
know if it could be anything, until then. I knew that a trust had developed in
those short hours, at least enough for her to accept my mediation. This
material that I recorded of the time spent with her is not precious, just time,
a conversation, and intense intimacy at a close and unbreachable distance.
from untitled part 1: everything and nothing
One
principal element the videotaping of Soha, and in the weeks immediately before
that the taping in the former Yugoslavia clarified was the specificity of
theme. The comprehension that the underlying thread of interstitiality could form the definite article or object of this
indefinite study. Each part of the project addressing this in its own
appropriate manner.
figuring resistance
untitled
part 1: everything and nothing upon
first glance appears unremarkable, shot and apparently edited out of one
continuous take: a person on a bed speaks directly to the camera, the filmmaker
(played by myself) behind the camera converses with her. The tape becomes
disarming only gradually, once the viewer commits to several minutes of the
conversation and an intimate connection is fashioned between politics and
subjectivity. The engagement is latent but is carried relentlessly. This
countenance is one instance of the subtle forms of resistance of the tape, a denial to give into the gratification of
immediacy. More explicit references to various modes of resistance are made as
the tape unfolds. With Soha it is necessary to look at her image as a figure of resistance and a figure of the resistance, an image that was occupied by a history which
was is still being played out. This history grew into a near mythology and was
used by contradictory forces to justify their aims. Her imagistic strength is
superceded only by her actual life making it even more problematic to try to do
a piece with her and a critical reading of her representational over
exposure. Her unwavering
identification with the resistance (she expressed no critical relationship to
it) helped her persevere, she claims a history, one of her own that is part and
parcel of the secular resistance [see DVD clip #4]. Soha is acutely aware of
her role, her image and the mission she has laid out. Part of her mission is
the talking about it, a responsibility to
speak. She speaks to a viewer yet to be named but anticipated in the process.
The (surviving) martyr's narrative is
also ever-present, an overexposed and overshadowing structure. I try to
permeate these layers by interruptions in the cadence with our in-between
moments of banter, the immediacy of the medium, a specificity of language,
technical denotations, structural breaks, time signified, and a malleability of
the image.[see DVD clips #2-4]
approaching distance
There is a certain distance between the geographies encountered;
Khiam[21],
Beirut, Paris[22], and the
distance I traveled to eventually meet Soha. She discusses whether she is
closer to the detainees now, thousand of kilometers away or when she was in the
cell next door, and what distance taught [see DVD clip #1]. The paradox of
distance is also enacted linguistically, used as a trope and a means of
approach. I pose the questions in a broken third language, French. Fractured
not only by my minimal fluency but more importantly by the intricate interior
formulation needed to piece together the precise question, after her response
in Arabic (being practically unintelligible to me). She replies in French when
the dialogue is less formal during the in-between moments such as the
discussion around a possible title for a project that wasnt yet a project, a
tape that wasnt yet conceived [see DVD clip #6]. She waits while I piece my
language together, she is the speaking subject, I am the listener, except for
these instances and for the tape where the subjects are other. This distance could also be seen as a form of
productive alienation, perception (recognition of gaps, or the impossibility of
understanding without
which there would be no other), constructive disjunction and as a provisional or analogous
response to difference.
The
lifetimes of detention, the epoch of occupation, the period of shooting,
editing time, the real-time videotape recorded, time spent with the footage,
and the factor of translations, distance is rooted in temporality. The two
interchangeable at times. On its most primary level these relationships and
what is valued here are the inverse of the dominant medias relationship to
distance and time. Temporal displacement is always needed (and is not the
exception) as time is imperative to an intelligent response. In the finite
pointing of distance, temporality provides a space for a visceral closeness
throughout the tape connecting the viewer to the subject to self.
the
challenge of intimacy
Soha
speaks quietly and directly into the camera (to a listener), this is juxtaposed against her silent self listening
(and her image which is never silent). Some are unsettled[23]
in the intimacy of the encounter between subject and listener(s), others find
an empathy, or empathetic response. Both reactions are engaged and complicit,
however only the later can lead to a type of awareness or consciousness. Video
enhances pixel by pixel the emotive quality of the image and the nearness of
the voice, lavalier mic at throat level, neck to ear through the encapsulated
space, channeled into the privacy of headphones or loudspeakers - breathing
mixed into breathing of gallery/theatre (single channel) viewers, their
expressions and silences entwined. Intimacy is a determining cause in the
possible impossibilities of representing the subject of resistance.
part 3
Late in 2000
while rough editing the first two installation tapes I recognize that if I am
going to have the current focus of the project be articulating the
condition of interstitiality as a subjective, political, or geographical state, it was necessary to include a component on the
Palestinians in Lebanon, those residing in refugee camps of one form or another
for close to 60 years. Most Palestinians in Lebanon exist in a realm of
interstitiality, unable to return to Palestine (whether they chose to or not) or to their villages (if they exist
still or not) inside or outside the green line of Israels borders. They are
barred from working legally in over 70 professions in Lebanon and unable to
obtain resident rights nor citizenship (even if it was desired). Not being able
to return and unable to move forward under the restrictions imposed upon them,
and their personal experiences of dispossession, several generations live in a
state of permanent temporariness.
from untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends..
September 2000, I videotape in six refugee camps from the North to the
South of Lebanon. Predominantly conversations with Palestinian refugees from
1948 and some with subsequent generations. The formal tendencies are similar to
..part 2.. though the
location and ambient imagery consist of more close-up and medium range shots in
the tight exterior and interior confines of the camps, as well as abstractions
of flags, bodies during demonstrations, and parades of martyrs. The
conversations range from accounts of loss and displacement, to memories of
place, perceptions of absence, and the violence of representation. In the first
installment[24] of untitled for part 3a
I took excerpts from two conversations, one with Nameh Hussein Suleiman (in
Baddawi camp, near Tripoli), and the other with Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in
Bourg al Barajinah Camp, near Beirut), elder Palestinians that had been living
in refugee camps in Lebanon since 1948. Nameh recounts her fleeing to exile (a
monumental moment lasting years), leading her siblings by foot to Lebanon and
their present situation in a local and global context. Abdel Majid discusses
absence and presence through the recounting of an eloquent poem told by the
ruins of his house in Palestine where he was permitted to visit after his first
30 years of dispossession. During March-April 2002 when the Jenin Refugee Camp
massacre occurred (yet another in the series of atrocities where Ariel Sharon
was liable), my overwhelming urge to say something, to make something in
reaction to this would not subside. I took the central part of Abdel Majids
audio where he locates the trees on the property and what ensues to form the
audio/text for the single channel tape part 3b[25] [see DVD clip #9]. This material will ultimately be edited
into the feature length part 3,
a personalized confrontation of the Palestinian dispersion, the predicament of
refugees (the representational equivalence of the interstitial state), and the
ethnic cleansing on a daily basis which is successively neglected. This part of untitled
continues the attempt to come to terms with the problem of representing the
unrepresentable, unrepresentable due to over exposure (made banal or
sensational due to facile coverage), lack of exposure, misrepresentation (to
the point of absurdity), effacement, omission, or repression (self and
external).
inside
All four
current parts of untitled (1, 2,
3a, & 3b), and the three appendices (i, ii, & iii) come together in the
installation, extending the issues of the individual parts, building
further relationships between the
tapes, and constructing an environment where the spheres of histories are
situated in a web of connectivity. It is a sculptural space that presents the
effect of walking into the videotape itself, a stillness, a silence of moving
images juxtaposed, flowing and colliding, waves of scan lines, an active
meditativeness picturing the interstitial. A choice is made to sit or stand,
and to place the headphones on closing off the preponderance of exterior sound,
linking to the audio feed, the voice speaking from the image before you. It
fixes the space, frames it, the act of witnessing becomes confessional, no
fancy audio or video tricks, the simplest, most direct feed. The tapes take
time, the installation takes more time, it is demanding. Each part is projected
onto its own screen area or emanating from a monitor. It is an atmosphere of
visual collusion, collaboration, contextualization, critical interference and
mutual existence. The illuminations play off of each other creating an
imagistic and aural experience of the physical/visceral and of the underlying
subjectivities experienced through the body, as crisis, nation, and metaphor,
or in transition and shift, and in the recounting or enunciatory nature of the
interstitial site.
telling
Narrative
is mobile, telling at home and away, traveling like well worn suitcases, used
often or now stored and opened only occasionally to reveal cherished contents.
Telling and retelling, writing and rewriting, narrative has hooks to latch onto
and go for a ride, it is appealing to use but not to rely upon as a convention,
potentially formulaic and unprovocative. I use different forms of narrative but
am cautious about giving in to its authority. The narratives Im interested in
are either open or broken. Sohas conversation is broken, much more so than the
English subtitles would suggest. She is cyclical in her dialogue yet very
clear.[26]
She speaks elliptically (in the original Arabic), how can she speak otherwise,
to express her position there has to be a certain amount of circling around the
subject, herself, within the confines of how resistance situates her. Cycles
by their definition are joining and overlapping, revolving and returning,
allowing us to come closer to knowing.. but only so close. The way she
remembers is the way memory works, filling in gaps at each turn, writing in the
spaces, reading the past from the context of the present, rewriting and
speaking. With the hours of videotape from other conversations, outtakes that
Ive never used, Ive often thought about combining and rewriting the most
absorbing ones into a script to have a dense voice/textual overlay,
intermittently reverting back to a speaking subject on camera. I will
incorporate this approach in the long format of part 3.
The
viewer must anchor narrative. A story exists at the moment of telling and a
little longer, relating to other stories that will ensure the survival of this
one, or those that have a completeness about them and strength in their
dispersion. Through fragmentation you are only allowed to be seduced for so
long. Within the parameters set up paradigms soon break down or are shown to be
malleable, synthetic films of realism shifting to other fields of the real.
Fragments are important, as are the appendages, but equally so is a body or
state of being, with some direction of completeness and taste of potential
closure sprinkled amongst the openings leading to elsewheres. The immediate,
local, and translocal can spiral to wider elements and associations. Attention
to detail, and a larger picture comes together. Something that is more tactile,
able to be seen and heard.
untitled (installation
detail), Museum of Civilization, 2002-03
a
living archive
To amass
an archive is a leap of faith, not in preservation but in the belief that there
will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will
continue to live, that they will have listeners. Subjective affinities render a relationship and engagement with the viewer,
linking information or documents and
more ephemeral matter, common struggles across various states. Objective
trusts in that relationship develop a
system of delineating and promise, a commitment that the bank of meanings being
produced will recognize its presence and undermine its authority. The taping of
subjects is a collaborative process, we are both aware of the medium, the
dialogical aspects of the work, of transferring meaning, and the act of
translating, and editing that is at the core of their expressions and my
mediation. The material itself has a sense of living, a presentness, a
relevance, excerpts of life resting in their context of extraction. Enunciation
carries traces of speaking before, the details of verse in an itinerant manner
being part of the archive. A collaboration also exists with the viewer of the
archive, unknowingly perhaps, taking on a responsibility for the representations
that are consumed. The viewer becomes part of the extended archive, collecting,
preserving, sharing stories that could possibly disappear, and neglecting
others that are disappearing.
The
archive is untitled, as memory is, as the accounts of the subjects who refuse
to be reducible are. The individual parts follow this practise in content,
construction, and packaging in their refusal of commodification. In the archive
(and outside of it) all viewing is
incomplete in the sense of having seen all, but also in the sense that this is
a living entity, it rumbles along indefinitely, growing in stops and starts,
mutating.. You can walk into the vaults, there are files, stacks, and shelves
of material. The records are static but movement is written all over them.
back
to interstitiality
untitled seeks to articulate the conditions of living and moving,
subjectivity strewn between or through borders, nationalisms, ideologies,
polarities of culture, geography, or histories. The visible act of concretizing and valuing this interstitiality occurs while
re-constituting and re-presenting the ephemeral and transitory demarcations in
which it resides. These demarcations or better yet, zones of being are situated in the contested and conflicted notions of
homeland, nation, diaspora, exile, travel, assimilation, refuge, native, and other. Confronted as standard or anomaly, the subject may choose
to intersect, suture, or overlay, ameliorate, reshape, redefine, morph,
hybridize, separate, erase, augment, or rupture these constructions in a form
of resistance or liberation from antagonizing forces. Fixing the temporal,
space and time become conflated. A sense of the momentary (living between or
during events) stretches from a point of being into permanency, temporally or
spatially bounded, which, as interstitial subjects know, can occupy significant
moments or portions of our lives, and in some cases our complete lives.
Interstitial
space can be seen as productive and tactical, not merely resting in the
traumatic, or devalued in the dysfunctional, transitional, rendered as anxiety,
tentativeness or lack. untitled
subjectively theorizes interstitiality
beyond a peripatetic field, as a concrete entity (where one can react or act
upon it), a place of living, or a space/time of resistance or change, exploding
this notion, this site into discursive areas where it can be seen as a
constructive space with increasingly important relevance to our public and
private lives. Living the ephemeralization of the fiction known as the concrete
and concretizing the ephemeral are two interrelated positions of these
sometimes fragile, sometimes more than real polarities that the interstitial
subject or state exists between, that state which we all occupy more or less.
What
I have seen of your work fascinates me especially because it insinuates a
prelude to a much more complex politics, a preparation for something to come.
The works that engage me, sometimes with a healthy degree of trepidation,
create a space somewhere between a failure of politics and the agonized resolve
to persist. And not just the persistence of a person or people but of an idea
also; in other words, ideas too have their own biography..
Jawad
Ali
ongoing/going
on
My
methodological focus is one of constant research, rethinking and augmentation.
This is intrinsic to all stages of production, reworking and learning from the
material gathered leads the project instead of vice versa. I test out multiple
forms and structures, metonymical chains, and formulate a detailed layout
accounting for every frame of the piece. The editing stage is utilized as an
equal forum of mediation and construction, where unanticipated and meaningful
juxtapositions can be formed and the structure of the piece can be tweaked to
its final intact shape. None of this is arbitrary (though occasionally affected
by chance). The process becomes the product leading to the end result.
The
syntax structure developed is evident. The dialectical relationship of the
speaker and the spoken is highlighted, the speech laid bare and layered between
the story, the field of images, the suggested frames and the butted fictive and
documentary process. Difference is articulated in and around the literal and
metaphorical spaces of displacement and dwelling, the constitution of this
being viewed as crucial social meanings rather than only as an extension of
(an)other locale/space or subjective relationship. It is a dialectics of
experience engaging a viscerality of substance.
These
collaborations speak for themselves, these works.. the subjects in them
speaking for both of us, me trying
to prevent speaking for others, at times a paradox and a solution, problematic
and potentially full of possibilities in questioning and investigating each of
our positions.. juxtaposing myself & the ostensible subjects (in front of
the lens), the actual subject being both of us.. investing in each others
subjectivities, and intersubjectivity,
speaking in collaboration/conjunction, speaking through our articulations and mediations.
untitled has concerns common to all its parts, addressed at
different times in diverse manners. Each part has its own themes which are
brought to the forefront, like a juggler who drops some of the objects circling
to focus on the ones in hand. These include, the disintegrating nation/body,
body as nation, nation as metaphor, dysfunction and crisis, abject geographies,
agents and monsters, ethno-fascism, displacement and dispossession, the self in
interstitial space, refusal as a claim of the subject, and the perseverance of
will. A key focus of the project is borders, physical and metaphorical, imaginary and ontological, how
they are constructed and defined and how they inscribe, control, restrict,
shield, and screen us. Borders are seen as barriers, margins and occasionally
zones of autonomy. Their emplacement reflecting apparent necessity or
uselessness belies their histories and permanence/impermanence, porousness
(with the movement of goods and capital) and impermeability (with peoples
movement). When meaning slips around and through borders, frontiers are crossed
and new associations are made, when they cant, the body public disintegrates.
Inherent
and critical references to conventional documentary (and ethnographic
representations) are woven into the tapes as a subtext. Some of these are made
visible through the structure, elements, techniques, and aesthetics utilized[27].
Only available light is used, interior location shots, public settings, and
abstracted direct imagery are layered underneath and around the textual
elements. There is no detached authoritative voice-over dictating what to see
or think. Asynchronous voices are edited from the material recorded. This audio
component carries its own content (and form) which parallels the video
component, forming relationships of the oblique, directional, and expansional,
delineating and speculative. Working outside an essentializing gaze (which
reduces and conforms the complexities of subjectivity) the audio/text /image
configurations selectively release levels and layers of information from
shifting positions for specific
purposes, and at times for specific publics with more vernacular or fluent
readings dependent on language and
affiliation. Entry points are multiple as are means of access. No monikers are used, i.e. restrictive forms of identification of the
subjects or overdetermined representation of the sites, no artifice of
objectivity or naturalizing discourse of seamless realism, nor a grand summarizing narrative or imposition of
closure resolving all. With no beginning or end texts to package and objectify
the tapes, each is part of one continuous endless whole, confused at times and
semi-raw, the project incorporates this even as the end product is less raw and
more finished. The tape/installations unwieldiness is analogical to the
provisionality of the process.
A
relationship to reality can only be arrived at through the subjective. The
basis of objectivity, is where
subjectivity is placed and how it is revealed in the issues at stake and the
circumstances of the lives lived. untitled is situated firmly between genres on the margins of the
margins in an unstable and unsettling placement, establishing this in-between
state as a critical position to elucidate a context or many contexts, look at
historic and present day realities, and engage in the transference of lived
experiences.
This
project renders different forms of resistance, the figure of the resistance
fighter struggling for self-determination and liberation, resistance in a
broader sense as part of ones daily life struggling against a predetermining
hegemony, the act of staying on the ground or in a more domestic means working
within, and, where survival is an act of resistance. I attempt to have my work
function as a form of resistance which affects social, political, or personal
change. Work that points to agency as the first step, and recognizing,
challenging and altering our perceptions plays a decisive role. The pivotal
relationship is that of an individual to community. This is an intrinsic part to all forms of resistance (and identity). The acts of taking
apart, building and dismantling to build again is more than an exercise in
laying bare the elements, process, and motivations of power and regulating
bodies, it is an attempt to articulate the conditions that exist for a
subjects individual life, and the forces that confront our individual and
common realities. These explode and careen from the person to the political, to the banal, the intimately exigent
construction of nationalism(s), other ideologies, and their conjunctive
subjective relationships..
opening
a fissure/filling a void
In the
triangulation of histories and positions between countries, cultures and
subjectivities untitled
continues building on previous (production and curatorial[28])
projects of mine aiming to implode existing barriers, chipping away at the
structure until it dissipates, skeletal then ephemeral, identifying a space to
locate difference in forms of articulating, of filling these (intentional and
unintentional) gaps in representation, intervening in these spaces between
spaces, messing them up with deliberated contentions then leaving for others to
clean them up, refine, and reflect upon. Filling spaces with massive amounts of
material and a density of meaning is imperative. There is an exigency of excess
required in a demand to be heard/listened to, in the opening of spaces for
other silenced or negated voices to emerge. These are politicized spaces where
one is challenged to respond (or challenging responses), and ones perceptions
and understandings are confronted.
These openings are productive interstices where possibilities exist to engage,
encounter, reflect and act upon the forces that act upon us at work or play in
the days of our lives.
Is it enough
to provoke sometimes and other times provide a meditative space claiming a
calmness in the midst of anxious spaces or vice versa; a brief moment of
anxiety, left floating, unresolved but intense in its suggestions and
potential. It is a set-up in a way, the polarities contesting each other to
create an active space that the viewer can be placed in, a space that is
questioning, unresolved, at times lucid, always open, but open with anxiety and
angst, pleasure, contemplation, anger, frustration, or sadness. These projects
often fall between the cracks, of genre, and of attention. There is a price
paid in not heeding cautionary tales, breaking rules, pushing the conservatism
and limits of institutions, providing layers of realities, tactile, juxtaposed in
correlation and contradiction with dominant motifs, a price of denial and
censure.
from untitled part 2:beauty and the east
histories
of the self
Who are we allowed to be, who allows us to be who we are or
what we identify with, and where is this power usurped from? What constructs us
as human beings, what informs our psyche, what shapes how we perceive each
other and the world around us? This is not a question of identity but of
subjectivity and agency, where we are placed, where we choose to position
ourselves, and how the world acts upon us and how we act upon the world. Place
is defined by the people who live it (or have lived it) daily, without this,
there is no place, no sense of place and no geographic local(e) existing in the
real and the imaginary.
Many of
us want to claim a space for fluidity of self, an identity that is determined
contextually, a subjectivity that is unimpeded. Others seek to hold onto or
regain a land, a nation, and the ensuing dilemmas that follow. The right to be
self-inscribed spans a flexible local identity and the trans-local, the
particularities of each, the movement between the two, the split and
interconnectedness, and the usurpation of either. One searches for sense, to
make sense out of things, to have something static to grab onto, a set of
images, of beliefs, some way of perceiving grounded in their real [see DVD clip
#8]. This projects fragments of narrative have a coherency and a positioning
to question the grand narrative(s) that put/set things in order, it aims to
deeply disrupt/interrupt unified notions of nationalism, empire, and identity.
These that are experienced through the body [see DVD clip #7]. We are all
transnational subjects, entwined globally, in assault, complicit with, directly
or indirectly affecting all, at risk of being affected by each other, at
anytime, by those we choose to identify with and those we ignore. As viewers
and consumers of culture(s) we need to challenge our existing assumptions and
preconceptions. We are implicated within these constructions, our histories are
present there and here, our projections firmly entrenched.
Re-presenting
the accounting of experience over a range of locations and contexts the act of
videotaping is used as a direct way of tracing lives, revelations of the self,
and the realities around us, as well as a tool for looking at issues of
representation, governing paradigms, and the construction of meaning. The
subjective enunciatory experience is central to this. From very local
positions, lived history, and working with representations from the ground up
that respect the individual subject and is immersed in the complexities of
culture(s), models can be developed that confront and theorize the
representation of politics and the politics of representation as part of the
mandate and mode of production. This critique of all hierarchic forms of
information, corporatism, and systems of overarching authority is part of a
larger analysis of political and economic strategies and the effects of
corporate globalism and the military industrial complex. This project provides
a heterogeneous engagement with facilitating a means of contemplation that can
counter the imposition of consent.
untitled brings together the intensely personal space of the
dialogue moment with the context of the intrinsic social and political site,
different with each subject but with overlapping and overarching points of
contention, correspondence, senses of place, notions of community, domains of
discursivity, legacies of conflict and capital, disenfranchisement and the ties
of transnational concurrences. This project is not about difference per se but about separateness and a connective web.
Sometimes I wonder how I carry a presentness of home with me, making work where others found and lost theirs,
of what is left behind and what remains. How one can go on, building in the
political discrepancies of the present, to move forward without ignoring the
traces of the past. There is a associated agency, one of praxis or activism of
sorts that emerges to engage or enrage.. with whatever means of resistance, survival, and will necessary.
We
have no boundaries, our boundaries should be the love that continues forward.
If we want to define that movement, it goes beyond acceptance, beyond
tolerance, it is the capacity to reach an empathy with the other in a way that
encompasses everyone, democratically, with liberty, equality and justice, and
its the creating and maintaining of a system that asserts itself without
attacking, and without assaulting the other on a daily basis.
Soha
Bechara[29]
Jayce
Salloum 2004