ما يمكنني قوله عن طبيعة انشغالي هو وصف عن عمل الكتابة؛ عن إباء القصيدة في تلوين الفضاءات الأدائية للأدب.
وكأن القلم يعيد تفكيك الصوت والطين والشاشة في خط ملتف ساحب.
لا أستطيع استثناء القصيدة من كل لحظة تعبير عن هوية الحاضر، حتى في ظل بيروقراطيات الأرض المتشنجة، فالقصيدة روح كلامية تحملنا إلى المواد التي تحيط بنا في الغرف المتوجة بالمال، لتكون القصيدة زهرة، أو حلم أشبه بالكرسي، حتى وإن كان الشعر شكلاً من أشكال المال المعلق على حواف اللغة، إنما تستشف القصيدة روحها من حرف موشوم كما قد أقول بلسان عبد الكبير الخطيبي. لقد وجدت ممارساتي في الفترة الأخيرة تستعر حول بلورة النص في تكوينها للعلاقات الهاجرة ما بين الوشم والصورة والاندثار.
ما أحاول قوله هنا هو أن القصيدة بالنسبة لي هي وحدة شعورية تلتمس، لذلك ارتأيت أن أفصّل لكم عن عملي من خلال علاقتي بالقصيدة، فهي تَوجّه ونزيف في لحظة تجميد الحاضر، كما الصورة الفوتوغرافية، لكن على خلاف الكاميرا، القصيدة لهجة قراءة تتوهج حول الروح في كتابتها لذاتها.
وكأن القلم يعيد تفكيك الصوت والطين والشاشة في خط ملتف ساحب.
لا أستطيع استثناء القصيدة من كل لحظة تعبير عن هوية الحاضر، حتى في ظل بيروقراطيات الأرض المتشنجة، فالقصيدة روح كلامية تحملنا إلى المواد التي تحيط بنا في الغرف المتوجة بالمال، لتكون القصيدة زهرة، أو حلم أشبه بالكرسي، حتى وإن كان الشعر شكلاً من أشكال المال المعلق على حواف اللغة، إنما تستشف القصيدة روحها من حرف موشوم كما قد أقول بلسان عبد الكبير الخطيبي. لقد وجدت ممارساتي في الفترة الأخيرة تستعر حول بلورة النص في تكوينها للعلاقات الهاجرة ما بين الوشم والصورة والاندثار.
ما أحاول قوله هنا هو أن القصيدة بالنسبة لي هي وحدة شعورية تلتمس، لذلك ارتأيت أن أفصّل لكم عن عملي من خلال علاقتي بالقصيدة، فهي تَوجّه ونزيف في لحظة تجميد الحاضر، كما الصورة الفوتوغرافية، لكن على خلاف الكاميرا، القصيدة لهجة قراءة تتوهج حول الروح في كتابتها لذاتها.
غُول خراب الشّمس
‘A Canadian woman, 32 years of old, 59 kg, 168 cm, with brown hair and brown eyes. At the time of her disappearance, Nicole was wearing long-sleeve red shirt with white sleeves, khaki pants, grey and blue New Balance running shoes, and a small blue knapsack. Jacqueline Nicole was last seen at around 9:00 am, the morning of March 31, 2007 when she left the Cairo hotel in Hama, Syria. She was planning to go sightseeing in the local area and she never returned that evening.’
The (I) of this book falls into a forensic obsession following the threads of a clinical study in which two corpses get mysteriously entangled in Hama, Syria, 2008: The material corpse of an unknown Syrian woman and the bureaucratic corpse of a missing Canadian citizen, Jacqueline Nicole Vienneau.
I got to know this forensic case study during my medical education in Damascus university. The case study is mentioned in forensic medicine as an example of the first and only case of identification in which a Syrian forensic team does a facial reconstruction of an unknown corpse found in Hama in 2008.
When I started incisively trying to recall the narrative of the case I only remembered one detail: That the body had been assumed to be that of a missing Canadian person. I managed to remember the impression of the name and with the aid of googling, I finally found her name: Jaqueline Nicole Vienneau.
The book becomes a volume of notes and documents of this impossible research into knowing what happened, and a forensic investigation done at a distance.
It’s a sort of poetry that had been written to cannibalise a novel which I intermittently worked on for the past four years.
Blending the disappearance of an unnamed Syrian woman with mythical poetry and the desire to reconstitute her face which keeps melting between the fingers of a book.
The loss of documents is never redeemed here; and keeps the narration hollow at heart as it becomes a force to work with scarcity and loss of information.
عينيك التانية وحشتني
I miss your other eyes This work is a research into the amateur archival practice of an internet forum under the name “Amir Adhalam Genuine Forums منتديات أمير الظّلام الماجدة الأصليّة” which had been dedicated since 2006 for collecting and circulating Arabic amateur pornographic material. The archive is a collection of files that date back to 1990s, and were mostly produced under domestic, extremely precarious conditions.
On the one hand, one can say that these images are the material witness (Susan Schuppli) of the conditions under which the camera had operated. On the other hand, the circulation of such material maintains the slow violence of the image (Urok Shirhan).
To go about this photographic paradox—that the circulation of evidence of violence is part of the performative violence of the image; I introduce cutting as a main archival method. The question of “What does it mean to cut well?” (Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska) becomes the ethical imperative of my archival practice. for example such process of cutting is already at work as the poor image materially collapses, creases and glitches in resistance to the rewinding (VHS material) and the subsequent digital circulation of the videos in online environments.
By looking at the image as a scene of tensions between the eye, the screen, the hand and the voice, the shutter becomes clearly not just a technology of capturing/freezing but a method of operating/moving/acting under the pressure of the lens. How can then techniques of montage unfold the complex handling of the camera not only as held by a man’s hand, but as operated through many possible and impossible tele-powers such as snapping, slapping, clapping and hiding.
Film stills from the glitch archive
Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem, NL, 2020 as part of group
exhibition Queer Diasporas
ArtScience, KABK, NL, 2022
MONO, Rotterdam, NL, 2022, as part of New Radicalisms Festival
Glitched frames extracted from one of the found videos. Every frame lasts 0,07 seconds in the original file making them almost invisible.
Where Does a Director Hide in a 360° Frame?
2020
In this image research I extract archival evidence of the process of “border-working” practiced by Israeli security cars on the google car during the capturing of the street-view images in Palestine in 2011-2012. The 360° panoramic camera ironically documents the process.
Mahmoud Keshavarz in "Design Politics" defines borders “not as lines designed by states to protect their citizens and promote a sense of security, but as mechanism that hide battle of authority of knowing over the material reconfiguration of the act of moving, crossing and transgressing." What Keshavarz calls "border-working" is a set of material urban practices which controls mobility, in this case, the mobility of the google car. And since the car is also a panoramic recording device (having the 360° camera mounted on top), it transforms such “material reconfiguration of the act of moving” into a material reconfiguration of the act of imaging. What starts as an act of regulation of images, ends up being images which document the regulation of their own production.
Qalansuwa, Tira, Jaljulia and Kafr Qasem are four Palestinian towns located outside the West Bank, on the Israeli side of the green Line—1949 Armistice border. Their street-view images are a direct articulation of the border working documented by the 360° camera. The street-view in the four Palestinian towns captured on July, 2012 documents a green Mazda (Israeli yellow license) that is constantly central to panoramic frame, apparently leading and giving movement instructions (obstructions) to the google car. In this instance of interaction the google car becomes both the official green/red/blue/yellow/white car with a camera mounted on top and the green Mazda that gives movement cues to the former one, as if the panoramic frame is a visual monologue between the two cars. Going in line with Mahmoud Keshavarz in understanding borders not as localities but as a set of delocalised material practices—which he terms “border-working”—that produce spaces of immobility; one would consider the green Mazda as a part of the materialisation of the Israeli-Palestinian border and at the same time the border/frame of what is rendered visible as street-view and what remains viewless.
The mapping of most of the West Bank—which was achieved over the time period 2011-2017—is securitised/authorised through a collection of different cars: from a VIP SECURITY (Palestinian white license) car in Ramallah, Al Bireh and Bethlehem (which was a program authorised by the Palestinian Authority); to private Israeli licensed cars in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. On the contrary to the carto-graphing of the green Mazda which shows mostly its back side since it takes the leading role; the securitised carto-graphing in the rest of the West Bank shows the front side of the security cars which follow the google car throughout its journey.
This work was performed as an online lecture performance after a residency in Off site project, November 2020. You can find the full essay here.
July 2012/Qalansuwa, Tira, Jaljulia and Kafr Qasem/Securitised by an Israeli green Mazda
A map tracing the route of the green Mazda (in red) in Qalansuwa, Tira, Jaljulia and Kafr Qasem
November 2011/East Jerusalem/Securitised by an Israeli white Suzuki SX4
October 2012/Israeli road network in the West Bank (Ariel and Southwards)/Securitised by an Israeli white Suzuki Splash
September 2012/Israeli road network in the West Bank (road 557-57-55-60 northern to Ariel)/Securitised by an Israeli dark blue Ford