Excerpted from Actual Size (2013), an artist’s project by Kandis Friesen printed in FUSE issue 36-2.

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Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1978, Kandis Friesen is a Montreal-based artist working in video, sound, performance, drawing and installation. Her interests lie in contexts of labour and production, sites of national and cultural identity, and the role of documents and archives in constructions of collective memory. Her work has been shown at galleries and festivals across Canada and internationally, and among many projects, she is currently working on the Mennonite Video Archive Project, a collaborative collection of work activating the archive as public space.

Related posts:

1. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly
2. 36-2/Editorial
3. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

Excerpted from A Game of Shater Hassan, an artist’s project by Haitham Ennasr printed in FUSE issue 36-2. To see the rest of this artist’s project please click here.

A Game of Shater Hassan is a nonlinear, semi-autobiographical project that explores notions of memory, oral history and the diaspora. The project is described as a retelling the story of Shater Hassan when in fact it actively denies you most of the story itself, and takes you somewhere else instead.

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Haitham is a New York based new media artist and game designer. His work ranges from digital and analog games to fake organizations, and has been featured on Mondoweiss and Indiecade. Haitham completed his MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons (New York NY), and his bachelors from the Arab American University in Jenin, Palestine. He is a decent bellydancer, but there is room for improvement in that department.

Related posts:

1. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine
2. 36-2/Editorial
3. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly

By Sarah Pupo in collaboration with Josh Pavan

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

She may have traded her microphone for a megaphone, but you would be hard-pressed not to recognize that signature hairpiece above the crowd. Lady Gaza has recently emerged as her latest reinvention, this time from international superstar to – if you can believe it – Palestine activist.

“I just really felt that, as an artist, it was my time to give back. Everyone talks about Darfur and the Congo, but what about the West Bank?” she says, pictured at Montreal Pride in a custom Thierry Mugler.

Her latest transition hasn’t pleased all the fans however, and despite how nonchalantly she plays it off, the subject can still stir her infamously well-documented temper. “I’ve been blessed with some amazing fans,” she tells us from her Ramallah home, “but at the end of the day you have to be true to yourself. These Disneyfied faggots, they love queens as long as you’re decorative, don’t say anything political, but open your mouth and they cry that you’re highjacking their parade, that you’re not a ‘real gay’ concerned with ‘real gay’ issues.

I’m Lady m**********n Gaza! I am realness!”

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Sarah Pupo was born in Toronto, Ontario and lives in Montreal, Quebec. Through painting, drawing and animation she works with methods of making that place value on intuition, ritual, associative thinking and the flux of chance and control. Her practice is rooted in a desire to undermine hierarchies privileging rational, linear experience over that which lies beyond traditional means of perception and understanding. Recent projects include a solo show at La Centrale in Montreal, Quebec, group shows in Vancouver and Berlin and a collaborative animation with the Norwegian recording artist, Nina Nielsen.

Joshua Pavan is an Alberta-bred queen relocated to Montreal where he works as a trade unionist and community organizer. In the summer of 2007, he was one of the co-founders of Pervers/Cité, Montreal’s radical queer summer festival. When not figuring out political drag as the Lady Gaza, he can be found defending the honour of misunderstood popstars.

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. Signposts from alQaws: A Decade of Building a Queer Palestinian Discourse
3. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly

Introduction and interview by Gina Badger for FUSE.

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 36.2 (Spring 2013). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

Cuisine is a vivacious and mutable cultural practice that has history and politics folded right into it. The privileged eaters who make up North American foodie culture may often miss the specific histories of conquest and migration built into their eclectically global palettes, but they are present in each bite. Israeli appropriations of Palestinian ingredients and dishes are illustrative; for instance, the rebranding of tabouleh as “Israeli salad,” and maftoul (a small, round pasta made from wheat and bulgur) as “Israeli couscous.” The complex etymology of the word sabra, commonly known as the name of an Israeli-produced hummus, reveals a complex history of linguistic colonialism. In Arabic and in Hebrew, sabra is a generic word for cactus, plantings of which were used pre-1948 to delineate borders between Palestinian villages. More recently, in Modern Hebrew sabra has become the descriptor for Israeli-born Jews — metaphorically and literally, the beneficiaries of the clearing of the Palestinian cacti. In 1982, residents of the Sabra Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon were massacred by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, in collusion with Israel, one of the most brutal events in the history of the occupation. The name of the hummus, so cunningly appropriated, can’t be separated from this settler-colonial history.

Palestinian cuisine — in Gaza and the West Bank, in camps and in cities worldwide —reflects a history of occupation and displacement. But more than that, it reflects the skills, proclivities and ingredients required to survive those conditions. Basil AlZeri has captured hours of Skype video of his mother teaching him how to cook from her impressive oeuvre of Palestinian dishes. This archive of cultural knowledge is the private counterpart to a series of public food-based performances he has presented since 2011. The first performances were mezze-style dinners in which AlZeri presented his guests with an array of Palestinian recipes in tiny dishes resting on his body. Lying face-down on the table, the uncomfortably shifting body of the cook became an antidote against the commodity fetishism of foodie culture. These early performances established the labour politics of AlZeri’s work by highlighting two kinds of unrecognized and often unpaid labour: gendered domestic work and artist’s labour. Next, AlZeri began cooking live as a performance with his mother, Suad, instructing him from Dubai, over Skype. Most recently, AlZeri has been working on The Mobile Kitchen Lab, which he will use as an itinerant stage for future cooking performances. AlZeri performs simple and generous gestures, inviting his guests to identify the Palestinian stories of land, resources and labour that are built into his recipes.

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FUSE – When did you learn to cook?

Basil AlZeri – After I left home, at age 17. My sister Karmel and I were living together in Cairo, and we were sick of eating out all the time. So she proposed a deal where I would wash the dishes and she would cook. She said, “I’m not your wife or your mother, if you want me to cook, you have to wash the dishes.”

FUSE – Was she a good cook?

BA – She just copied my mother’s dishes exactly.

FUSE – So it was your mother who cooked at home?

BA – Yes, my mother was always in full control of the kitchen. It was her domain.

FUSE – So you always had these women cook for you. How did you get interested in cooking yourself?

BA – I became really good friends with Rina, a Japanese student at the American University in Cairo where we were both studying. She was really well traveled and adventuresome. She was really knowledgeable about world food and introduced me to so many new ingredients.

She also taught me about street food in Cairo. We started cooking together and she eventually moved in with Karmel and I. She was very proud of Japanese cuisine, and so I wanted to learn more about Palestinian food so I could share with her.

FUSE – Eventually, you began to incorporate food into your artistic practice. How did you come to that?

BA – Cooking became an entry-point for me to introduce myself, as a human being who is also a Palestinian, to my peers in Canada. Cuisine became a way for me to express myself, my history, my cultural identity, with a lot of specificity but without being over-determined by certain politics.

FUSE – Mezze is a form of cuisine you’ve drawn on in your recent work. In Arab cuisine, is mezze an appetizer course within a larger meal, or more its own style of eating?

BA – People don’t necessarily eat mezze and then a main course and then dessert. Mezze can be the whole meal. The meal is made of many different little dishes, and that’s all you eat. For lighter meals, or lunch, or even a lighter dinner. It’s usually the type of meal for when you have a little time to sit around and talk. It has a social aspect to it. Where people sit around and eat for longer, and the plates keep coming.

FUSE – How many times have you done the mezze-style dinner party performances?

BA – The first time I experimented with that gesture was very informal, in a private space, in 2010. It was Mother’s Day, and I dedicated the first dinner party performance to my mom. I kept working with the idea of the body and cooking and food preparation. I did a short residency at Don Blanche in August 2012, where my role as an artist was as a cook’s assistant. I realized that I’d like to present something there towards the end of my residency, and it seemed like a really great chance to re-enact certain elements of the food gestures, but in a different context.

[…]

To continue reading, purchase the single article or the whole issue below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24! 

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Basil AlZeri is a Toronto-based Palestinian artist working in performance, video, installation, food and public art interventions. His artwork is grounded in his practice as an art educator and community worker, and engages with the intersection of everyday actions and life necessities. AlZeri’s performance work has been exhibited in Toronto (FADO, Nuit Blanche, Whipper Snapper Gallery), Quebec (Fait Maison 14), Winnipeg (Central Canadian Centre for Performance) and Mexico City (Transmuted International Performance Art Festival, Performancear O Morir). Upcoming projects include a public performance project with the Ottawa Art Gallery/Creative Cities Conference and performances in Chile and Argentina in 2013. On 15 March, FUSE and Israeli Apartheid Week Toronto will co-present AlZeri’s performance at Xpace Cultural Centre as part of the FADO Emerging Artists Series, .sight.specific.

Related posts:

1. Inside Decolonizing Architecture: The Politics of Visibility in Common Assembly
2. 36-2/Editorial

By Nishat Awan and Cressida Kocienski

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 36.2 (Spring 2013). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

The Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) [1] is part of a long-term project that deals with the spatial complexities of decolonization through an interrogation of the relationships between law, spatial production and colonial practices in Palestine and Israel. A significant body of DAAR’s work attempts to reveal how the operation of Israeli spatial and legal regimes within the Occupied Territories can produce extra-territorial spaces and grey zones wherein legal jurisdictions fade. For DAAR, these spaces of ambiguity are significant for their role in revealing the workings of power — they are places where such colonial and territorial power can be understood, challenged and perhaps undermined. Their work experiments with narrations of the landscape under occupation, and strives to be both intellectually and architecturally propositional.

In this article, we will consider the rhetoric of DAAR in relationship to their work Common Assembly, which was produced during a summer 2011 residency in which we participated. The work was conceived in response to the unfinished Palestinian parliament building in the West Bank, the prospective Palestinian bid for recognition at the United Nations [2] and the unfolding backdrop of the Arab Spring. Considering the recent expansions and contractions in the possibility for a viable two-state solution within this contested territory, [3] we feel it is an important time to examine the ways in which this work renders visible vital questions about the constitution and agency of the Palestinian body politic, and its viability in terms of its own claims of decolonization, both within and outside the West Bank.

Standing as a disused and incomplete structure, the Palestinian Legislative Council building (its official title, but known to DAAR as the Palestinian parliament) was designed by noted Palestinian architect Jafar Tukan. It is located in Abu Dis, an outlying Jerusalem neighbourhood that used to be a separate village, but has now been subsumed into the expanding city. Much of Abu Dis falls outside the Jerusalem line, Israel’s unilaterally declared 1967 border of the city. Close to the parliament building, severing it completely from Jerusalem, passes the wall that separates the West Bank and Israel. Significantly for the project, the positioning of the building is entirely ambiguous: it sits on the Jerusalem line, partly in and partly out of the city, yet entirely physically cut off from it. The exact reason for this placement is unknown, and its potential political fallout is also in disagreement. Rumours, theories and conspiracies abound — in the tug of war between Israel and Palestine, and between the various Palestinian factions, how did the building land so fortuitously, so awkwardly? Nevertheless, it is certain that the building’s positioning was the result of political manoeuvring.

The Palestinian parliament site was the starting point for the research, design, and film production work that the DAAR residents helped to produce, which also sat within a previously established framework of discourse and exhibited work. The planned outcome of the residency was the touring exhibition Common Assembly, to be shown in Switzerland, the UK and the US. [4] As the title of the exhibition suggests, the nucleus of the work was intended to be an exploration of the commons, informed by Hardt and Negri’s definition of this concept as “the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude.” [5]

Several months into the Arab Spring, there was a tangible sense of political elasticity in the region brought about by the collective uprisings, and it seemed pertinent to raise the question of the Palestinian struggle from within this wider context. The DAAR participants were keen to transpose this idea of collectivity onto the site of the parliament building, taken to represent a form of politics under threat in the region. A principal reference was the February 2011 cleaning of Cairo’s Tahrir Square by volunteer members of the public, in the wake of mass protests demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. This was seen as a manifestation of the triumph of the political power of the commons, and the claiming of common ownership of civic space.

One of DAAR’s primary strategies is to work with and inside the lines that slice up the landscape. [6] In Common Assembly, the physical space taken up by the Jerusalem line as it cuts through the parliament was cleaned to create an ephemeral and symbolic strip of common space. This was a staged performance-for-the-camera that, because of the inaccessibility of the space to the Palestinian population, was performed symbolically for them in absentia by the DAAR residents.

The exhibited work was the installation of a 1:5-scale sculptural cross-section of the parliament as it appears inside the Jerusalem line, transporting this fragment to the site of each gallery in various configurations alongside this intrusive element were projections of both the six-minute film of the cleaning performance, and grainy black and white images of crowd scenes from historical meetings of the various Palestinian parliaments-in-exile. [7] These images produced a spectral assembly of dispersed discussions, removed from their specific context, and with the key figureheads supplanted by images of the audience (although still members of a political elite) to create an image of a de-localized collective assembly. There were also four brief extracts of interviews with political figures [8] displayed on monitors with headphones. The lines of their narratives, set against the figures of the multitudes and the parliament, often cut across one another, producing a microcosmic view of the terrain in all its complexity.

[…]

To continue reading, purchase the single article or the whole issue below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

NOTES:

[1] DAAR is described as a platform for collective production. It is based in Beit Sahour, a small suburb of Bethlehem in the West Bank, within the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It was founded in 2007 as Decolonizing Architecture, by Beit Sahour-based architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and London-based architect Eyal Weizman.

[2] In September 2011, there was a formal request by the Chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, for Palestine to be recognized as the 194th full member state of the United Nations, by the General Assembly, based on the pre-1967 borders, as part of a campaign called Palestine 194. At press time, this has not yet been voted on, and at the prospect of a veto from the US, the request was scaled back to an upgrade to non-mem­ber observer state.

[3] In November 2012, Palestine was granted status as a non-member observer state in the United Nations, which then “express[ed] the urgent need for the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestin­ians leading to a permanent two-State solution.” (See “General Assembly Grants Palestine Non-member Observer State Status at UN,” UN News Centre, 29 November 2012, online.) This unprecedented rise in support for the political legitimacy of the Palestinian diaspora, however marginal it may be in concrete terms, immediately provoked plans for a retaliatory measure of architectural occupation from Israel—the building of 3,000 new settlement homes in the E1 area, to the East of Jerusalem, previously kept clear under international pressure (see Peter Beaumont, “Israel approves another 1,200 settlement units around Jerusalem,” The Guardian, 25 December 2012, online). The insertion of this territorial expansion into the remaining fragments of the West Bank, if it materializes in the months ahead and remains unrevoked, will effectively sever the territory completely in half, and obliterate the chances for establishing a contiguous neighbour state for Israel.

[4] Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; The James Gallery at The City University of New York (CUNY), US.

[5] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 303.

[6] Previously, DAAR has worked with the Green Line, which was drawn following the 1949 Armistice Agreement, and the lines of the 1994 Oslo Accords. In each case, they have interpreted their ambiguous physical and legal definition as bestowing these geopolitical borders with a spatial thickness.

[7] These videos were from publicly accessible video archives available online, and ranged from depictions of the first parliament appointed by the PLO in 1964 to the first popularly elected parliament established in 1996.

[8] Ahmed Qurei, PLO Member and Former President of the Palestinian Legislative Council; Basem al-Masri, First Director General of the Palestinian Parliament; Fajr Harb, an activist; and Khalil Tafakji, a cartographer (a highly politicized occupation in the region). The fifth video of Oxford academic and former PLO Representative Karma Nabulsi was from a lecture held in Ramallah organized by Fajr Harb.

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Nishat Awan is a writer and spatial practitioner whose research interests include the production and representation of migratory spaces, inquiries into the topological as method and alternative modes of architectural practice. She holds a PhD in Architecture and is co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Trans-Local-Act (aaa-PEPRAV, 2011). She was architect in residence with DAAR in 2011. She is a member of the art/architecture collective OPENkhana and is a Lecturer in Architecture at University of Sheffield, UK.

Cressida Kocienski holds an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, London. Working between video, performance and text, her research concerns spatial production and modes of narration. She collaborates with architects Nishat Awan and Phil Langley as OPENkhana, and is co-editor of the experimental publishing platform The Institute of Immaterialism. She was filmmaker in residence with DAAR in 2011. She has worked collaboratively with Art on the Underground; James Taylor Gallery; South London Gallery; Whitechapel Gallery; ICA, and Resonance FM. Her films have been screened at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2010); FormContent, London (2010); and Pleasure Dome and TSV, Toronto (2012).

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. Decolonizing the Occupations: Shortlist of Links
3. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation. 

Review by Etienne Turpin 

“O Pangloss!” exclaimed Candide, “this is a strange genealogy! Wasn’t the devil at the root of it?”

“Not at all,” replied the great man. “It was something indispensible in this best of worlds, a necessary ingredient.”

Beginning with an agile reading of the sequence of disasters that constitute the narrative of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has, in his latest monograph, The Least of All Possible Evils (LPE), initiated another productive foray into our optimized “humanitarian present.” [1] In his previous book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), Weizman delivered a compelling and comprehensive stratigraphic reading of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, moving through the bio-social-technical assemblages that constitute the conflict, from the polluted aquifers under the West Bank to the airspace regularly patrolled by drones above the Gaza Strip. [2] A key problem created by the Israeli occupation, in Weizman’s designation, was the UN Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) responsibility for the construction and maintenance of housing in the Jenin refugee camp in the north of the West Bank, following an attack by the Israeli military in 2002. The reconstruction of destroyed buildings in the camp by the UNRWA signalled, for Weizman, the “humanitarian paradox” wherein humanitarian relief can simultaneously increase political oppression. The radical architecture research project of Hollow Land clearly anticipates The Least of All Possible Evils, but the new book expands the context for thinking humanitarian interventions among multinational institutions, juridical formations, and spatial configurations, thus positioning the Israeli occupation as an exemplary case within a broader trajectory of pervasive contemporary violence. [3]

It is within this general context that readers of LPE will encounter new conceptual categories to help order the understanding of militarized conflict: “The diffuse body of customs and conventions that make up jus in bello, the laws of war otherwise known as international humanitarian law (IHL), have since the end of the Cold War increasingly become the frame within which the calculation and application of military violence takes place.” [4] Weizman adds, “The juridical categories of ‘necessity’ and ‘proportionality’ seem to be among the most popular terms employed in designing and monitoring state violence.” [5]

Precisely because of the ubiquitous vernacular reference to “disproportionate” violence in media and cultural discourse, Weizman goes on to explain that IHL is not designed to prevent or end wars, but to manage the ways in which militaries wage them; from this perspective, the Panglossian principle of lesser evil operates most effectively as the principle of proportionality. In Weizman’s words: “Different versions of it have been used to describe different types of balancing acts, most often in situations where some rights contradict others, or when individual rights are weighed against public interests, or against administrative or economic policies. Within the context of IHL, however, proportionality is a moderating principle that seeks to constrain the use of force.” [6] As it is codified in Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1977, we are reminded that, “Proportionality thus demands the establishment of a proper relation between unavoidable means and necessary ends. Which, considering the choice of military means, the principle calls for a balance to be established between military objectives and anticipated damage to civilian life and property. Proportionality is thus not about clear lines of prohibit-ion but rather about calculating and determining balances and degrees.” [7] It is this proportion of optimized conflict and military aggression — to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, as Aristotle once suggested in the Nicomachean Ethics — that is considered in the subsequent case studies. [8]

In the remainder of the book, Weizman moves through three key cases, first analyzing the difficulties facing Médecins Sans Frontières President Rony Brauman as he navigated the politics of affinity and anonymity during the relief effort for the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s (“Arendt in Ethiopia”); then, explicating the complex visual economy of courtroom models in an Israeli High Court of Justice case, argued by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian human rights lawyer Muhammad Dahla, regarding the legality of the separation wall in the Palestinian village of Beit Sourik (“The Best of All Possible Walls”); and, finally, considering the strange case of Marc Garlasco’s role in Human Rights Watch’s investigations following his role as an analyst in the US Defense Intelligence Agency, where he selected bombing targets and attendant munitions, and conducted “proportionality assessments” in anticipation of military attacks (“Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime”). These chapters — each provocative enough on its own to demand much greater consideration — provide sufficient material, in Weizman’s estimation, for a more schematic analysis of the shifting role that evidence plays in the prosecution of war crimes; that is, we are asked to track the move from the predominance of witness testimony to an increasing reliance on the expert witness, or more specifically, from the narrative provided by the subject of a given crime, to the objective material evidence of a criminal act. Of course, much is at stake in this transformation of the juridical apparatus, and despite the brevity of Weizman’s conclusions, it is clear that the implications of the shift beckon the attention of political activists and scholars alike.

In the epoch of the European enlightenment, Voltaire was willing to ridicule Leibniz’s theological optimism, wherein the best of all possible worlds was guaranteed by a divine calculus that permitted forms of destructive evil in order to optimize the invisible and mysterious good occurring elsewhere. Currently less subject to ridicule, but certainly no less pernicious, is the condition wherein the optimal forms of destruction called for by new standards of international humanitarian law shield criminal perpetrators whose precise violence increases alongside the suffering of the oppressed who struggle against the paradoxes of our humanitarian present.

NOTES:

[1] An earlier version of the book was published in Italian as Il male minore (Rome: Edizioni Nottetempo, 2009).

[2] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). For a discussion of evidence within a practice of forensic architecture addressing environmental pollution, see Paulo Tavares, “Murky Evidence: Environmental Forensics in the Age of the Anthropocene,” Cabinet 43 (Fall 2011): 101-105.

[3] Weizman, Hollow Land, 205. For a detailed explanation of the transition from Hollow Land to The Least of All Possible Evils, see Eyal Weizman, “Political Plastic,” Collapse 6 (July 2010): 257-303.

[4] Weizman LPE (2011), 10.

[5] Ibid., 10.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] Ibid., 11.

[8] For a discussion of the aesthetics of forensic architecture in relation to the economy of visual evidence, see Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

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Etienne Turpin is, itinerantly, a teacher, writer, editor, and curator. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and a lecturer in architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is principal investigator, with Meredith Miller, of Architecture + Adaptation: Design for Hyper-complexity, and a contributing editor of Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy. Through these and other projects, Turpin works with colleagues, contributors, collaborators, and students to learn about and through modes of inquiry such as making, building, philosophy, aesthetic confusion and design research. These collaborative efforts work to assemble worlds that can sustain passion, pleasure and conviction.

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Review by Mike Hoolboom

When I slip Nadim Mishlawi’s Sector Zero DVD from its sleeve, my heart is already in my throat. I am expecting to be hurt by these pictures from Lebanon, and the cruel accident of this country’s geography, but from the very opening images I am assured that beauty will be a regular accompaniment. The camera seeks out the light, it caresses the broken walls of the hospital in which much of the film is shot, the touch is tender and sensitive. The word “camera” has its roots in the Latin for “room,” which cinematographer Talal Khoury seems aware of in his lyric exploration of spaces in a factory, a slaughterhouse and a tannery. People are secondary here, the figures have become the ground, while the walls and floors are carefully and slowly observed. Slow, the looking is so slow, as if there were time enough to gather all the lives that lived between these walls, that touched this table and looked out these windows. The worn surfaces shimmer with a flickering, hopeful light, as the camera draws its focal planes in and out of focus, breathing with the architecture. Not unusually, this formal, nearly studied beauty is both cover story and uncovering. It offers the qualities of touch.

Where are we? Mishlawi’s architectural explorations are perched at the edge of Beirut in what one commentator names “a city of outsiders… a reflection of Lebanon.” [1] As architect and urbanist Sandra Frem notes, “Beirut’s earliest experience with globalization dates back to 1888, when it was proclaimed the capital of the Ottoman province.” [2] A growing population in the new port required that its quarantine facility (karantina in Ottoman Turkish) be moved from the city centre to its outskirts, and a hospital was built around it. Though the facility didn’t last, the name stuck, as the region’s outcasts came to find a home in this outlying area. In the 1920s there were Armenians fleeing the Turkish genocide, and in 1948 Palestinians came rushing from their former homes at gunpoint as the new nation of Israel expelled its native sons and daughters. Kurds flowed in from what had been Kurdistan as boundaries shifted, traders came from Jordan and Iraq. Eventually, the sprawl extended to encircle Beirut in what came to be known as the “misery belt,” and city officials decided to build a wall to hide its unwanted residents.

How do you make a portrait of a neighbourhood? Three men, ghosts of light and shadow, appear in succession, often in voice-over. First, political historian Hazem Saghieh details the waves of immigrant outcasts that gathered to form “Beirut’s only ghetto.” He recounts that during Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), many in the densely populated Palestinian refugee camps were massacred by Christian militias. In one stand-alone sequence, historical footage is introduced. It is shot from the streets, and shows mostly teenagers, some of them dressed like soldiers, crouched in the rubble of what used to be home, staring through rifle sights, or else rushing out to save a wounded friend, only to be gunned down.

The second ghost voice belongs to Beirut architect Bernard Khoury — designer of the renowned nightclub B018, built eight years after “the end” of the civil war and whose office is nestled squarely in the Karantina — weighs in with personal recollections: I came back to Beirut in 1993 and obviously did not find any work… I thought I was going to be a great architectural warrior that was going to take part in the reconstruction of his country… Not only rebuilding buildings, but the reconstruction of a nation, only to realize a few years later that the reconstruction never really happened. In order for such a project to be politically feasible, you have to have some kind of political consensus, you have to go through a scarring process. This never really happened in Beirut. After 1990, we went through a long denial period which we’re still in. [3]

According to the director, the film was once going to be named In the Freudian Slip. [4] Little wonder then, that the third voice of Sector Zero belongs to psychoanalyst Chawki Azouri, who at one point states, “Historically, primitive tribes arrived at the idea of monotheism and of government simultaneously. Once government had been formed on the ground, God was formed in the sky.” [5] Does a nation have an unconscious? How many can fit on that couch? Azouri argues that the creation of group identity requires an enemy that must be found within and then cast out. He goes on to conjure a national Oedipal narrative, arguing that the beginnings of democracy arrive in a collective killing of the father. “In Freud’s view, we become what we cannot have, and desire (and punish) what we are compelled to disown.” — Adam Phillips [6]

Azouri argues that the Karantina is at the heart of Lebanon’s national life, precisely because it is home to so much that is unwanted. The outskirts of Beirut are thus figured as a national, even international, dumping ground, a refuse container for all that cannot be contained within the city’s globalized crossroads. It is home to a slaughterhouse, a garbage dump, a metal factory. Can we perhaps look to the Karantina’s bloodied streets for the necessary glue, the binding agent, that will re-imagine Lebanon’s national project?

“It is the individual who remembers, while groups forget because it is in their interest to forget.” [7]

NOTES:

[1] Dr. Chawki Azouri in Sector Zero.

[2] Sandra Frem, “Reclaiming the Infrastructural Landscape: the Case of Nahr Beirut,” Transnational Tides and the Future of the Arab City (lecture, American University of Beirut, Beirut, 2 October 2009).

[3] Bernard Khoury, “New Wars in Progress,” (lecture, University of Michigan Art and Design, Ann Arbour, 8 October 2009).

[4] Leah Caldwell, “Nadim Mishlawi: Behind the Walls of Sector Zero,” Al-Akhbar English (7 April 2012; online)

[5] Quoted in Sector Zero.

[6] Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 76.

[7] Azouri, quoted in Sector Zero.

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Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian media artist whose work can be found at fringeonline.ca and mikehoolboom.com. His most recent movie is Lacan Palestine (2012), a feature length, found-footage essay.

Image Credit: Nadim Mishlawi, Sector Zero (2011). Film still. Courtesy of MC Distribution.

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Years ago, on my way to work, I ran into my friend Barb [1] who was trembling with rage. She’d just been told that her cash settlement as a residential school survivor not only made her ineligible for social assistance, but that she’d have to pay back months of benefits she’d already received. Barb successfully fought that decision, even though it shouldn’t have been necessary, and in any case, no amount of money could compensate her for past and current traumas. That day, I arrived at work shaking with rage myself.

Then I got a call from my co-worker Tarek, a Lebanese-born Palestinian solidarity activist. During the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, I’d commiserated with him when he lost touch with family members who were living in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had bombed and invaded. I felt moved by his plight, frustrated in my helplessness, and gratified to eventually learn his family was okay. This experience solidified my resolve as a Palestinian solidarity activist. Similarly, since the day I’d met him, Tarek expressed and acted on his solidarity with First Nations peoples in a variety of ways. This time, however, he was calling to share some good news: his father had just bought him and his partner a house. I expressed happiness for him, but underneath I was angry at the injustice. Tarek, born in another land, was now a homeowner in mine. Barb, then in her 50s, had lived all her life on Turtle Island, a descendant of its original caretakers, yet she was always falling in and out of crisis, trying to survive. I struggled to articulate the relationship between the very different lives my friends were living.

Seeing Barb after that incident, speaking and singing in solidarity with Palestinians at community events, filled me with respect and admiration for her. Yet, I still grapple with my contradictory feelings. I question how they impact my activism. While I understand the history of settler colonialisms, here and in the Middle East, as well as complex issues of privilege and solidarity, I remain emotionally unsettled by this and many other similar stories.

Some of my Indigenous friends believe the Palestinian solidarity movement seems unwilling or unable to interrogate the complexities of settler colonialism on Turtle Island. There are legitimate concerns. Palestinian solidarity activists fly the Two Row Wampum [2] or Hiawatha [3] flags, even when their meanings aren’t clearly understood. Such activities betray a lack of awareness of the specifics of settler colonialism here, as well as other nations’ relationships to the land on which Toronto is built, such as the Anishinaabe, Wyandot and many others.

Years ago, some Palestinian solidarity activists I was working with in Toronto approached me about their experiences within the movement. They expressed frustration that their organization was insincere in its support for Indigenous struggles on Turtle Island. They feared my involvement in the movement was being tokenized. They had seen First Nations spirituality being ridiculed and denigrated behind my back, in some cases by central organizers. They were concerned that I was invited to co-organize, speak and sing at events only to lend credibility, to appear as if they were doing something meaningful about settler colonialism in Canada. While I had sometimes felt tokenized, I trusted that the work I was doing would eventually heighten awareness of Indigenous struggles for some, if not all. The awareness of these activists was actually proof of my impact. In fact, their assumption that I was unaware of being tokenized hurt me as much as confirmation of the fact itself. Though I’m not proud to admit it, I enjoyed the celebrity that accompanied my continued activism.

In any case, these young folks insisted that any and every settler activist had a responsibility to centralize and prioritize Indigenous struggles. Furthermore, they themselves felt ostracized by their organizations because they were practicing Muslims. While they continued to engage with their own faith communities in speaking out strongly and publicly against oppressive interpretations of Islam, their activist communities failed to respect their spiritual practice. Consequently, their questions left me wondering if solidarity organizations so grounded in secularism and hostile to spirituality could be genuine and effective allies with First Nations peoples. I still wonder. [4]

Indigenous activists, artists and academics like Robert Lovelace [5] (who sailed on the Tahrir [6] to Gaza in 2010) continue their activism, not allowing criticisms of the solidarity movement to deter their unflagging support for justice in the Middle East. Likewise, Palestinian solidarity activists have created educational websites around Idle No More and round dance with the rest of us in sub-zero temperatures.

Generally, discussion of relationships across our movements raises issues of integrity, honour and respect in struggle. While I see many activists whose organizing is consistent with the values they espouse, I also see too many who role-model insincerity, tokenism, dishonesty, manipulation, as well as other oppressive and abusive behaviours that are inconsistent with how activists need to conduct themselves in order to be effective. I’ve had my own issues in this regard and these days hold my activism to a high standard. This includes learning humility and ensuring that it’s my love for people and hope for a better world, rather than anger, that drives my activism.

In any case, our movements have evolved. It’s possible now to discuss issues that we couldn’t ten years ago because we didn’t know each other’s stories very well — as communities or individuals. Today, I’m optimistic about the potential for closer relationships and more effective mutual solidarity. Toward this end, I pose this question to Palestinian solidarity activists on Turtle Island: “If you were a settler living in Palestine right now, what would you consider to be your responsibilities?” The query hardly begs a one-size-fits-all response.

Were I living in Palestine, I would follow the lead of Palestinian communities and organizations in recovering their lands and sovereignty: to understand the many ways in which I was complicit in genocide there, and to do everything I could to minimize that complicity. That might mean leaving the country, hopefully for a safer place. Even if I were living in Palestine, I would still feel a sense of responsibility to Turtle Island and the communities that sustained my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual development here — particularly when those communities experience crisis.

In this interconnected world, struggling against settler colonialism anywhere is struggling against it everywhere. Any settler living on Turtle Island owes their ability to do so to ongoing genocide and colonialism here. I include myself as a settler. Even if I invoke my Tsalagi ancestry as lending me the right to identify as an Indigenous person, I’m still living on the ancestral lands of others. Furthermore, those of us who have agency in Canada, limited though it may be, cannot escape our complicity in the actions of this nation-state in Palestine, Afghanistan, Haiti and any number of places around the globe.

The answer to my question will shift across individuals and contexts. I trust that an awareness of the contradictions of our social locations, a willingness to dialogue about allyship, as well as efforts to honourably role-model honesty, sincerity and integrity in our relationships, will take us to the compassionate, cooperative and socially just world we all aspire to create.

NOTES:

[1] To maintain privacy, fictional names are used in this text.

[2] The flag is based on a wampum belt that signifies one of the early treaties between the Haundenosaunee and at first Dutch then British settlers, enshrining the principle of noninterference in each other’s affairs while sharing the land.

[3] The Hiawatha Flag is also a depiction of a pre-colonial wampum belt that represents the agreement by the original five nations of the Haundenosaunee who agreed to form a confederacy informed by the Great Law of Peace.

[4] For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Why Indigenous and Racialized Struggles Will Always be Appendixed by the Left,” Rabble
(19 July 2011; online).

[5] Elder, activist and retired Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation.

[6] The Tahrir was a Canadian-led boat, part of the larger Freedom Flotilla movement, protesting the Israeli blockade and the Canadian government’s complicity in military violence against Palestinians.

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Of African-American, Cherokee and European descent, Zainab Amadahy is a mother, singer/songwriter, activist and author. Her publications include the feminist science fiction novel Moons of Palmares (1997) and Wielding the Force: The Science of Effective Activism (2012).

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. From Turtle Island To Palestine: Reflections On the Indigenous Youth Delegation To Palestine
3. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a global campaign applying moral and economic pressure on Israel to end apartheid and its occupation of Palestine. The call for BDS was first made in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, unions, movements and political parties representing the West Bank, Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the diaspora. Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against the racist system of apartheid, they called upon international civil organizations and people of conscience around the globe to impose broad boycott, divestment and sanction initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa during the apartheid era.

The BDS campaign demands that Israel recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully comply with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. [1]

Forty-six years into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights, Israel continues to illegally expand its colonies into Palestinian territory. Sixty-five years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Indigenous Palestinian population, forcing a majority of Palestinians to become stateless refugees, Israel’s entrenched system of racial discrimination remains intact. The recent Israeli military aggression against Gaza [2] is the latest act in the decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people. Thus, the BDS campaign calls upon global civil society to boycott Israeli and international products and companies profiting from the violation of Palestinian rights, including Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions; divest from corporations complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights and ensure that university investment portfolios and pension funds are not used to finance these companies; and impose sanctions to demonstrate disapproval and educate society about violations of international law and to end the complicity of other nations in these violations. [3]

In an effort to educate people and promote BDS, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was established in 2005. The first IAW event was organized by the Arab Students’ Collective at the University of Toronto and has since spread all over the world. IAW raises awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies, practices and institutions that affect all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the diaspora, as well as Palestinians inside Israel. In 2012, the BDS Global Day of Action took place in 23 countries, and the eighth annual IAW was organized on campuses in over 200 cities around the world.

Israeli Apartheid Week has also become a solidarity network, which links a wide range of groups and issues relating to international justice. IAW uses a variety of formats for popular education, including film screenings, lectures, cultural events and protests. Speakers who have presented at IAW include Tyendignaga Mohawk activist Shawn Brant, philosopher/theorist Judith Butler and author/activist Naomi Klein.

Popular consumer boycotts of Israeli companies complicit with occupation have not only raised awareness across the world, but have had a significant economic impact on specific corporations. For instance, Agrexco, Israel’s former largest exporter of agricultural produce, entered liquidation towards the end of 2011 following a campaign of blockades, demonstrations, popular boycotts and legal action in more than thirteen countries across Europe. Other successful boycott campaigns include the UK-based Co-operative Group (the largest co-op in Europe), which, following a determined campaign by its members, introduced a policy to end trade with companies that source products from Israel’s illegal settlements. [4] Thanks to a sustained campaign against Ahava, an Israeli cosmetics company situated in the illegal West Bank settler colonies of Mitzpe Shalem and Kaliya, the company was forced to close its stores in the UK, Norway, Japan and Canada. [5] As a result of Palestinian civil society’s call for action against G4S (a private security company complicit in the detention of Palestinian political prisoners), the European Parliament elected not to renew their contract with the company. [6] Furthermore, scores of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers have refused to perform or publish in Israel following pressure from the BDS movement including, in 2012, musicians Cat Power, Mashrou’ Leila and Zakir Hussain, and scholars Jacques Rancière and Katherine Franke. Also in 2012, Egyptian media collective Mosireen, Iraqi-Canadian MC The Narcicyst and American hip hop duo Rebel Diaz refused to participate in Creative Time Summit events, citing the annual New York-based forum’s partnership with the state-funded Israeli Center for Digital Art. [7]

Despite the apparent success of BDS actions, critics have asked why Israel is singled out and not other countries that commit human rights violations, arguing that this is because of an inherent anti-Semitism. [8] In 2009, Naomi Klein addressed this question:

The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa… Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity…Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work. [9]

Veterans of the South African anti-apartheid campaign who led successful boycotts have also echoed these sentiments. Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize and archbishop-emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, wrote:

[The] harsh reality endured by millions of Palestinians requires people and organizations of conscience to divest from those companies [profiting] from the occupation and subjugation of Palestinians. Such action made an enormous difference in apartheid South Africa. It can make an enormous difference in creating a future of justice and equality for Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land. [10]

In December 2012, South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), made BDS part of its official policy. The University of Toronto’s Graduate Student Union (GSU) also endorsed BDS recently, joining other Canadian universities, including York University, the University of Regina, and Carleton University.

Toronto’s ninth annual Israeli Apartheid Week is set to take place from 1 – 10 March 2013. This year’s IAW campaigns stand in solidarity with the Idle No More Indigenous movement. Confirmed speakers include Crystal Lameman, Beaver Lake Cree First Nation activist and the Peace River tar sands campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network in Alberta, and Razan Ghazzawi, frontline Syrian blogger and activist. There will also be a special screening of Roadmap to Apartheid with Cinema Politica at the Bloor Cinema. Cities across Canada and the world are also set to host IAW events.

NOTES:

[1] “Introducing the BDS Movement” BDS Movement (online).

[2] For background on the eight-day assault that began 10 November 2012, see Sharif Abdel Kouddous, “Gaza’s ‘Severe Damage’ and Why Truce Won’t Stop the Violence of Occupation,” Democracy Now! (26 November 2012; online).

[3] Nora Barrows-Friedman, “BDS Roundup: The BDS Movement, Seven Years On, ‘Stronger, More Effective and More Diverse Than Ever,’” The Electronic Intifada (11 July 2012; online).

[4] Tracy McVeigh and Harriet Sherwood, “Co-op Boycotts Exports from Israel’s West Bank Settlements,” The Guardian (29 April 2012; online).

[5] Palestinian BDS National Committee, “BDS Campaigners Force London Ahava Shop to Move,” BDS Movement (31 March 2011; online).

[6] The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine, “G4S Loses Its Contract with the European Parliament,” BDS Movement (17 April 2012; online).

[7] Nora Barrows-Friedman, “BDS Roundup: The Victories of 2012,” The Electronic Intifada (2 January 2013; online).

[8] See Sami Hermez, “Answering Critics of the Boycott Movement,” The Electronic Intifada (1 October 2009; online).

[9] Naomi Klein, “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction,” The Nation (8 January 2009; online).

[10] Desmond Tutu, “Justice Requires Action to Stop Subjugation of Palestinians,” Tampa Bay Times (1 May 2012; online).

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Rwayda (Rod) Al-Kamisi is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, currently in her last year. Her specialization is women and gender studies, with a minor in history, and she is currently completing her thesis on the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Al-Kamisi is part of Students Against Israeli Apartheid and a writer for the U of T newspaper, The Varsity. She also volunteers and writes a blog for the Centre for Women and Trans People at U of T.

Related posts:

1. 36-2/Editorial
2. From Turtle Island To Palestine: Reflections On the Indigenous Youth Delegation To Palestine
3. Signposts from alQaws: A Decade of Building a Queer Palestinian Discourse

This FUSE article from issue 36-2 is available full-text online for your reading pleasure. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing to FUSE or making a one-time donation.

Review by Marty Fink

In Blown Up: Gaming and War, video games inspire new possibilities for the representational role of militarization, occupation, and racial violence within emerging interactive media. Toronto-based curator Vicky Moufawad-Paul brings together installations by Wafaa Bilal, Harun Farocki and Mohammed Mohsen. Displayed at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) from 17 November to 15 December 2012, Blown Up raises challenging questions about mediated representations of violence and their position within gallery and gaming space. The exhibit showcases video games within the art world, asking how the representational violence characteristic of gaming culture might be viewed not merely as a catalyst for off-screen violence, but as resisting the normalized spectacle of warfare and racial violence within dominant media. Gallery visitors with no prior knowledge of video games are invited to engage with a stark sensory environment that makes military violence visible in ways oppositional to the objectives of mainstream news reporting. The video games in the exhibit cast the violence of war not as a necessary or inevit-able threat but as an outcome of displacement and occupation. In shifting the position of the viewer from a passive recipient of such representations to the active roles of gamer and witness, Blown Up creates new spaces through which to build diasporic disidentifications and migrant self-representations that reframe militaristic violence within mediated space.

Moufawad-Paul’s curation surrounds viewers in darkness. [1] A single illuminated bench in an otherwise shadowy room positions gallery visitors in front of two adjacent screens to watch Farocki’s two-channel film loop, Serious Games I-IV (2009-10), in which spotlighted viewers witness the documentation of American soldiers playing a video game that will train them for their upcoming attack on Afghanistan. [2] The dramatic overhead illumination of MAI’s viewing bench adds significant emphasis to this spectacle of watching. Farocki’s viewers — as well as those viewing them from amidst the gallery’s surrounding darkness — are urged to question not only the links between video games and institutional violence but also the significance of collective witnessing as a form of resistance to occupation and war.

Confronted with their intended position of identification with the violent progression of the game, visitors are compelled, both as a viewing public and on a personal level, to confront disturbing affects of passivity in the face of widespread technologies of militarization. This piece uses viewers’ collective discomfort as a catalyst to move them out of a helpless individual position as spectator and into a more public one that breaks down the seamless alliance between technological advancement and war.

Across the gallery from Serious Games, the exhibit’s only remaining overhead light beams down onto a podium facing a large-screen projection of Bilal’s The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi (2008). [3] The lit viewer’s avatar in the game is the artist himself, who casts his own virtual body as a suicide-bomber to avenge the real-life death of his brother. [4] Moufawad-Paul’s staging of the artworks draws further attention to the spotlighted viewer, who not propels the game forward but also becomes part of the gallery’s primary spectacle. Through the embodied participation of its illuminated player, the effects of Bilal’s fabricated shoot-to-kill scenario become not merely representational but also physical, prompting gallery visitors to consider strategies for disrupting the game’s enticing progression. And indeed, the installation succeeds in framing participation in violence as an act that collectively rescripts and critiques the military and racial representations that saturate Western media.

Located between these two illuminated areas within the exhibit stands an upright arcade-style console featuring Mohsen’s Weak (2010), [5] an 1980s-era platform encasing an intricate pastiche of Pac-Man-style graphics, 1970s Egyptian pop music, and even fragments of poetry. Its architecture impels viewers to not only move through the manual labyrinth of the game but also through the affects of loss and displacement it triggers. The nostalgia of Weak’s retro gaming aesthetic also lends value to the fragmented sensory memories of Mohsen’s childhood within the Palestinian diaspora.

Just as Farocki and Bilal’s installations urge viewers to consider their role as witness, perpetrator, or even resistor of violence, Weak’s nostalgia prompts viewer identifications with migration, exile and racialization. The piece urges viewers to stitch together the fragments of Moshen’s experience of war, racial violence and displacement through their engagement with the game. In navigating the console, viewers are faced with the futility of attempting to apprehend logics of both gaming technology and of war.

Weak therefore links the public experience of playing video games within gallery space to prior incarnations of gaming space, from the arcade to the cell phone, which have transformed alongside developments in new media. [6] As Moufawad-Paul identifies in her curatorial essay, when public space within occupied territories becomes a zone not of play but of militariz-ation, then the simulation of war within the domestic sphere of video gaming can become a transformative site of resistance. [7] Bringing these transformative spaces out of the home and into the gallery’s inquisitive lighting, Blown Up offers the opportunity for disidentification from white heteronormative avatars while urging viewers to question their spatial alignments within mediated acts of representational violence.

Blown Up offers a wide range of gaming aesthetics, from the early arcade culture of Mohsen’s childhood memories to Nintendo 64 James Bond-esque templates, from the now-obsolete MS Windows interfaces of Bilal’s work to the early-2000s laptop culture of Farocki’s documentation of military training. In doing so, these works connect an archive of digital invention with a corresponding history of Islamophobic media represent-ation. In bringing these three installations together within a single gaming/artistic space, Blown Up conjures a linked history of diasporic cultural interventions into both gaming technology and racial representation. It therefore succeeds in presenting violence as necessarily interconnected with technological advancements in both military combat and media industries. Importantly, by recognizing the capacity of technology to not merely perpetuate violence but also to document and offset it, the archive Blown Up builds urges viewers to reclaim gaming narratives in order to challenge the power mechanisms of occupation and war.

NOTES:

[1] Though the three installations’ video screens are individually illuminated, the sparse use of overhead lighting creates a focus not only on the games, but also on gallery visitors as they participate. Only a total of four lights shine down from above, three of which illuminate a bench upon which viewers are offered headsets to watch Farocki’s Serious Games.

[2] While one screen displays the digital game in action, the other features uniformed cadets playing it in a training facility.

[3] Illuminated by the overhead light, the viewer at the podium is offered a keyboard, headset, and mouse through which to navigate the installation.

[4] Bilal’s autobiographical positioning within the game references his own brother’s death at the hands of American soldiers. By placing himself into the action, he draws attention to both the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians within war, as well as the effects of racist representations in cultural outlets like Quest for Saddam, a video game released by Petrilla Entertainment in 2003, which Bilal’s console emulates. It also references an adaptation of this original release that features a new skin that transforms the popular Islamophobic game into a corresponding hunt for President Bush, and places the viewer at the seat of the action. Bilal’s home screen features camp reproductions of so-called terrorists, talking heads, and WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), using Halloween fonts, gothic hillsides, and spider webs to accentuate the sensationalism of the endeavour.

[5] Unlike the other two installations that are experienced through headphones, Mohsen’s console — though not illuminated by overhead lighting — loudly calls attention to the user perched at its interface. The call of its booming, 8-bit-inspired soundtrack entices gallery visitors to approach and play the game.

[6] While arcade settings eventually gave way to individual consoles to enjoy in private, domestic space, current developments in handheld technology have reintegrated gaming experiences into the public sphere. Similar adaptations in film — from the glory of the pre-war cinema experience to home entertainment centres to current YouTube and handheld culture —  raise associated questions regarding collective consumption, mass indoctrination and the spectator’s potential for resistance.

[7] Vicky Moufawad-Paul, “Blown Up: Gaming and War” (Montreal: MAI, 2012).

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Marty Fink works with archives, zines and new media to investigate Trans* representation and homo diasporas. Fink’s writing has appeared in venues including Science Fiction Studies and The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Fink’s current research traces the circulation of HIV prevention materials in prisons to understand shifts in technology from print to digital formats. Fink recently received a PhD in English from the City University of New York (CUNY). Fink currently works with the Prisoner Correspondence Project in Montreal and teaches English and Women’s Studies at Concordia University.

Related posts:

1. States of Coloniality/ Palestine–Palestine