THE ARAB
ARCHIVE
MEDIATED MEMORIES
AND DIGITAL FLOWS
EDITED BY
DONATELLA DELLA RATTA
KAY DICKINSON
& SUNE HAUGBOLLE
A SERIES OF READERS
PUBLISHED BY THE
INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES
ISSUE NO.:
35
THE ARAB
ARCHIVE
MEDIATED MEMORIES
AND DIGITAL FLOWS
EDITED BY
DONATELLA DELLA RATTA
KAY DICKINSON
& SUNE HAUGBOLLE
Theory on Demand #35
The Arab Archive
Mediated Memories and Digital Flows
Editors: Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle
Authors: Hadi Al Khatib, Mohammad Ali Atassi, Mitra Azar, Enrico De Angelis, Donatella
Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, Sune Haugbolle, Ulrike Lune Riboni, Soursar_mosireen, Mark
R. Westmoreland
Copy-editing: Meredith Slifkin
Cover design: Katja van Stiphout
Design and EPUB development: Tommaso Campagna
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2020
ISBN: 978-94-92302-56-4
ISBN epub: 978-94-92302-55-7
Contact
Institute of Network Cultures
Phone:+3120 5951865
Email:info@networkcultures.org
Web:http://www.networkcultures.org
Order a copy or download this publication freely at http://networkcultures.org/publications.
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
3
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
CONTENTS
00. INTRODUCTION
6
Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, Sune Haugbolle
01. ARCHIVAL ACTIVISTS AND THE HYBRID ARCHIVES OF
THE ARAB LEFT
7
Sune Haugbolle
02. TIME CAPSULES OF CATASTROPHIC TIMES
20
Mark R. Westmoreland
03. 858: NO ARCHIVE IS INNOCENT. ON THE ATTEMPT OF
ARCHIVING REVOLT
35
mosireen_soursar
04. THE VIRTUOUS CIRCUITS BETWEEN UPLOAD AND
DOWNLOAD: DIGITAL AND ANALOG ARCHIVES AND THE
CASE OF GRAFFITI ART IN REVOLUTIONARY EGYPT
41
Mitra Azar
05. THE DIGITAL SYRIAN ARCHIVE BETWEEN VIDEOS AND
DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
60
Mohammad Ali Atassi
06. THE CONTROVERSIAL ARCHIVE: NEGOTIATING HORROR
IMAGES IN SYRIA
69
Enrico De Angelis
07. CORPORATIONS ERASING HISTORY: THE CASE OF THE
SYRIAN ARCHIVE
89
Hadi Al Khatib
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08. WHY THE SYRIAN ARCHIVE IS NO LONGER (ONLY) ABOUT
SYRIA
99
Donatella Della Ratta
09. THE ‘FLÂNEUR’, THE ARCHAEOLOGIST, AND THE MISSING
IMAGES: DOING RESEARCH WITH/ON ONLINE VIDEOS 115
Ulrike Lune Riboni
10. THE VANISHED IMAGE
129
Lulu Shamiyya
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
134
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00. INTRODUCTION
DONATELLA DELLA RATTA, KAY DICKINSON, SUNE HAUGBOLLE
What are the political and ethical economies of the Arab image – the principles of its
production, its often-threatened and always fluctuating materiality, its circuits of distribution
and re-use? As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved
into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and
contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an
unprecedented fashion. Yet, at one and the same time, these facilities institute a globally
dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into
commodified and copyrighted goods. Which images of struggle have been created, bought,
sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged in these milieux? By whom and by what means?
These are some of the crucial questions that encircle what our anthology identifies as ‘the Arab
archive’. This archive comes into being in formats as diverse as digital repositories looked after
by activists, found footage art documentaries, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’
or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse
by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The
Arab Archive examines which forces – local, regional and international, public, commercial
and informal – determine the politics, economics, and aesthetics of what materials we can
access and what gets erased.
This anthology is also, itself, an archive. As is ever the case, it is an incomplete, expanded,
and transmogrified compilation and a record of an event from the past; something that came
together in one form and now re-establishes itself in another. In May 2018, the following
people met at John Cabot University in Rome to share ideas and to try to address some
of the questions proposed above. We thank each of them for their generous input: Basma
Alsharif, Miriyam Aouragh, Mohammad Ali Atassi, Enrico De Angelis, Donatella Della Ratta,
Kay Dickinson, Laure Guirguis, Sune Haugbolle, Philip Rizk, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, and Dork
Zabunyan. Some have reshaped their presentations into the ensuing chapters; new colleagues
have since joined us for this publication.
Like the workshop, this volume purposefully congregates activists, artists, filmmakers,
producers, and scholars. Their diversity of approaches stands collectively as commitment to
the necessity for multivalence and creativity in revolutionary praxis. Our mutual conviction in
accessibility and the commons inspires the partnership with the Institute of Network Cultures.
We thank everyone at INC for their support of and hard work on this project, along with their
radical stance on open source provision. Our gratitude extends also to Meredith Slifkin for
copy editing this manuscript.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
7
01. ARCHIVAL ACTIVISTS AND THE HYBRID
ARCHIVES OF THE ARAB LEFT
SUNE HAUGBOLLE
Archival activists retrieve and capture archives, while at the same time producing new
collections of evidence. Most archival activists have their eyes firmly fixed on the recent
past, but others go further back in time. In this essay, I focus on the hybrid archive of what
is often termed the Arab Left, a somewhat obfuscating catch-all (which I nevertheless
adopt) for radical, progressive, secular, and revolutionary states, movements, ideas, and
people.
Hybrid archives come into existence through the agency of activists and their networking
practices. It is a dual process that includes both the retrieval of existing corpuses of texts
and images, and the making of new collections mainly on the internet. Drawing on Ann
Stoler’s ideas, I see archives not merely as a virtual or material storage place, but as a
composite social phenomenon. The archive is both a corpus of writing and images, and
a force field that animates political energies and expertise. Archives order the world by
repelling and refusing certain ways of knowing. It is never just what is in an archive that
matters, but rather the form it takes, the sensibilities it animates, and the imaginations it
promotes.1 As I hope to show here, archiving the Left in the age of uprisings and revolutions
animates sensibilities of hope and critique. Perhaps these archives can even play a role in
the creation of a new episteme regarding not just the Left, but the history of the modern
Middle East; a history where the Left is seen as a key actor rather than a marginal midcentury footnote.
Reviving the Left
The highest ranked journal in Middle East studies recently published a special section
called Towards New Histories of the Left, an Arab Left Reader of key texts from the Arab
Left tradition is under publication, based on a workshop at Cambridge University held in
2018, and a new book series focuses on radical and progressive histories of the Middle
East. 2 Overshadowed until a few years ago by nationalism, Islamism, terrorism, and
modernity, the Left in the region (often referred to as the Arab Left, to the detriment of
other language groups and transnational forms of leftism) is no longer seen as an outdated
research topic that met its demise along with the Arab radical revolutionary project of the
1970s. Propelled by the uprisings, revolutions, and wars since 2010, the Left has come
back into fashion, both as an object of study and as a (Marxian) paradigm. Since the 1970s,
1
2
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton:
Princeton University Press,2010, p. 22.
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 51.2 (2019);Towards an Arab Left Reader: Key
Documents in Translation and Context, Conference, Cambridge, UK, 12-14 April 2018, http://www.
crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27446; Radical Histories of the Middle East book series, London: Oneworld,
2019, https://oneworld-publications.com/radical-histories.html.
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THEORY ON DEMAND
much of the discipline has adopted Saidian and post-colonial readings of politics and society
that drew on, inter alia, ideological registers from political thought of the Arab Left tradition.
However, a comprehensive new historiography of the Left has only emerged recently.
Now, historians explore untapped archives of states, parties, newspapers, and other sources
that shed new light on left-wing groups. Intellectual historians reexamine Arab Marxist thinkers.
Anthropologists interview surviving members of leftist movements from the 1960s and 1970s,
and media scholars peruse the journals, posters, and films of radical movements of that time.
This academic trend overlaps with a new interest in Arab Left history in Arab societies. Across
the Middle East and North Africa, revolutionary groups, as part of their online practices,
investigate their own intellectual and political predecessors.3 Veterans of the struggle publish
memoirs, help set up new journals, and engage in debates about their experiences.
This process of retrieving, organizing, and reworking the past intersects with a general ‘archival
fever’ in the region and in the world, which manifests itself in the arts, in academia, and across
society. People attempt to create an archive because there is no archive. There is only a hybrid,
fluid network of collections, interpretations, and representations of what the Left used to be,
and perhaps what it ought to be today. In that sense, the people involved are also trying to
organize political sentiments of loss, nostalgia, and anticipation related to re-readings of the
past. Archive-making is both an archeology of knowledge and generative of political positions
and hopes.
Archival Activists
As Leila Dakhlia points out, archive fever in the Arab Middle East today takes two forms.4 On
the one hand, people seek to excavate and preserve existing archives, be they state archives,
private collections, or the archives of institutions such as political parties and newspapers. The
retrieval and protection of state archives is often part of a power struggle with authoritarian
state apparatuses and therefore, as was the case in Egypt from 2011 to 2013, essentially
a revolutionary act. On the other hand, archival activists ‘make’ archives online through
collections of mostly visual material. Much of this work, as the articles in this volume show,
aims to preserve and indeed shape collective memory of the popular uprisings since 2010 (see
the essays by Atassi and mosireen_soursar). Other archives double as testimonial evidence
that is meant to further the quest for legal justice, as in Syria (see the essays by De Angelis
and Della Ratta). Most of these web-based archives are hybrid and not owned or regulated by
state agencies or other large institutions. Abiding by the laws of the internet, they are multiauthored, multi-sited networked practices of knowledge creation and sharing. They come
into being through the dedicated labor of archival activists, many of whom double as political
activists, historians, or artists.
3
4
Miriyam Aouragh, ‘L-Makhzan al-’Akbari: Resistance, Remembrance and Remediation in Morocco’,
Middle East Critique 26.3 (2018): 241-263.
Leyla Dakhlia, ‘Archiving the State in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions’, in Sune Haugbolle and Mark
Levine (eds) Altered States: Remaking of the Political in the Arab World Since 2010 (forthcoming).
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
9
Archival activists invest different emotions and politics in their quest to retrieve documents,
images, oral histories, and other bits of history. For some, locating the archives of the Arab Left
– whichever historical and geographical focus one might have – has become an important part
of clarifying a revolutionary project today. For other scholars, artists, and activists, collecting
Arab Left histories provides clues to the demise and failure of the Left in the region. They may
themselves be aging activists who wish to throw light on and sometimes shape the public
narrative of their own partisan past.
Fig. 1. Pages from Socialist Lebanon, archived on https://adrajarriyah.home.blog/.
For example, former member of the small 1960s Marxist group Lubnan al-Ishtiraqi (Socialist
Lebanon), Ahmad Beydoun, recently made the back catalogue of the movement’s journal from
the 1960s available on his blog.5 Until now, scholars had to search for the journal in special
collections. With increased interest in the group and Arab radicalism during the long 1960s
generally, Beydoun is assisting a public rediscovery of the period’s sophisticated theoretical texts.
Such individual efforts are just a small part of wider public debates and cultural production that
carry an ongoing conversation (often more of a clash of positions) about the past that pertains
to the Left. TV stations, such as the Beirut-based al-Mayadeen, profess to represent a living
progressive position by celebrating icons of Arab resistance such as the female fighters Leyla
Khaled and Jamila Bouhired, and by presenting their coverage of regional and global affairs
through an anti-imperialist lens. Being partly funded by the Syrian regime, it is no surprise that
al-Mayadeen largely draws on the heritage of the Syrian Baath Party. This register of leftist history
contributes to a strident and highly ideological archiving practice that seeks to use the past to
underpin the discourse of resistance and mumana’a (rejectionism).6
5
6
Ahmad Beydoun, Drawers of the Wind blog, https://adrajarriyah.home.blog/.
Christine Crone, Producing the New Regressive Left, PhD dissertation, Copenhagen, Copenhagen
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Other TV stations produce less openly ideological programming about the radical past.7
Newspapers and websites write feature articles about wars, coups, and revolutions of the 20th
century, and publish portraits of iconic cultural and political figures of the radical tradition,
all of which feeds into an ongoing reevaluation. This cumulative material is part of the hybrid
archive of the Left. Although ephemeral, public debate and cultural production are a crucial
source for historians and an important element in the act of archiving the past; not least
because archiving, like memory, is a hermeneutical practice. Similar to the colonial masters
and the modernizing classes in 19th century Egypt that Timothy Mitchell famously examined
in his book Colonizing Egypt, archival activists also ‘put the world on display’, ordering a
semantic and/or visual rhetoric that serves to shape both the collectors and their audiences.8
Missing Pieces to a Puzzling Puzzle
Everyone, it seems, is looking for missing pieces to a puzzle, in the sense of both searching
for a larger picture and trying to address a puzzling question, namely: How can it be that a
region which fifty years ago was dominated by progressive politics became the stronghold of
fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary forces?
Some clues to the answer lie in the transformation of the Left itself. Although it might be
tempting for some to focus on the democratic, humanistic Left, the object of inquiry is not
just a flawless victim of suppression and regression. The Left, as anywhere in the world, spans
widely and paradoxes abound. Self-proclaimed ‘Arab socialist’ groups such as the Syrian
and Iraqi Baath parties became vestiges of authoritarian states; some Arab Communist
parties remained devoted to Stalinism; ostensibly radical leaders sexually abused their
female colleagues; and socialists in name turned into promoters of neoliberal economies.
For their part, Arab communists have inspired (and occasionally shape-shifted into) Islamist
revolutionaries from the late 1960s onwards. A sizeable group of Palestinian Maoists even
turned into jihadists.9 Many other leftists ended up in exile, dead, or in prison, along with
other opposition forces. The new historiography of the Left is uncovering many new details
about the contestations over ideology and political alliances between different parts of the
Left, while social historians are giving us a better idea of the place and importance of the Left
in Arab societies throughout the 20th century and beyond.10
In doing so, scholars rely on a plethora of sources and I have no ambition of cataloguing them
all here. Rather, I want to offer some reflections on the different forms of archives and archival
practices. First, there are what I call ‘hard archives’. Some research institutions, like the library
of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, hold large, well-organized collections archived
7
8
9
10
University, 2017, https://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/174493766/Ph.d._afhandling_2017_Crone1.PDF.
See for example MBC’s documentary series about the 1950s and 1960s, Ayam al-Sayyid Arabi (The
days of ‘Mister Arab’), DVD, 2009,.
Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Manfred Sing, ‘Brothers in Arms: How Palestinian Maoists Turned Jihadists’, Die Welt des Islams 51.1
(2011): 1-44.
Sune Haugbolle and Manfred Sing, ‘New Approaches to Arab Left Histories’, Arab Studies Journal 14.1
(2016): 90-97.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
11
for their own purpose of understanding and furthering a political goal, in this case the cause of
Arab unification.11 Political party offices, such as the national branches of communist parties,
have libraries and archives that they may open up to researchers looking for reports, speeches,
and perhaps more classified documents. The archives of some security services have been
opened to the public, as for example the papers of Emir Farid Chehab, head of Lebanon's
intelligence agency (the Sûreté Générale) from 1948-1958, whose reports on various leftist
groups in the 1950s and 1960s are now available courtesy of the Wilson Centre’s Public
Policy Program.12
Such institutional archiving helps historians immensely. Still, most sources must be retrieved
from private collections, obscure library stacks, or backroom bookshops. Many state archives
remain closed to researchers. Sometimes missing pieces of information have to be put
together from personal narratives of surviving members of the Left. Even when books, journals,
and letters are catalogued, it can be difficult work to find them. Locating libraries and formal
archives takes time and resources.
Sometimes scholars and artists share their works-in-progress and file them on research blogs
and project webpages.13 Sometimes they collaborate on collecting oral histories, political
documents, and art. Two outstanding projects on the Palestinian revolutionary movement
show how different formats can be used to display such collections. Given the crucial
importance of Palestine for the Arab Left, these projects intersect with various genres of Arab
Left historiography and archival practices. The first, Past Disquiet – Narratives and Ghosts
from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, is an exhibition by curator Rasha
Salti and researcher Kristine Khouri. The exhibition, which opened at the MACBA Museu d’Art
Contemporani de Barcelona in February 2015 and has since travelled to galleries around
the world, uncovers networks of individuals and practices behind a 1978 exhibition that the
PLO organized in Beirut. Illustrating the multiple themes and interrogations that guided Salti
and Khouri’s investigation, Past Disquiet stitches forgotten histories together and maps lost
cartographies from recorded testimonies and private archives of the international artists who
participated in the event. By retracing the complicated affiliations and solidarities that linked
militant artists across the world, the project offers historians a way into the imaginaries and the
networks of the international Left at the time, and the means by which they made Palestine
a central nodal point. In an interview, Salti and Khouri stress that we need to ‘resurrect’
these radical histories today if we want to understand internationalism in our recent past,
and particularly the role that radical spaces like Beirut and radical movements like the PLO
played in tying it all together.
The ’70s are not the distant past, yet the universe of the international, anti-imperialist
leftist solidarity in which the “International Art Exhibition for Palestine” was embedded
seems to have lapsed from memory – it’s not yet part of the art-historical canon. The
11
12
13
Centre for Arab Unity Studies, https://caus.org.lb/ar/home/.
Wilson Center Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/209/emir-farid-chehabcollection.
See for example, https://ruc.dk/en/entangled.
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struggle for Palestine galvanized many artists, as did opposition to the US war in Vietnam,
the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the United States-backed dictatorships in
Chile and Central America. The 1978 Beirut exhibition became a prism through which
to look at these movements and the artistic practices affiliated with them. In one of
the versions of the exhibition’s press release, we had actually used the verb suturer,
because at some level, we were mending tears, ruptures: This idea remains essential
to our motivations.14
Fig. 2: Past Disquiet, exhibited in A Space, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, October 2016.
Resurrecting memories that are dead but should be living, mending a broken and scattered
past, and re-collecting it in the age of new revolutions are the central ambitions of much
artistic work focused on Arab radicalism. Salti and Khouri’s output – a temporary exhibition
and a catalogue – does not make use of the internet, thereby obviously limiting its archiving
functions. The Palestinian Revolution, in contrast, makes full use of the internet. What was first
a large international research project led by historians Karma Nabulsi and Abdel Razzaq Takriti
has resulted in a bilingual Arabic/English online learning resource that explores Palestinian
revolutionary practice and thought from the Nakba of 1948, to the siege of Beirut in 1982.15
Nabulsi and Takriti (who participated in the conference that led to this book) distinctly do
not view their project as an archive, but rather as a pedagogical tool for teaching courses on
Palestine, supplemented by an upcoming book that will go into further detail about the material
available on the webpage depository. Indeed, the page does not function as a standard archive
with indexing of the collection, nor does it contain the full amount of material collected in the
project. However, if we view the Arab online archive as a hybrid networked venture, as they
suggest we should, The Palestinian Revolution arguably participates in archiving the Arab Left,
not least by storing rare texts and narratives (video-recorded and made available on YouTube).
14
15
‘Interview with Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri’, Artforum International 53.9 (May 2015): 330.
The Palestinian Revolution, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
13
Fig. 3: The Palestinian Revolution webpage.
Hard Archives vs. Facebook Memories
Retrieving, collecting, and piecing together archives of the Arab Left is methodologically
challenging. Some archives are hard – stored in libraries, formal collections, and institutional
repositories. Meanwhile, as I have shown, traditional mass media, the art world, and the
internet are bursting with individual and group efforts to come to terms with the region’s
radical past. The two archives – the hard and the hybrid – each has its strengths and
weaknesses when it comes to furthering critical historical work. Historians today have to
wrestle with both.
One instructive example of the possibilities and difficulties of online archiving is the Facebook
group Collective Memory: Documents of the Left in the Arab World.16 Palestinian historian
Musa Budeiri, author of a groundbreaking book about the early Palestinian communist
movement, created the group in June 2017.
As a longtime resident of Jerusalem, he gathered a huge collection of documents mainly
from the Arab communist tradition, without finding the time or space to work with most of the
material. It was only after moving to London that he gained the necessary distance to organize
it. Looking for ways to share his material and connect with others interested in the topic, he set
up a Facebook page and began uploading documents bit by bit. After a few years, he became
16
See, https://www.facebook.com/arabcommunistparties/.
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frustrated with the limited results of his efforts. In order to secure a more permanent place
for his collection, he has therefore donated it to the Institute for International Social History
(IISH) in Amsterdam, where he plans to move the material soon.17
Fig. 4: Collective Memory: Documents of the Left in the Arab World.
Incidentally, I have been involved in efforts with other historians and veteran scholaractivists of the Left to retrieve collections of rare journals, letters, and papers from Egypt,
Lebanon, and Syria and move them to the IISH. These include collections of the groups
Hizb al-’amal al-shuyu’i fi Suria and al-Tajammu al shuyu’i al-thawri. As the holders of one
of the world’s largest collections of documents from non-Western social movements, the
IISH has the institutional resources to gather and protect papers that might otherwise
disappear. Collecting them in one archive makes the work of historians immensely more
manageable and creates a focus for a sustained new historiographical effort. Ideally, these
collections would be digitized and freely available online. However, in an institutional
setting, copyright issues matter more than in the ‘hybrid archive’, where people simply
post their material. Digitizing and archiving online require substantial resources. As a result,
there is still no guarantee that the documents from the IISH collection will be available to
the public on a platform that allows non-academic audiences to engage with them.
17
Personal communication with Musa Budeiri, 2 September 2019.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
15
Budeiri and the IISH represent two different ways of approaching the archival question.
Budeiri’s is individual, but generative of new publics and in that sense open and hybrid,
connecting with other archivists, historians, and anyone interested in the topic. The IISH
is institutional and organized, but also, by default, more closed and less generative and
connective. The question is: How to make hard and hybrid archives connect? I believe this is
necessary, because we need both. In addition, small efforts online can sometimes generate
more exciting work than well-organized collections hiding in book stacks. In fact, Budeiri’s
disappointment with the results of his page contradicts my own sentiments and those of
many of my colleagues who use the page. We appreciate the open source availability and
the discussions that the Facebook platform facilitates. The page is a treasure trove of rare
images, articles, speeches, and letters that we could not find elsewhere. Postings often
lack the circumstantial evidence that is important when dealing with source material, such
as the larger text corpus that a document is part of, when and how it was collected, and
sometimes the precise authors. At the same time, the unexpected findings often introduce
new perspectives to our work. From our point of view, although Budeiri may have wanted
his archive to generate even more interest, it has been a roaring success because it is
online on a platform that allows for engagement. Although some of us work to create a hard
archive with librarians who protect the documents and index them properly, we depend
on the hybrid archive to make research dynamic and connective.
Five Trajectories in Arab Left Historiography
Working with an emerging hybrid archive pushes us to look at the individual histories
of revolutionaries, their movements, parties, and spaces. On a broader level, it raises
questions about the bigger picture, the modern history of the region, and the role of the
Left. One way to disentangle obfuscating narratives from each other is through a clearer
periodization, and by default through a clearer ordering of historical sources. In the
final part of this essay, I will suggest a way to periodize the history of the Arab Left that
pays attention to current archiving practices. Most books and articles have traditionally
privileged national ordering, such as the Lebanese Left, the Palestinian Left, the Saudi
Left, etc. In contrast, online archive projects tend to privilege transnational aspects of the
Left, perhaps as a reflection of the transnational concerns at stake for archival activists
as well as the groups they tend to focus on archiving.
In the emerging scholarship resulting from engagement with Arab Left histories, five
distinct historiographical projects with contiguous archives and sources intersect and
overlap. First, historians of the Nahda reform period trace the beginnings of the Left back
to the debate between Islamic reformers and so-called materialists in the late 19th century.
Historical materialism as a way to rethink the relation between man, nature, and society
laid the groundwork for socialist visions of development and independence. There is no
central archive for the Left during this period and historians have to retrieve it from library
collections in the region, in Europe, and in the US.18
18
See Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
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The second historiography is that of Arab communism. After the early Arab Marxists
became enthralled with the Bolshevik Revolution, they established communist parties in
Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Palestine. The Marxist-Leninist dogma that Joseph
Stalin’s Comintern imposed left a deep imprint on Arab communist parties. It effectively
meant that Arab communists struggled to develop the Marxist system of thought into a flexible
methodology, which might have helped them understand the realities and differing conditions
of their own countries. At the same time, communist parties became formidable organizations,
particularly in Iraq. Many of the central archives, not least those in Russian, have yet to be
analyzed properly. Part of the archival project here must be one of translation, as very few
historians of the Middle East read and write in English, Arabic, and Russian.
Stalinism had a long-lasting impact particularly on the communist parties of the Levant
under the lifelong leadership of Khalid Bakdash. In reaction to Bakdash’s position, a group
of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian intellectuals inspired by the British New Left of the late
1950s wrote critically against the party, against Moscow, and against the Arab socialism
of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baath Party. This ‘New Left’ of critics and subsequent
revolutionary movements is the third distinctive subject area in the historiography of the Left.
It had important iterations in the Maghreb and connected with student and solidarity groups in
Europe. This intellectual vanguard coalesced with members of the Arab Nationalist Movement
to form the revolutionary ‘fronts’ of the late 1960s and 1970s such as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP),
the Communist Party-Political Bureau in Syria, and the Organization for Communist Action in
Lebanon. Many writers’ political affiliations with these groups and their political and military
struggles in the Lebanese Civil War, in the Palestinian resistance, and in the confrontation
with the Syrian regime of Hafiz al-Asad, have strongly influenced the post-1967 Arab Marxist
tradition, not least in the Levant. Their embattled history and the prominence of several of its
protagonists in Arab cultural life has meant that this section of the Left has received a lot of
attention. Some of their intellectual production is being archived, as mentioned earlier, but
many sources are still untapped.
Republican Arab socialism, originating in the Baathist and Nasserist regimes of the 1960s and
continuing in Syria and Algeria until today, constitutes the fourth historiographical cluster. It is
perhaps the trickiest to deal with because these regimes defy any facile identification of the
Left with ‘the good guys’ of Arab history. As previously mentioned, this is a wrong assumption
that we should reconsider. One way to do that is to read the archives of the Iraqi regime’s
substantial engagement with the international non-aligned movement.19 Or one could point
to the entanglement between the Marxist branch of the Syrian Baath Party on one hand, and
various Marxist-Leninist groups on the other (some of which lay the seeds of the PFLP and
the DFLP). These connections appear in state archives that scholars publish online, but also
in historical work on the ‘Arab New Left’.
19
Michael Degerald, The Legibility of Power and Culture in Ba’thist Iraq from 1968-1991, PhD
Dissertation, Seattle, University of Washington, 2018. The author is working on publicizing his collection
of Iraqi state files regarding the non-aligned movement.
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17
Since the end of the Cold War, the global crisis of Marxism effectively dovetailed with the
decline of socialist and communist movements in the region. This led to introspection among
its former members. Consequently, much recent research on the left examines reflexivity and
memory work since the 1990s, not least the work of Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers, many
of whom had been part of the New Left decades before. While some maintained a dogmatic
Marxism (mostly represented by currents around the official Arab communist parties), many
drifted toward liberalism. Post-Marxism also involves feminist critiques from within communist
movements. Some post-Marxists dismiss the claim that Marxism is an infallible scientific
theory, some have moved on to theoretical pluralism. They maintain class analysis, while
others only apply select elements of the Marxian heritage. In an Arab context, moving on
to theoretical pluralism after the end of the Cold War meant critiquing the lack of internal
democracy in Arab communism and its accommodation with liberalism. This accommodation
also carried the practical implication that, by the mid-1990s, a significant proportion of Arab
Marxists had left the party and became free-floating intellectuals. Post-Marxism and memory
work constitutes the fifth historiographical trend. The main sources here are autobiographies
and cultural journals such as al-Adab and al-Jadid. These journals, along with many others,
have been archived on the webpage archive.alsharekh.org, along with many other radical,
progressive journals.20
Conclusion
What comes after post-Marxism is still an open question. It includes the time of the alterglobalization movement in the early 2000s and then the Arab Uprisings. It is our time and
not quite history. Yet, as all the articles in this book show, the ability to archive online has
created a reflexivity that supersedes all previous generations. We seem to make present
history at a record pace. This generation of leftists, many of whom were active in the Arab
uprisings of 2011 and protested against ruling parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and now Sudan
and Algeria, came of age with a different outlook than their jaded parents and grandparents.
They are condemned to follow what Stuart Hall called a ‘Marxism without guarantees’, a
less teleological and self-assured leftism that characterizes late modernity.21 They are also
hyper-connected with contemporary forms and grammars of mobilization through the internet.
As part of the globalized, networked generation, they know how to tap into the mobilizing
potentials of the internet. This includes the ability to archive their own political work and that
of previous generations.
The history of the Left shows this young generation not just what went wrong in the past, but
equally what we could call ‘past futures’, the utopias that failed and the avenues not taken.
Some were borne out in revolutionary projects, some were brutally defeated, some went
awfully wrong, and others failed to materialize. By submitting them to a collective, hybrid
archive, activists have opened up a conversation about the Left that will continue to stimulate
reflection and, one hopes, action.
20
21
See, ‘Archives of the Levant’, http://archive.alsharekh.org/AllMagazines.aspx.
Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees’, Journal of Communication Inquiry
10.2 (1986): 28-44.
18
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References
Aouragh, Miriyam. ‘L-Makhzan al-’Akbari: Resistance, Remembrance and Remediation in
Morocco’, Middle East Critique 26.3 (2018): 241-263.
Arshif al-majalat al-adabiya wal-thaqafiya al-’arabiya (Archive of literary and cultural Arabic
journals), http://archive.alsharekh.org/AllMagazines.aspx.
Beydoun, Ahmad. Drawers of the Wind blog, https://adrajarriyah.home.blog/.
Budeiri, Musa. The Palestine Communist Party 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for
Internationalism, London: Haymarket books, 2010.
Center for Arab Unity Studies, Beirut, https://caus.org.lb/ar/home/.
Collective Memory: Documents of the Left in the Arab World, Facebook group, https://www.
facebook.com/arabcommunistparties/.
Crone, Christine. Producing the New Regressive Left, PhD dissertation, Copenhagen,
Copenhagen University, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, 2017.
Dakhlia, Leyla. ‘Archiving the State in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions’, in Sune Haugbolle
and Mark Levine (eds.) Altered States: Remaking of the Political in the Arab World Since
2010 (forthcoming).
Degerald, Michael. The Legibility of Power and Culture in Ba‘thist Iraq from 1968-1991, PhD
dissertation, Seattle, University of Washington, Department of History, 2018.
The Emir Farid Chehab Collection, Wilson Centre, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/
collection/209/emir-farid-chehab-collection.
Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left, project webpage, Roskilde University,
https://ruc.dk/en/entangled.
Haugbolle, Sune and Manfred Sing. ‘New Approaches to Arab Left Histories’, Arab Studies
Journal 14.1 (2016): 90-97.
Hall, Stuart. ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees’, Journal of
Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 28-44.
Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 18601914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
19
The Palestinian Revolution, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/.
Salti, Rasha and Kristine Khouri. Interview, Artforum International 53.9 (May 2015).
Sing, Manfred. ‘Brothers in Arms: How Palestinian Maoists Turned Jihadists’, Die Welt des
Islams 51.1 (2011): 1-44.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Towards an Arab Left Reader: Key Documents in Translation and Context, Conference,
Cambridge, UK, 12-14 April 2018, http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27446.
‘Towards New Histories of the Left’ Roundtable Discussion, International Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies 51.4 (2019).
20
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02. TIME CAPSULES OF CATASTROPHIC TIMES
MARK R. WESTMORELAND1
I wish we could just forget things, and I wish we could simply not have archives. It’s
liberating in a way, living with YouTube, as ephemeral records, is liberating.2
— Akram Zaatari
Until we find ourselves in a utopian moment, the archive is going to continually be in
play, much like it is today, with varying degrees of urgency or with various targets. To
continue to build and assemble out of these moments of recent history is something
that, regardless of whether the revolution is completely successful or a complete
failure, remains a political and humanistic imperative, something we must do to
continue to build and go forward.3
— Sherief Gaber
Vis-à-vis
Two figures stand facing the calamities of history. One figure’s face is full of wonder and
horror, unable to look away from the spectacle of death while backpedaling away from the
waste piling up in the wake of progress and power. The other’s turns away from our gaze
to direct us at his own vision of recurrent catastrophe. The first makes copious notes that
desperately document the ruins before they disappear under more rubble. The second
quickly sketches the fleeting moments of critical clarity that appear in a flash and then
vanish as if they never happened. In the desperation of the moment, the first cannot
organize these memos, but anxiously hides them so they won’t vanish in the storm of
violence as time marches on. Despite the urgency of the situation, the second knows
we’ve seen it all before and are no longer moved, nevertheless remaining steadfast to bear
witness and remember the symbolic connections being severed. When trying to escape
from the fascists, the first is compelled to take his life knowing already that the alternative
would be unbearable. While continuing the resistance in exile, the second is assassinated
on the street by a traitor. The first figure is inspired by Walter Benjamin and his writings on
1
2
3
This text was written as part of the ‘Resistance-by-Recording’ project based at the Department of Media
Studies (IMS), Stockholm University. The research was made possible by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
Reference No. P14-0562:1.
Stuart Comer, ‘Uneasy Subject “Interview with Akram Zaatari”’, in The Uneasy Subject, Leon, Spain &
Mexico City, Mexico: Musac & Muac, 2011, p. 129.
Quoted in Alisa Lebow, Filming Revolution, A Stanford Digital Project, Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2018. See also https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/article/234/sherief_gaber.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
21
The Angel of History.4 The second evokes Naji al-Ali and his cartoon character,Hanthala.5
Faced with a growing mountain of rubble and ruins, the archive is reminiscent of Walter
Benjamin’s seminal figure – the Angel of History – cast in an epic performance facing an
endless storm of destruction called the past. Inspired by Paul Klee’s drawing, in which the
Angel faces us wide-eyed and open-winged, we as the viewers of this drawing assume a
position in reverse of the Angel’s perspective. We do not see what the Angel witnesses, but
instead register her surprised affect. In effect we are bearing witness to the traumatization
of the Angel of History, who in turn is witnessing the catastrophic accumulation of human
destruction. While the future void is unknown and unseen, we can be sure that it will soon
be filled with the debris of what has come to pass. The ambitions of continual progress will
inevitably succumb to the catastrophes of lost causes.
If we recast the Angel of History as Hanthala – the iconic cartoon creation of Naji al-Ali of a
Palestinian boy facing an unending series of disasters – we, as the viewers of these comics,
steadfastly look over his shoulder to witness what he sees. Unlike Benjamin’s engagement
with the Angel, Hanthala refuses to face us (the viewer of the image), apparently turning his
back on the world in a reflexive gesture meant to critique how the world has turned its back
on Palestine. Whereas we can only imagine the violent storm blowing in the face of the Angel
of History and feel her frontal affect, Hanthala serves as a guide for onlookers to recognize
the destruction of Palestine and the larger Arab world without ever giving us his face.
The Angel of History and Hanthala could in fact be the same figure. Both facing the mounting
catastrophe of history, bearing witness to all the calamity unfolding, while the records of
these disasters recede on the distant horizon to make room for the next shocking event.
And yet, neither the Angel nor Hanthala can face the future, whether merely because the
future is unknown and unseeable, or because the past overwhelmingly blinds any other
perspective. These two figures of the angel and the boy become emblematic of different
theories of witnessing and serve as a reminder of the impossibility of historical equivalence
and universal modes of witnessing. Whereas the Klee drawing structures an impossibility of
witnessing what the Angel witnesses, but nevertheless assumes the accessibly of traumatic
testimony, the Hanthala figure reflexively invites (perhaps beseeches) the viewer to see what
he sees while refusing to give us access to his own affective experience. By refusing the
conventional testimonial frame of a talking head, which privileges the face as a window to
human interiority, Hanthala’s refusal challenges the viewer to rethink one’s assumptions
about the act of witnessing.
What do these contrasting parables tell us – fellow scholars, artists, and activists – about
archives in the Arab world? As the billowing pile of past progress becomes the material
4
5
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt (ed.)
Illuminations: Essays by Walter Benjamin, New York: Schocken, 1969, pp. 253-67.
The name Hanthala is commonly transliterated as Handala, signaling the difficulty of appropriately
registering the Arabic letter ẓāʾ in Latin script. For more on Hanthala, see Naji Salim al-Ali, A Child in
Palestine: Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali, London: Verso, 2009.
22
THEORY ON DEMAND
remains of the future, how might contemporary archival practices lead us to see both the
destruction rising up before them and their shocked expressions at what unfolds? Like al-Ali,
we must recognize the importance of witnessing, of unflinchingly being committed to collecting
evidence and making records of what’s happening. Like Benjamin, we must document and
organize these fragments into a unified whole to create a synergetic potential for a future
generation. As witnesses to these calamities, we must commit ourselves to be the custodians
of the past, carrying these precious remains into a new era without already having clarity of
purpose. While the availability and accessibility of these material remains are prerequisites for
their later activation, how can an archive be assembled with the potential to be activated again
at another time? For image activists in the Arab world where the norms of video authorship
and political action continually shift, the burden of archiving recent revolutionary events
nevertheless poses many concerns about usage rights, authorship, accountability, and legality,
not to mention history and representation.
Fig. 1: Cartoon of Hanthala published with permission of Naji Al-Ali family; original publication 13 October
1982, Beirut, As Safir newspaper.
Eight-Hundred-and-Fifty-Eight Hours
The uprisings and downfalls across the Arab world since the end of 2010 have been fertile
territory for citizen-journalists and activist-filmmakers to document both the assembling of
mass protests and the atrocities of state violence. In Egypt, images played an unprecedented
role during the initial uprising – from the frenetic scenes of spectacular violence to the online
circulation of vernacular images to the rescreening of protest videos on the streets to the
posters that provided English captions for foreign viewers of the events. Most of the people
drawn to these street protests with their cameras had been neither politically active nor skilled
in news-making beforehand. And yet, the videos they shot and shared provided the main
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
23
source of information for people across the globe before the major news outlets arrived on
the scene. The dominant narrative in global media quickly became about Revolution 2.0 and
the affordances of new mobile, interconnected digital technology to enable an unaffiliated
network of filmers to upload their videos for both those only a few blocks away and audiences
watching thousands of miles from the scene.6 Although only a small number of these videos
went truly viral, the collective recording of these events, producing thousands of videos from a
multiplicity of perspectives, provided momentary glimpses of mass movements from the street.7
Although those videos circulating on social media and televized on satellite networks
bore witness to the unprecedented events unfolding from a variety of vantage points, the
shared exhilaration of these rebellious images circulating online often gave way to fleeting
sensationalism. This mediated phenomenon mistakenly decontextualized these images from
the spontaneous and improvized practices that created, collected, curated, and continued
to care for them in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Despite being largely uncoordinated
acts, the process of shooting video and uploading it online is an important context for thinking
through the range of filmmaking practices needed to create and sustain an unaffiliated record
of the revolution.8 As Alisa Lebow notes, ‘it was crucial not only that there were cameras there
to document it but that there was a place where that material would be stored, to be used to
contest the government claims’.9 Disconnecting these practices from celebratory discourses
about social media helps bring the mundane features of the archive into focus.
858: An Archive of Resistance, compiled by members of the Mosireen media collective,
embodies many of the attributes of the uprisings that enacted new and inspiring modes of
collective politics. The origins of the archive lie in the Media Tent during the occupation of Tahrir
Square in 2011.10 Among other forms of collective action mobilized in this liminal moment, the
Media Tent became a site to channel the photos and videos being collectively produced in the
square (and beyond). Here the people could pool their records of witnessing with the ambition
of collecting visible evidence for future trials. This emergent archive also provided materials to
international media producers absent from some of the most important events.
This initial archive of collective action served as the seed for the so-called Mosireen archive.
Omar Hamilton recounts, ‘The first mission was to collect and preserve of [sic] as much digital
memory of the initial 18 Days as possible’.11 But following the glorified 18 days that culminated
in the ousting of entrenched President Hosni Mubarak, the regime continued to violently
6
7
8
9
10
11
Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power: A Memoir,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Mark R. Westmoreland, ‘Street Scenes: The Politics of Revolutionary Video in Egypt’, Visual
Anthropology 29, no. 3, 26 May 2016: 243-62, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1154420.
Mark R. Westmoreland, ‘Documentary Film Making’, in Mona Baker, Bolette B. Blaagaard, and Luis
Pérez González (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media, New York: Routledge, in press.
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/article/226/mosireen.
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup and Sherief Gaber, ‘Making Media Public: On Revolutionary Street Screenings
in Egypt’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 2903-2921; Lebow, Filming Revolution.
Omar Robert Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Mosireen Video Timeline’, Ibraaz, 4 July
2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/169.
24
THEORY ON DEMAND
suppress dissent. Soon those who had connected in the Media Tent, like Hamilton, realized
that if the continuing revolution was going to be documented it would have to be done by the
people participating in it.12 Many activists gained resolve in the turbulent months that followed
with varying efforts to reoccupy the streets that ebbed and flowed with both celebratory and
crushing force.13 On the scene during the army’s horrifying massacre outside the Maspero
state television headquarters, Mosireen’s first edited film uploaded to YouTube ‘The Maspero
Massacre’ crystallizes their imperative.14 Brought together around a shared belief in the basic
tenants of the revolution – ‘bread, freedom, and social justice’ – and ‘that media should
always be confrontational toward power’, around fifteen core members within a larger network
of contributors and supporters constitute the media collective.15 Among a variety of citizenjournalist efforts and activist collectives, Mosireen (meaning ‘determined ones’, but also a
play on the Arabic word for Egyptians, ma riyyīn) proved to be one of the more significant for
their well-organized, multifaceted, and coordinated efforts. More importantly, the Mosireen
media collective provided a key example of media activism committed to radically new political
formations. Devoted to horizontal structures of non-hierarchical authorship and management,
they refused outside funding or sponsorship, and found local support to offer training and
equipment to anyone interested in contributing to the demand for camera-mediated activism.
Their vision of social change remained resolutely revolutionary as they focused on documenting
street protests, worker strikes, and mass sit-ins. From their crowdsourced material, the
collective produced dozens of short videos covering different issues and events specifically
from the perspective of the street, many of which featured in mainstream news. By January
2012, Mosireen briefly became the most viewed nonprofit YouTube channel in the world.16 That
said, they emphatically placed their emphasis on addressing the local population – the street
– holding impromptu public screenings in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.17 Out of the ephemeral
cloud of social media and back down on the streets, another member of Mosireen, Philip Rizk,
notes that they ‘also disseminated [their] images through flash drives, CDs and Bluetooth
connections in an attempt to use new methods to get our images into different spaces: living
rooms, coffee shops, university dorms, or further street screenings’.18 The impromptu and
spontaneous nature of these images, combined with their shared assembly and collective
identity, added to the potentiality that anything was possible.
Online attention and public outreach led to an exponential growth in their donations and the
initial collection from the Tahrir Media Tent quickly grew by several terabyte, spread over
a series of hard drives. With only a small portion of the archive materials available in their
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Khalid Abdalla, ‘The Advent of Mosireen 25 February 2011’, in Lebow Filming Revolution. https://
filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/clip/37/the_advent_of_mosireen_25_february_2011.
Abdalla, ‘The Advent of Mosireen’.
The Mosireen Collective, The Maspero Massacre 9/10/11, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=00t-0NEwc3E&feature=youtu.be.; Omar Robert Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution:
The Maspero Massacre: October 2011’, Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/170.
Sherief Gaber, ‘The Mosireen Collective’, in Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.
supdigital.org/clip/79/the_mosireen_collective.
Bel Trew, ‘Egyptian Citizen Journalism “Mosireen” Tops YouTube’, Bel Trew: Freelance Journalist (blog),
20 January 2012, http://beltrew.com/2012/01/20/egyptian-citizen-journalism-mosireen-tops-youtube/.
Mollerup and Gaber, ‘Making Media Public’; Westmoreland, ‘Street Scenes’.
Philip Rizk, interview by Shuruq Harb, 20 May 2013, http://www.artterritories.net/?page_id=2997.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
25
online videos, the ambition to make the archive fully accessible online emerged early in its
formation. But the magnitude of the collection, combined with a host of complicated ethical
issues, saddled Mosireen with a monumental burden. Inexperienced with managing large data
collections and facing a continual influx of new material, Mosireen struggled to implement
the best practices in data management after the fact. Initially, a simple date and author folder
structure enabled some level of organization, but these efforts had to be completed piecemeal
as they were constantly responding to an unstable and dynamic political context. When editing
their own videos or trying to provide content upon request, they had to rely on the distributed
memory of the collective to identify the correct hard drive and file. Furthermore, they were
not simply depositing material into an archive, but relying upon it ‘as a tool in the struggle’ to
understand the events within a broader context of rapidly shifting political conditions.19 While
committed to tagging and indexing the materials, they recognized the messiness as integral
to the conditions of this archive and sought ways to ‘preserve the disorderliness’.20
In a similar vein, Mosireen did not want the archive to serve simplistic purposes. One of the
affordances of having such a massive collection was the ability to imagine different kinds of
engagements. If queried in a generative manner – ‘How to get people in the rabbit hole?’ –
the archive could help rethink the problems of the present. Sherief Gabr, who served as one
of the main custodians of the archive, imagined a way of beginning with specificity, rather
than grandiose ideas. Start with the extremely granular then pull back to see what emerges.
Pick concrete variables that can be traced through the archive irrespective of conventional
organizational schemes. A particular site examined from different positions in ways that
displace the typical subject. This analytical approach to the archive enacts a ‘cybernetic
storyteller’ as a generator of narratives and arguments, new political situations and analytical
agencies, without prefigured connections.21 This is not what YouTube offers. As articulated by
artist Lara Baladi, who with Mosireen initiated the street screenings of protest footage known
as Tahrir Cinema:
the problematic nature of relying on the internet itself as an archive, given the
algorithmic logic that drives Google and other search engines, which organizes material
in ways that prioritize the new and the sensational, making it difficult if not impossible to
find artifacts from the past, even the recent past.22
Ethical dilemmas presented similar conceptual challenges. Unlike a repository hidden in
the stacks where documents collect dust, Mosireen’s ideal for the archive required open
access. This demonstrated their activist commitment to deliver stories and images entrusted
to them by the people of the street. Mosireen felt burdened by their collection of images
and the magnitude of their responsibility to give the images back to the people, not specific
individuals, but a more collective sense of those revolutionaries who took to the streets to fight
19
20
21
22
Sherief Gaber, “The Archive,” in Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/
clip/80/the_archive.
Sherief Gaber, “Organising the Archive,” in Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.
supdigital.org/clip/81/organising_the_archive_.
Sherief Gaber, Beanos, Zamalek, interview by Mark R. Westmoreland, March 2015.
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/theme/75/archive.
26
THEORY ON DEMAND
for justice, many losing life or limb. Access also presents infrastructural challenges to address
the demands of delivering thirty days of footage to the servers in an organized manner, not to
mention designing an interface to facilitate jumping down the euphemistic rabbit holes. The
pernicious and multifaceted issues with access remain at the core of this and other archives
of the Arab uprisings.
One of the risks of giving the archival footage an online Creative Commons license means that
it can be freely appropriated for counter-revolutionary purposes. Access by nefarious parties
can expose people to persecution. In fact, the viability of the archive required hiding it from
authorities, making duplicates to be stored in different locations, and restricting access ‘on
the basis of networks of trust that seem […] to be frail and unreliable’.23 As Alisa Lebow has
argued in her Filming Revolution project, the various unofficial efforts to produce ‘a “people’s
archive” of the revolution’ present the same dilemma on an official level.24 This is evident even
in the effort to create an official archive of the revolution, headed by historian Khaled Fahmy.
While imagined to be an archive for the people, it became clear that the information gathered
therein would likely be used by the state against those who participated in the revolution.25 ‘To
gain access to any official state archive in Egypt, to this day, requires that the researcher get
permission from state security’.26
This question on how to balance their commitment to free access with the protection of people’s
identities grew increasingly difficult. Now that years had passed and different regimes moved
through power, the notion of consent presented another problematic issue to address. Nothing
has remained static or stable. Someone’s politics at the time of donating footage may have
radically shifted. This is even more challenging when considering those imaged in the footage.
For Mosireen, there is a recognition that these issues cannot be completely resolved. While
the footage may reveal compromising evidence, it was commonly understood that everything
was being recorded at the time. Furthermore, as Gaber relays to Lebow, ‘the state in Egypt
does not seem to need hard evidence in order to detain or imprison those it deems dangerous,
and thus it might not make much sense to worry about providing them with such evidence’.27
Since asking for permission can be taken too far, Mosireen places the burden on others to
contact them with requests for removal. That said, part of the arduous process of preparing
the footage for public accessibility meant culling through it and withholding material that would
clearly put people at risk.
Already exhausted and losing focus, the up swell of popular support for the army to remove the
Muslim Brotherhood left those critical of both without a defensible position to protest. Though
23
24
25
26
27
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/article/234/sherief_gaber.
Lebow’s meta-documentary is an archival project in itself that combines textual commentary with
interviews about the creative process of filmmaking in Egypt during the Arab uprisings. Lebow uses
a non-linear structural framework that makes it possible to trace different constellations of relations
and to move through themes and topics in an organic manner or by following prescribed curated
conversations.
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/theme/75/archive.
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/article/226/mosireen.
Lebow, Filming Revolution, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/theme/75/archive.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
27
many of the Mosireen members may not have known it at the time, inertia had already sealed
their fate.28 After the Rabaa massacre in August 2013, where hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood
supporters were murdered on live television, Omar Hamilton recounts:
We had no response. We were not there, we had not risked our lives to film it. We
had fallen out of the equation of power in the stand-off between the Army and the
Brotherhood. We were powerless and yet we felt complicit. We were racked by a
confusion and guilt and impotence. We sat stunned in our office day after day, smoking,
silenced.29
While committed to radically new political formations, the collective had to change tactics
under the new Abdel Fattah el-Sisi regime. As the revolutionary period collapsed, Mosireen
became even more burdened by the custodial responsibility of what had become ostensibly
the largest video archive of the revolution, particularly for its now silenced perspective from
the street protests.
Another and ultimately more abstract question that confronted the collective turned on defining
the archive. Despite the common idiomatic reference to the ‘Mosireen archive’, its members
did not want to impose their claim to it. If it is an archive of the revolution, then it belongs to the
street.30 Whether the street can access online platforms is another matter. But if the revolution
is framed in nationalistic terms as the Egyptian Revolution, then it reproduces the framework
of the nation-state, which goes against the widespread spirit of revolution emboldened across
the Arab world and part of the global phenomenon of public protests. The hopes and dreams
of these borderless revolutions and unifying uprisings in most instances became crushed.
In the subsequent years, Mosireen struggled to maintain momentum. All their strategies up
until then lost traction. Energy in the collective dissipated. Reflection mixed with pessimism,
the exhilaration of witnessing something truly emancipatory with real potential for change
confronted sentimental nostalgia and they began asking themselves if ‘what happened
meant anything at all’?31 And yet, researchers and journalists continue to laud Mosireen for
its achievements as a success story, while the group tried to reconcile its ‘post mortem’ state
vis-à-vis a failed revolution. Following the publication of its final video in February 2015,32 Omar
Hamilton laments its weaknesses, ‘This video feels, to me, like little more than a symptom
of a moment of desperation as we became lost in the endless swamp of the judiciary's
counter-revolution’.33 Filming on the streets was no longer viable and releasing new videos
28
29
30
31
32
33
Omar Robert Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Coup or a Continuation of the Revolution?’,
Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/173.
Omar Robert Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: Prayer of Fear’, Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://
www.ibraaz.org/channel/174.
Westmoreland, ‘Street Scenes’.
Sherief Gaber, Mosireen and the Battle for Political Memory (1/4), AUC New Cairo, 2014, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=qRo0cgaHoR8.
The Mosireen Collective, سنة وشهرين من العبث: قضية الشوريA Brief History of the Shura Council Trial so Far,
Cairo, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UzXqfeA6lQ&feature=youtu.be.
Omar Robert Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Brief History of the Shoura Council So Far’,
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in social media became senseless. The burden of delivering the archive to the people of the
street in many waysepitomized the larger sense of failure. Procrastination and neglect became
understandable responses to tedious tasks of organizing and viewing thousands of videos of
people and events that no longer remained, not to mention having to relive horrific scenes
of violence. But these circumstances did not absolve Mosireen from their promise to make
the archive accessible based on a shared expectation that the archive with all its parts is not
merely a repository, but an ‘arsenal’ that must be activated.34 In those hopeless years, the fate
of their archive, now 12TB in size with over thirty days of footage, provided a faint beacon of
purpose. Hamilton ends his depressing summary of their last YouTube video with optimism
for the potential of the archive, ‘soon the full archive, the raw, unedited archive will be online
and open for anyone, for everyone, to step in and make the next [film]’.35
The story of the Mosireen archive may ultimately be a testament to the perseverance of noble
ideals and the hope for political reactivation. While the idea of publishing the Mosireen archive
languished, progressing slowly in fits and spurts for another five years, becoming an endurance
test for a small set of members who could muster the dedication needed, a half dozen or so
members organized archiving retreats in 2016 and 2017 to oblige themselves to sit down and
work through the materials. With technical support provided by members of the Pad.ma open
source video archive, they designed front and backend elements of an archival platform to
actualize their long-awaited goals.
After struggling seven years to make the archive accessible, the collective launched 858: An
Archive of Resistance online featuring 858 hours of footage completely indexed and tagged
with an interface that encourages crowdsourced annotation (https://858.ma). The platform
encourages multivariate journeys through ‘thousands of histories of revolt told from hundreds
of perspectives’.36 The platform also allows further submissions, indeed encourages it. The 858
aspires ‘to make public all the footage shot and collected since 2011’.37 Now that the archive
has finally been released online, how does its absence in the streets reconcile the critiques of
Revolution 2.0 over-emphasizing technology at the expense of on-the-ground work? The fate
of this archive remains uncertain. It is unlikely that these documents will be used to incriminate
leaders guilty of human rights abuses, nor will it compel protesters to return to the streets, but
they may serve as an important resource for future revolutionaries. In more modest prose, 858
flags its inevitable limitations:
858 is, of course, just one archive of the revolution. It is not, and can never be, the archive.
It is one collection of memories, one set of tools we can all use to fight the narratives of the
counter-revolution, to pry loose the state’s grip on history, to keep building new histories
for the future.38
34
35
36
37
38
Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/175.
Gaber, Beanos, Zamalek, Interview by Mark R. Westmoreland, March 2015.
Hamilton, ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Brief History of the Shoura Council So Far’.
‘858: An Archive of Resistance’, https://858.ma/.
‘858: An Archive of Resistance’, https://858.ma/.
‘858: An Archive of Resistance’, https://858.ma/.
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The archive is now available, accessible to whomever would like to utilize it. And yet, it may
still be too soon. The undertow of crushed hope has yet to dissipate. In the present moment,
nobody may possess the ability to activate these images with revolutionary potential. If the
images of the Egyptian revolution have become bankrupt, lifeless, or otherwise inaccessible,
what hope can we anticipate for them in the future?
Archival Foundations
Elsewhere in the region, at an earlier time, others were also imagining an archive of images
made by the people across the Arab world. The Arab Image Foundation was established in
1997 by a generation of artists, photographers, intellectuals, and otherwise members of a
Lebanese post-war creative class. Establishing the AIF enacted an urgent and critical response
to a series of issues facing the image cultures of Lebanon, if not the entire region. On the one
hand, photographic archives of the Middle East were principally produced by outsiders to
the region, taken back home, and now located in European and North American capitals. On
the other hand, photographic collections within the region were at risk of destruction either
from passive forms of neglect or more active threats under conditions of war and political
instability. In the context of Lebanon, many of the earliest studios in Beirut lost their collections
during bombings, fires, and looting (often only for the silver content of the negatives). For those
displaced from their homes in war-torn areas within Lebanon and beyond, family collections
were often abandoned, looted, or destroyed. Elsewhere, well-meaning institutions often
disposed of their photographs after haphazard scanning processes intent to only salvage the
content of the image. The results of this situation also meant a loss of photographic heritage
and a lack of access to local visual cultures. Accordingly, one of the aims in creating this
collection was to safeguard the photographic heritage of their region in the face of ongoing
political violence and institutional neglect.
In the absence of a distinctly Arab photographic archive, the AIF provided a mandate for its
members to collect thousands of historical photos and negatives from countries across the
region. The members of AIF endeavored to create a collection that could enable them to write
a different history or even multiple histories of photography in the Arab region. Recounting his
reasons for co-founding AIF, Akram Zaatari says, ‘I was eager to discover what was out there
that had been inaccessible to me’.39 Through a process of conducting research, collecting
materials, and producing art projects, Zaatari was ‘guided by the possibility of discovery’.40
This generative approach resisted the idea of the archive as a preconstituted source, opting
instead for a notion of actively assembling it as an outcome of various research projects. These
projects became key sites for writing personal histories and addressing the way broad historical
trends became ‘translated into the micro, into people’s day to day’.41
39
40
41
Mark Westmoreland and Akram Zaatari, ‘Akram Zaatari: Against Photography Conversation with Mark
Westmoreland’, Aperture 210 (Spring, 2013): 62-3.
Westmoreland and Zaatari, ‘Akram Zaatari’..
Eva Respini, Ana Janevski, and Akram Zaatari, ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’, MoMA The Elaine
Dannheisser Projects Series (blog), April 2013, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/projects/
akram-zaatari/.
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In the context of an emergent critical art scene in Beirut, which has intensely problematized
the representation of war and trauma in the region, the archive has served as a master
symbol of evidentiary knowledge politics and the precarity of historically determined futures.
As an infrastructural platform to build upon and an ideological edifice to push against, the
AIF stands at the center of a key dilemma – the desire to preserve is easily corrupted into
regimes of speculative value, while at the same time the physicality of the architecture
remains vulnerable to the same fate as the nearby ruins of yesteryear. Discursively, the archive
echoes the warnings of official history and traces of erasure, but creatively it has nourished
artists and intellectuals seeking inspiration in the material forms of evidence. As such, Zaatari
insists that the AIF is not a photographic archive, but rather an archive of research practices,
which ‘has decontextualized a lot of the original images – taken them out of their social and
political economy and moved them into perhaps more of an archival/market economy’.42
According to Zaatari, the problem with framing the AIF as a photographic archive is that
these items have been displaced from their original context, but are nonetheless assumed
to speak definitively about their origin as if undisturbed. This sort of direct access to history
that many documentary forms assume typically relies on erasing the context of the artifact’s
current existence in an archive. The appropriation of thousands of photographic records and
documents of research to the foundation’s vaults also presents an ethical responsibility to
care for the vast quantities of other people’s images. The burden of this obligation has only
revealed itself in hindsight, from which Zaatari has recounted his own uncritical enactment
of an archival impulse.
Burdened by an unending custodial responsibility to these complicated objects, Zaatari has
rhetorically offered a radical reversal to the archival impulse by suggesting that the AIF return
the photographs to whence they came. We should not interpret this as a naive nostalgia as
if things once displaced can ever return to their original status. On the one hand, his intent
emphasizes a political act of repatriation, in which ‘we would be most likely able to have
new encounters with new people, get in touch with new ideas, new questions regarding the
function of photography in people’s lives now’.43 On the other hand, this signals Zaatari’s
anxiety that the archive will eventually fail as a source for critical intervention, thus anticipating
its potential for symbolic exhaustion. In the parlance of Jalal Toufiq, the traditions inscribed in
these photographs may disintegrate in one’s hands, falling into the abyss of radical closure
in which all threads of connection to their origin are lost. As such, this transfer may serve as
a rescue mission to prevent the archive from becoming a dead-end. Zaatari thus proposes a
radically different idea of preservation – one that is less concerned with an image’s material
support than its symbolic potential.
While only rhetorical, we can see the same logic at work in another one of Zaatari’s artistic
gestures. Indeed, Zaatari’s oeuvre has shown a synergy between archival collection practices
and archaeological excavation practices. Both involve a process of extraction. In a parallel
inversion, returning the photographs is coupled with the gesture of burying them in a
42
43
Anthony Downey and Akram Zaatari, ‘Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in Conversation With’,
Ibraaz 006, 28 January 2014, http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/113/.
Respini, Janevski, and Zaatari, ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’.
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31
time capsule. Time capsules represent the principle of the archive to save something for
posterity, to bury a treasure of knowledge, something taken from the present that is perhaps
unremarkable in its ordinariness or overburdened by its potentiality, with the anticipation
that one day in the future it will offer a surprise to those that opened it. Zaatari’s contribution
at documenta 13, entitled ‘Time Capsule’, performed the burial of a set of images for the
future. If someone were to unearth this time capsule in the future, they would only find tiles
painted in various shades of blue dedicated to a photographer losing his sight. He imagines
this performance as a script for radical preservation, which ‘recognize[s] the necessity of
timely withdrawal […] of documents and artifacts in times of risk’.44
In catastrophic conditions, in which time does not unfold in a linear progression, what does
the posterity of an archive mean for future generations? Zaatari’s gesture suggests not only
that future generations may have a use for the archive, but also that we in the present are not
ready to engage these images. The mandate to create an archive for posterity implies that it is
being saved for a time when it is needed. Central here is the idea that we are not making this
for ourselves in our time, but are hopeful that conditions (whether in our making or otherwise)
will enable those who follow to harvest this material. Put another way, perhaps these images
are not for us in this moment at all. While such photographs and footage have had an impact,
in their contemporaneity their effects are ephemeral and fleeting, if not also unpredictable.
The images from Egypt may definitively reveal responsibility for war crimes and human rights
abuses, which may flatly contradict the claims by these regimes, but we cannot know if, how,
and when such documents will come to be used for such purposes. Indeed, what will future
generations make of these archives? Will they appreciate the content for the reasons that we
assume are self-evident now? Or will they be able to see something in the material that most
of us nowadays can’t see?
Hindsight / Foresight
The photographic heritage of the region may not seem immediately comparable to the
circumstance of image production in contemporary media activism. The challenges facing
the Arab Image Foundation serve as conceptual models for thinking about some of the latest
iterations of catastrophic violence faced by Mosireen. Conceptually, this is important as it
helps place the material traces of the recent uprisings within a larger context of social precarity
and political activism in the Arab world. The juxtaposition of different archives helps nuance
the crucial set of concerns around collecting, organizing, and sharing images as a political act
in its own right. The lessons of the archive by intellectuals, artists, and activists working in the
Arab world remind us once again of the revolutionary imperative to enact modes of witnessing
that account for the longue durée of recurrent catastrophe. This day, like any ordinary day, is
full of images and image practices that continually reshuffle, remix, and remediate scenes of
catastrophe.45 In a way, the archive makes this recursive historiography possible.
44
45
Westmoreland and Zaatari, ‘Akram Zaatari’, p. 64.
This Day / Al-Yaoum, (dir. Akram Zaatari, 2003); Mark R. Westmoreland, ‘Making Sense: Affective
Research in Postwar Lebanese Art’, Critical Arts 27, no. 6 (November, 2013): 717-36, https://doi.org/10
.1080/02560046.2013.867593.
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The temporal and spatial shifts afforded by the mediation and assemblage of these scenes
from the Arab revolution challenges the spectacle of event-based witnessing and the
fragmentation of linear historical time with its subsequent periodization. Like the detritus
amassing before our Angel of History, the particularity of these events inevitably is flattened
into a landscape of ongoing political violence and abuse. This is not to conflate them and
disregard their historical particularity, but aims to redress the myopia generated during
the Arab Uprisings and place the temporality of the archive within a context of recurrent
catastrophe. While seemingly exceptional at the peak of the Arab uprisings in 2010-2011,
the world has lost interest in these struggles. In the intervening years the production of video
activism has had to shift concerns and strategies, taking solace in Hanthala’s steadfast
commitment to face perpetual injustice. The juxtaposition of these cases helps to resituate
the exceptionalism of the Arab Uprisings, while retaining the revolutionary affect of these
images to hold open the potential for unrealized outcomes.
While Hanthala and the Angel remain fixated on unfolding histories of violence,
Zaatari’s proposal for a future perspective on these images lingers in my mind: What if we
buried the archive of the Arab Uprisings in a time capsule for another era? By relinquishing
the right to the present, this act of altruistic posterity poses important questions for the role
of the Arab Archive and whether it should be accessed in the present or carefully packaged
for another time. Unlike in the case of family albums and studio photographs, the prospect for
repatriating the images may be more complicated but remains at the center of key concerns
and debates among media activists in the Arab world. Efforts to relinquish the burden of
the archive by making it available to their creators rely on sustaining the egalitarian notions
evoked at the time of the uprisings like the people and the street. But how then do we imagine
our posterior audience? How do we imagine the future modes of witnessing within these
archives? What sort of symbolic power will these materials have when unearthed and activated
in unforeseen ways using the latest technological modalities?
References
‘858: An Archive of Resistance’, https://858.ma/.
Abdalla, Khalid. ‘The Advent of Mosireen 25 February 2011’. In Alisa Lebow (ed) Filming
Revolution, A Stanford Digital Project, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018. https://
filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/clip/37/the_advent_of_mosireen_25_february_2011.
Ali, Naji Salim al-. A Child in Palestine: Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali. London: Verso, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt
(ed.) Illuminations: Essays by Walter Benjamin, New York: Schocken, 1969.
Comer, Stuart. ‘Uneasy Subject “Interview with Akram Zaatari”’, in The Uneasy Subject, Leon,
Spain & Mexico City, Mexico: Musac & Muac, 2011.
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Downey, Anthony, and Akram Zaatari. ‘Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in
Conversation With’. Ibraaz 006 28 January 2014, http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/113/.
Gaber, Sherief, Beanos, Zamalek. Interview by Mark R. Westmoreland, March 2015.
Gaber, Sherief. Mosireen and the Battle for Political Memory (1/4), AUC New Cairo, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRo0cgaHoR8.
____. ‘Organising the Archive’, in Alisa Lebow (ed.) Filming Revolution, A Stanford Digital
Project, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/
clip/81/organising_the_archive_.
____. ‘The Archive’, in Alisa Lebow (ed.) Filming Revolution, A Stanford Digital Project, Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/clip/80/the_
archive.
____. ‘The Mosireen Collective’, in Alisa Lebow (ed.) Filming Revolution, A Stanford Digital
Project, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018, https://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/
clip/79/the_mosireen_collective.
Ghonim, Wael. Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power:
A Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Hamilton, Omar Robert. ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Brief History of the Shoura Council
So Far’, Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/175.
____. ‘Six Moments from a Revolution:A Coup or a Continuation of the Revolution’? Ibraaz, 4
July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/173.
____. ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: Prayer of Fear’, Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://www.ibraaz.
org/channel/174.
____. ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: The Maspero Massacre: October 2011’. Ibraaz, 4 July
2017, https://www.ibraaz.org/channel/170.
____. ‘Six Moments from a Revolution: A Mosireen Video Timeline’, Ibraaz, 4 July 2017, https://
www.ibraaz.org/channel/169.
Lebow, Alisa. Filming Revolution, A Stanford Digital Project, Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2018, http://www.filmingrevolution.org/.
Mollerup, Nina Grønlykke, and Sherief Gaber. ‘Making Media Public: On Revolutionary Street
Screenings in Egypt’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 2903-2921.
Mosireen Collective. The Maspero Massacre 9/10/11, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/
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watch?v=00t-0NEwc3E&feature=youtu.be.
____. A Brief History of the Shura Council Trial so Far, Cairo, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4UzXqfeA6lQ&feature=youtu.be.
Respini, Eva, Ana Janevski, and Akram Zaatari. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’, MoMA The
Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series (blog), April 2013, https://www.moma.org/interactives/
exhibitions/projects/akram-zaatari/.
Rizk, Philip. Interview by Shuruq Harb, 20 May 2013, http://www.artterritories.net/?page_
id=2997.
This Day / Al-Yaoum, (dir. Akram Zaatari,) 2003.
Trew, Bel. ‘Egyptian Citizen Journalism “Mosireen” Tops YouTube’, Bel Trew: Freelance
Journalist (blog), 20 January 2012, http://beltrew.com/2012/01/20/egyptian-citizenjournalism-mosireen-tops-youtube/.
Westmoreland, Mark R. ‘Documentary Film Making’, in Mona Baker, Bolette B. Blaagaard,
and Luis Pérez-González (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media, New York:
Routledge, in press.
____. ‘Making Sense: Affective Research in Postwar Lebanese Art’, Critical Arts 27 no. 6
(November, 2013): 717-36, https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2013.867593.
____. ‘Street Scenes: The Politics of Revolutionary Video in Egypt’, Visual Anthropology 29 no.
3 (May 26, 2016): 243-62, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1154420.
Westmoreland, Mark, and Akram Zaatari. ‘Akram Zaatari: Against Photography Conversation
with Mark Westmoreland’, Aperture 210 (Spring, 2013): 60-65.
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03. 858: NO ARCHIVE IS INNOCENT. ON THE
ATTEMPT OF ARCHIVING REVOLT
MOSIREEN_SOURSAR
In the summer of 2016, some members of the Mosireen collective gathered after years of
inactivity to open up the mess of an archive we had mainly filmed, but also gathered from
others, over the course of three years of the Egyptian revolution, resulting in 858. Collectives
are complicated. In times of revolt, the urgency of the struggle and the intensity of working
together tended to bring us together even when differences existed, too occupied with the
reality of things to let these differences tear us apart. Today, in a period when the struggle is
at an ebb, we’ve lost the closeness of continuous collaboration, and the differences emerge.
I want to lay bare some of the discussions hidden behind the clean interface of the archive
858 because we think fights can be constructive and these differences are important to learn
from. The act of archiving is also complicated. Behind every category, every naming, the use
of language, title, and date, lies a decision that appears to have been simple when seen in its
finalized form. Every one of those decisions is a choice to participate in the game of power.
The current text is written by one member of Mosireen, it does not speak for the whole
collective. It is written particularly for comrades in revolt, near and far, for you in parallel to
whom we fought our battles, to those of you considering the act of archiving. I will describe
three fights and four discussions we had amongst ourselves in the making of 858, in the
effort to make an archive that we desired to be ‘sympathetic to those practices which
sabotage capitalistic accumulation, and those which have an interest in the future, and in
the “unrealized”.’1
#1 Discussion: Why this Archive?
Before any words are laid down on the work of archiving, particularly of archiving revolution,
I need to start with a disclaimer: what matters is having bodies on the street. I don’t want to
fall into the trap of giving images more power than they are due. Let us not over-celebrate
archives. Archiving revolt is a critical act, but it is a secondary one. First and foremost comes
the revolt, taking the risk, confronting state violence, the pain of loss, the sleepless nights,
and facing your own fears. Before I begin, I want to make clear that this act of archiving
is not the revolution, nor can this collection be the memory of that time. It entails traces
of events, particular angles, and selected excerpts of a coming together; it encompasses
rage, marches, chants, rocks thrown, and desires enacted, screamed, and spoken. Every
archived moment entails the lack of a lot of others that aren’t. We could not access the torture
1
Pad.ma, ‘Thesis #5’, Pad.ma’s 10 theses on the archive, April 2010, https://pad.ma/documents/OH.
The archive 858 was solidly influenced by the archiving practices of Pad.ma. They workshopped and
interacted with a number of Mosireen members long before the collective came about and they were
the first interlocutors when we met to seriously turn our material into an archive.
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THEORY ON DEMAND
chambers, we could not lay bare the military tribunals, nor can any archive relay the effect of
years of economic policies that privileged a few at the expense of the majority, or this invisible
thing we call neo-colonialism that keeps re-inventing itself in the most brutal of ways. Now, in
spite of all this, why the archive?
We started 858,
because the narrative of events is day by day being written by the media outlets, through
school curricula, through new laws, through the continuous incarceration of those who dare
to speak out, through the writing of books and the speaking of speeches of the tyrants in
power and their ‘democratic’ partners across the globe who engage in trade and diplomacy
and general statist performances, because the narrative is thereby taken from those who
shouted ‘we want the downfall of the system’;
because there are lessons to be found in those chants, in the tactics, in the battles won, in
the things people spoke in front of or behind a camera or audio recorder in the time of revolt;
because there are traces of the solidarity that existed between cities, between struggles,
as well as evidence of a lack thereof, both of which are critical to reflect on for the coming
uprisings;
because we must learn our lesson from the tactics of the counter-revolution that attacked
and subverted a vibrant revolt;
because the archive has the potential to shape our ideas and move our emotions, to act
as a reminder, to prepare for what is to come;
And yet, at the end of the day, 858 can be just that, nothing more.
#2 Fight: Who Took the Images?
There is a clue in the wording. We talk about image-makers, but never image-takers.
With all our failed attempts or shortcomings, one thing I certainly celebrate about Mosireen,
is that we remained a collective. With a few exceptions when we succumbed to pressure or
when we were presented as such against our wishes, our work was not assigned individual
authorship. This beautiful composition was questioned within the collective only years after
the biggest struggles had past, while discussing how to deal with authorship within the archive
structure. It was a debate that carried on for over a year.
Eventually we agreed on a position to maintain pseudonyms for the collective’s
cinematographers, which meant that we would prioritize the collective nature of the
struggle over the individual ‘taker’ of the image, i.e. we would prioritize the crowd in front
of the camera, rather than the person that is behind it. Can the images belong to those who
struggled? By canceling the assignment of authorship, can we subvert the industry that
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
37
seeks to individualize, to name in order to feed its own logic? By having the images online,
downloadable for all, can the image belong to the greater collective? Mosireen contacted
non-collective cinematographers whose footage was in the archive and asked them to decide
for themselves to reveal or anonymize their identity.
These are attempts to undermine the hegemony of authorship.
#3 Discussion: Who Owns the Images?
It’s simple, whoever owns the server owns the images. Thus:
On March 16th, 2018, the private Egyptian TV channel OnTV removed from its YouTube
channel the archive of four programs that ran during the time of revolution.
Google’s fourth quarter report of 2017 announced that the company removed over 8 million
videos with ‘a machine-learning-based algorithm to flag videos for terms of service (ToS)related violations […] to expedite the removal of propaganda videos’.2 We know that countless
videos of the non-violent protests that began the Syrian uprising were purged during this time.
No other copies of many of these exist. From these consequences, we can judge the political
intentions behind such an ‘algorithm’.
The collective didn’t want an algorithm, government, or company to decide for us which traces
to preserve and which to delete.
Pad.ma’s thesis 3 proclaims how important it is to keep images ‘in, or bring them into,
circulation, and to literally throw them forth (Latin: proicere), into a shared and distributed
process that operates based on diffusion, not consolidation, through imagination, not memory,
and towards creation, not conservation’.3 It was during the time of revolt that Mosireen
attempted this strategy of throwing forth, by projecting on the street critical videos that the
dictatorship and private companies were censoring from their channels. Tahrir Cinema was
one attempt not to limit our dissemination to the internet, to bring the images and the debate
around them to the street. We tried different distribution methods, handing out free CDs after
screenings or mass bluetooth distribution. Bluetooth sounded like a perfect fix as it did not rely
on the internet, nor was its activity recordable through mobile networks, yet we learned that
the technology was not strong enough to allow for a high number of simultaneous transfers.
With 858, we are trying with care to disseminate copies of the archive on servers worldwide
so that they remain accessible even after a potential attack or blocking of any one server.
These are attempts to undermine the hegemony of ownership.
2
3
Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.fastcompany.com/40540411/erasinghistory-youtubes-deletion-of-syria-war-videos-concerns-human-rights-groups.
Pad.ma, ‘Thesis #3’, Pad.ma’s 10 theses on the archive.
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#4 Fight: What Is the Name of the Archive? (The Factor of Time)
During the debate about naming the archive, the collective was divided, largely between
two groups: those that fought for the name ‘an-archive’, in reference to an archive that acts
as a counter-archive, and others who wanted to give the archive a name that referenced
the Egyptian revolution more directly. Those opposing the first group found ‘an-archive’ too
ideological in its nebulous reference to anarchism, while many others did not want to accede
to the archive’s usual power to determine the factor of time. The battle over narrative begins
in the details. I did not want the archive to determine when a revolt ends or begins. I did not
want us to be the ones to solely decide on which event matters and which don’t. For example,
currently the archive’s first video dates from 23 January 2011 in the city of Suez. Protesting
there began on the 23rd in solidarity with Tunis, a matter that is overlooked in most narratives
of the 25 January revolution.
The collective couldn’t agree on the name, so we settled on 858 for the hours of footage in
the archive on the final day of that debate. This meant leaving the matter of identity open to
change with time. By keeping the factor of time open, the archive is able to take away the
glorification of a centralized narrative around Tahrir Square, allowing for the continuation of
something still to come.
#5 DISCUSSION: WHAT IS IN THE ARCHIVE? (THE FACTOR OF SPACE)
I don’t believe in nation states. As much as they were conjured up one day they will disappear
again on another.
Archiving isn’t an innocent activity and in its most routine manifestation is wrapped up in
the institution of the state. It is deeply violent. We have a crisis that remains unresolved.
The footage currently dominating the archive emulates the mainstream narrative that
overemphasizes the centrality of Cairo and its Tahrir Square. This practice of centralization
within 858 is taking place within the broader problematic of the overemphasis of the Egyptian
revolution in the region’s recent and ongoing revolts. Though some members of the collective
spent time traveling around the city and the country, the majority of the footage is of Cairo
and Tahrir, where we lived. We carried out workshops in various Egyptian cities for some time
trying to collect footage, but this remains an incomplete task. Recently, some members of
the collective had a conversation about 858 with other activists and filmmakers outside the
borders of Egypt. But this issue remains unresolved because the collective doesn’t want to
create an archive that replicates centralized archives, rather we want to open the conversation
for others to add their footage here or to create sister archives that overlap in form or function
or channels of distribution.
I offer this text as an invitation to you to join Mosireen in this conversation and activity.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
39
#6 FIGHT: WHO ANNOTATES THE ARCHIVE?
Mosireen participated in the revolt not as journalists, but in roles other than that of filming and
spreading images. In our relationship to 858, we disown one of the root definitions of the term
archive as ‘records or documents preserved as evidence’. The purpose of our collection is to
learn from these traces of events; we want to do this together with others, to eat together, to
remember together. We did not collect the images as evidence, we won’t appeal to a law that
is absent – on both a local and global scale. We want to decide what a revolt or a civil war is,
whether we decide to call it a riot or protest. This archive is not about documenting crimes,
but about narrating our version of the story.
#7 DISCUSSION: WHAT KIND OF IMAGE IS IN THE ARCHIVE?
Pad.ma’s thesis 4 states:
Archival initiatives have unconsciously continued this theological impulse. Their
desire to document that which is absent, missing or forgotten stages a domain of
politics which often privileges the experience of violence and trauma in a manner in
which the experience of violence is that which destroys the realm of the ordinary and
the everyday.4
858 includes images of protest and images of violence carried out by the forces that attacked
us, but it also hosts images of the everyday, images of the day after and the day before. Images
that don’t yell, but entail the ingredients to help us prepare for a better world. Like this one:
https://858.ma/ANP/editor/F
I believe it is important that this archive begins to include images of narrative fiction, both used
or unused parts of acted films. Too often performance can do things we can’t do in other ways;
the words of the poet have an effect that the direct recounting of the event does not arouse.
The origin of the word fiction entails the act of ‘kneading or forming something out of clay’, and
so this act of fiction-ing entails an act of imagination before the thing is formed. If we continue
on with the origins of words for a moment, the term ‘utopia’, as it was first conceived by the
writer Thomas More, was meant to be a play on words, between eu-topia, the better place,
and ou-topia, the impossible place. It is not surprising that the bards of history, the scribes
of the victor, have wiped away this duality and impregnated the word with the latter meaning,
thus marking utopia as the impossible world and putting an end to the act of dreaming and
imagining the status quo. 858 is full of traces of will and desire, both a roar and a whisper. 858
wants to evoke all of these because we remain adamant about the future and the unrealized.
4
Pad.ma, ‘Thesis #4’, Pad.ma’s 10 theses on the archive.
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References
Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.fastcompany.com/40540411/
erasing-history-youtubes-deletion-of-syria-war-videos-concerns-human-rights-groups.
Pad.ma. Pad.ma’s 10 theses on the archive, April 2010, https://pad.ma/documents/OH.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
41
04. THE VIRTUOUS CIRCUITS BETWEEN UPLOAD
AND DOWNLOAD: DIGITAL AND ANALOG
ARCHIVES AND THE CASE OF GRAFFITI ART IN
REVOLUTIONARY EGYPT
MITRA AZAR
The political impact of digital technologies on the Arab revolutions has been addressed
at length by the media in the Western world, and yet remains misunderstood most of the
time. Taking as an example the Tahrir Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath –which I had the
opportunity to experience firsthand while based there from 2011 to 2014, collaborating with
local activists and shooting a couple of films1 – I would like to briefly tell a counter-history of
the impact of digital technology as a way of archiving the then unfolding Egyptian revolution.
The main aim of this essay is to show how the events of the Egyptian revolution are not the
result of the use of new technologies, but rather of the capabilities of Egyptian revolutionaries
to create a virtuous circuit between digital technologies and their offline impact, or, in other
words, to create a virtuous circuit between an online archiving practice and the IRL world.
This digital archiving practice exists concurrently with a fully analogical form of archiving,
one which has served as one of the most powerful tools in the construction of Egyptian
revolutionary consciousness: the practice of street art by Egyptian activists.
I had the opportunity to closely follow the rise of revolutionary Egyptian street art while working
on the movie Art War, a documentary that tells the story of the Egyptian revolution from
the point of view of the graffiti artists who transformed the walls of Cairo into an open air
revolutionary newspaper, updated on a daily basis for its duration.2 In a way, the practice
of street art allows for a complete re-framing of the role of technology during the Tahrir
Revolution. Street art functions as a symptom of how the label ‘Facebook revolution’ – the
name for the Tahrir Revolution coined by the international media – has been misleading,
enforcing a narrative which wants to shift agency from the people to the technologies used
by them.3 By doing so, this label pushes the idea of the essentially good nature of digital
1
2
3
I was an assistant director and director of photography on the production of Cyberwar (dir. Jakob
Gottschau, 2013) for DR TV Denmark, and on the production of Art War (dir. Marco Wilms, 2014). The
latter was screened at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2015 and described the unfolding of the Egyptian
revolution from the point of view of street art.
Art War (dir. Marco Wilms, 2014).
Jose Antonio Vargas, ‘Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook’, The New
York Times, 17 February 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/books/review/how-an-egyptianrevolution-began-on-facebook.html. Although the title confirms the tendency of international media
to simplify the role of digital media in the unfolding of the Egyptian revolution, the article manages to
somewhat clarify their role and use, departing from the book Revolution 2.0, published by Wael Gonhim,
the man who created the Facebook page ‘Kullena Khaled Said’ (‘We Are All Khaled Said’), which has
been simplistically taken as the impetus of the Egyptian uprising; Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The
Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power: A Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2012.
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media, especially of social network platforms. On the contrary, and following a provocation
by Egyptian activist and friend Alaa Abd El-Fattah, it is possible to say that ‘the Egyptian
revolution happened because the biggest mistake Mubarak made during his last days was
exactly that of switching off the Internet’.4 This reading is quite different from the one that
wants the Egyptian revolt to begin with a Facebook post. I had the chance to reflect on this
together with the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Julian Assange, who joined Abd
El-Fattah over Skype one dusty and sultry afternoon in the spring of 2012.5 At that time, Abd
El-Fattah was still free.6 Abd El-Fattah believed that Western mass media had overplayed
digital media’s central roles in archiving and activating the images coming from the Arab
revolts in order to immunize their revolutionary message, while pushing through a basically
domesticating and comforting counter-revolutionary narrative: the Egyptian revolutionaries
were broadly and symbolically assimilated to young Western internet users. Nonetheless,
this reading cannot account for why, a year after the revolution, 49% of Egyptians voted for
the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% voted for the Salifists. By the end of the call, Abd El-Fattah
reminded Assange how counterproductive closing down both the internet and phone lines
had been for the regime during the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution, since it was exactly
thanks to the inability to access information via those media – from computers to cell phones
to home phones – that a large slice of the population poured out into the streets, relying on
old social networks: neighborhood tea-rooms, mosques, churches, squares.
In order to more accurately describe how internet activisms and archival practices have
worked and how these forms of digital archiving were successful during the Egyptian uprising,
we might instead imagine a circular path which, from an offline situation, generates an online
campaign (the upload), which in turn spills into the real world (the download), loaded with
the potential gathered from its online circulation. After examining a couple of examples of
such practices, I will point to one which I believe to be the most radical of all; one that allows
us to rethink the role of physical and public space in relation to the archiving practice of the
very images which defined and fueled the Egyptian uprising, namely the role of street art and
graffiti artists in the unfolding of the Tahrir movement and in the circulation and archiving of
its images.
One of the collectives I followed the most while in Cairo was called Kazeboon.7 Kazeboon
means ‘liars’ in Egyptian Arabic. Kazeboon’s work cycle starts with a Facebook page and a
4
5
6
7
I remember Alaa Abd El-Fattah telling me this right before we started shooting a conversation between
him and Julian Assange for The Julian Assange Show. The conversation is part of a series of short films
for The Julian Assange Show, which portrayed Julian Assange in dialogue with a number of activists
and controversial political figures worldwide: The Julian Assange Show, ‘Julian Assange’s The World
of Tomorrow: Nabeel Rajab and Alaa Abd El-Fatteh’, Episode 4, YouTube, 8 May 2012, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=HdVoBlABSpc&list=PL19A6F6A10DCFB253&index=5&t=0s&frags=pl%2Cwn.
The Julian Assange Show.
Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Alaa Abd El-Fattah’, 20 September 2019,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah.
Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Kazeboon’, 20 June 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazeboon. See also
an article written by friend and activist Wael Eskandaar about the Kazeboon collective: Wael Eskandaar,
‘Egypt’s Kazeboon: Countering State Narrative’, Mei.edu, 12 July 2013,
https://www.mei.edu/publications/egypts-kazeboon-countering-state-narrative.
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43
website, which consists of a simple application form through which users can notify them
of the kind of revolutionary event they would like to organize and the kind of support they
would need.
Fig. 1: Kazeboon logo. Courtesy of Sally Toma, co-founder of the Kazeboon collective.
Kazeboon events aimed to detect the lies enforced by the military regime that took
power upon Mubarak’s demise. These have taken the shape of illegal video-projections,
concerts, demonstrations, graffiti sessions, and workshops. In this respect, Kazeboon is a
decentralized, living, archival project: autonomous nuclei of people propose an idea and
independently realize it, logistically supported by the Kazeboon network, such as when a
video projector and loudspeakers are required for outdoor screenings or electricity must
be unlawfully tapped from street lamposts. Kazeboon finds a format that will enable the
almost real-time activation of the on-going archive of images and sounds, thus emerging on
the streets of Cairo and all over Egypt from their online archiving. While writing this essay,
I got it touch once more with Sally Toma, one of the founders of the collective, to ask her
if she could send me some visual materials from the Kazeboon archive (the application
form, some graphics, the map of events). 8 She told me that the Kazeboon website and
all Facebook pages have been hacked in the last years, and that ‘due to security issues
I have and had for a while now I cut myself from accessing any of this online... [it has]
been subjected to a lot of cyber attacks and real ones’. She concluded by telling me
that, ultimately, Kazeboon decided to ‘[take] it down ourselves for future uploading on
a website but not now or from here’. When asked about whether there are any backups
of Kazeboon’s materials, she replied, ‘I am sorry dear these are questions I can’t answer
here...or anywhere really...’ – an answer which gives a sense of the current political state
of affairs in Egypt today, almost nine years after the beginning of the Tahrir Revolution.
Finally, she sent me a link to a screenshot of Kazeboon’s calendar of events. Her response
highlights the fragility of online archiving and its offline impact on the lives of the people
8
Sally Toma, Facebook chat with Mitra Azar, 21 September 2019.
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producing it. Besides the attempts of the regime to take down platforms such as the
Kazeboon page, a process of self-erasure has been on-going to cope with the increasing
risks of a more-than-ever brutal dictatorship.9
Fig. 2: Kazeboon’s calendar, January 2012. Screenshot found on Facebook. Courtesy of Sally Toma.
The well-known Tahrir Cinema, a public cinema screening series taking place in Tahrir
Square and coordinated, among others, by members of the Mosireen collective, served as
inspiration for Kazeboon’s own screening events.10 Sally Toma recalls how ‘if Tahrir cinema
tried to bring more people to Tahrir with the cinema, we wanted, instead, to bring Tahrir
Square to the people through cinema’.11 Kazeboon subsequently started to produce videos
that attempted to create ‘cognitive dissonance’ between what the military regime was
saying on television and the images recorded during protests, which depicted a completely
different reality.12 They then screened them in conservative areas of Cairo.
9
10
11
12
In her essay about Syria included in this book, Donatella Della Ratta refers to processes of erasure in
relation to the Syrian revolution. See Donatella Della Ratta, ‘Why the Syrian Archive is no Longer (only)
About Syria’.
Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Mosireen’, 23 June 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosireen.
Sally Toma, Facebook chat with Mitra Azar, 26 September 2019.
Toma, Facebook chat. 26 September 2019; The first video produced by Kazeboon
collective denounced the abuses taking place in December 2011 during a number of
sit-ins around and in Tahrir Square. See Kazeboon, ‘Haqiqat al-kazeboon – nuskha
mu‘addala’, YouTube video, 25 December 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_
avXDAp44jA&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR21P7Ni1I6FSrUmL7oQerOfWD6tdM6Jvi_
SSPA8wN0U1uLWfI9e1j67xdw.
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45
Tahrir Cinema stands as a fine example of a virtuous circuit between an online archiving
practice and its offline impact. It is, in a way, a virtuous circuit between an upload and
download phase. Mosireen activists recorded images during demonstrations and clashes
with military and police, and uploaded and archived them online to give worldwide visibility
to the events happening in Tahrir Square. Furthermore, they collected numerous videos
from other activists who were not affiliated to the collective via the internet and their wide
network of contacts in Cairo. The download phase does not end here and culminates in
the precipitation of these images in the physical world, especially in Tahrir Square in the
form of a public cinema. In this sense, Mosireen’s practice goes beyond solely archiving
images recorded by their members and attempts to build a wider and more encompassing
archive, which eventually resulted in the 858 online archive.13
Fig. 3: Tahrir Cinema screening. Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
The most ambitious Kazeboon archiving project consisted of the creation of an online
interactive map designed as a counter-narrative platform. It prompted people to identify
military figures from the Mubarak regime attempting to occupying civilian jobs in the
newly forming administrative apparatus that followed Mubarak’s fall. This map is at once
a form of decentralized archiving and a leak platform capable of verifying information
accrued from citizens through Kazeboon’s widespread network, an independent mesh of
people scattered across Egyptian territory, including beyond Cairo. Kazeboon also opened
a Facebook page called ‘No Military Officers in Civilian Position’. Sally Toma explained
to me that the goal was to deconstruct the regime’s military structure by archiving and
making visible the hidden movement between military and civilian roles. In this case, the
archival practice turns into an interactive map of the country, where users can see where
these processes are happening and take action. After exposing the army’s violence and lies
13
The archival work conducted by Mosireen can be found at: 858 - An Archive of Resistance,
https://858.ma/.
46
THEORY ON DEMAND
against the civil population, Kazeboon’s archival practice now aims to reveal how power
processes are not just repressive, but active as well.
The last example of a successful digital archiving practice I would like to highlight is
the work of the 18 Days in Egypt collective.14 When I say successful, it is important to
underline that I mean this not because of the nature of digital media, but because of the
IRL consequences these archiving practices have set in motion in terms of developing new
forms of organizing and for political agency offline, more specifically in the spaces where
the recording of the images fueling these archiving practices commenced. The 18 Days
in Egypt collective to me is an exemplary case. It was the first platform that allowed for a
form of crowd-sourced cinematic documentary practice. This is how it works: my friends
and I decide to take part in a public event; armed with cameras, smartphones, and an
internet connection, we all agree on specific tasks to fulfill; one takes pictures, one shoots
videos, a third tweets, another posts on Facebook. Once at home, we upload all of these
different real-time digital artifacts to the 18 Days in Egypt platform, where we are given
access to an online non-linear editing software, which allows us to intertwine the different
materials into a single stream composed by all the members of the group involved. Every
invited member can combine the materials and thus produce a collective editing that
mirrors the collective recording from the streets. 18 Days in Egypt is, to me, the very first
attempt to address the necessity to narrativize the bits and pieces of the gigantic archive
of images produced during the Egyptian uprising and build from them a counter-narration
that connects the dots of a scattered digital puzzle. In a certain sense, the Mosireen 858
archive would benefit from such a practice.
Finally, there has been a form of archival practice where the actual archiving has happened
fully offline and in an analog way, only to be transferred to the internet later. This is the case
of street art. Here, the virtuous circuit between online and offline (or upload and download),
defined through the successful practices of the digital archiving examples outlined above,
is somewhat inverted. While in the previous examples the images recorded with mobile
phones and cameras were uploaded online and only after being downloaded again got
invested once more in the physical spaces where they were recorded, the practice of street
art produces an archive which is, in a way, self-contained within the offline world, and
which functions independently of its online uploading and archiving. Street art performed
a key role in the narration of some of the crucial events of the Egyptian revolution and the
walls of Cairo became a real-time bulletin which alternatively honored martyrs, accused
the military regime, documented and spread information about police and military violence,
supported the activists arrested, and generally kept the Egyptian population updated about
the state of the country. ‘I liked how the walls were like a newspaper; people wrote things
like, “Don’t go down this street, there are baltageya [plainclothes thugs] down here”’, says
Ammar Abo Bakr, whom I met while shooting the movie Art War (of which he became the
14
18 Days in Egypt, http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/. The project gained a lot of visibility and it also
features on the online page of the MIT Documentary Lab, https://docubase.mit.edu/project/18-days-inegypt/.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
47
leading character).15 Ammar, who came from Luxor to Cairo to use the walls of the capital
as a form of public newspaper, quickly became one of the prominent graffiti artists involved
in the newly-born revolutionary street art movement.16
One of the first tools used by graffiti artists were stickers, which in a way tested the ground
before they engaged in large-scale murals, in the beginning of their practice. It is worth
remembering the famous ‘Mask of Freedom’ designed by Ganzeer, which was stuck all
over Cairo in February 2011, right after the Council of Military Forces (SCAF) took charge
of the country after Mubarak’s ouster – an act for which Ganzeer was, inevitably, arrested.17
Fig. 4: Ganzeer, ‘Mask of Freedom’. Courtesy of the artist. The text reads: ‘Mask of Freedom – Salut from
the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to the loving son of the nation – Now available for an unlimited
period of time’.
Stencils – also quick to make and reproducible in bulk not only by the artist but by whoever
sympathized with the message and was given agency by accessing stencil models on social
media – paired with stickers at the very beginning of the street art movement and tested
the ground for more complex drawing operations.18 A stencil appeared in the spring of
15
16
17
18
Mia Jankowicz, ‘“Erase and I Will Draw Again”: The Struggle Behind Cairo’s Revolutionary Graffiti Wall’.
The Guardian, 23 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/23/struggle-cairo-egyptrevolutionary-graffiti.
The other key figures of this movement, together with Ammar Abo Bakr, were Ganzeer, El Teneen, Alaa
Awad, Mohammed Khaled, Abdo El Amir, Sad Panda – most of them are featured in Art War (dir. Marco
Wilms, 2014), to which I contributed.
Ganzeer, ‘7 Things I Have Learned from the Mask of Freedom’, May 2011, https://ganzeer.com/7Things-I-have-Learned-From-the-Mask-of-Freedom.
I will show what, to me, is the most iconic stencil of the Egyptian Revolution in the photo essay at the
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2011 portraying Samira Ibrahim, the young woman who managed to open a case in front
of a civilian court after being forced into a virginity test, which allegedly served to prove
that soldiers had not raped her, while in fact the virginity test itself became a form of rape.
The soldiers carried out the virginity tests and other types of brutalities after arresting a
number of activists involved in a sit-in in Tahrir Square on March 9, 2011.19 Samira Ibrahim
stencils appeared on the wall of Mohammed Mahmud Street beside one portraying Aliaa
Magda Al-Mahadi. This young female blogger posed naked at home in protest against the
military regime and the military violence in the streets of Cairo, posting the picture on her
blog, arebeldiary.blogspot, and describing her action on her Facebook page as ‘screams
against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy’.20
Fig. 5: Stencils of Aliaa Magda Al-Mahadi and Samira Ibrahim. Picture courtesy of Sally Zohney.
The power of graffiti art consists of its analog character, virality, and visibility: there is no
need for an internet connection and most of the time not even the need for literacy on
the part of the audience, as the majority of these works are mostly visual, and, even when
they are accompanied by text, self-explanatory within their local context. The archival form
practiced by graffiti artists took its most radical expression on the walls of the American
University of Cairo (AUC), situated on Mohammed Mahmud Street, leading away from
19
20
end of this text.
Samira Ibrahim’s story is the focus of Cyberwar by director Jakob Gottschau: Cyberwar, ‘Civil Cyberwar
in Egypt’, Express TV, Denmark, 2013, https://www.express-tv.dk/civil-cyberwar/; see also Wikipedia
Contributors, ‘Samira Ibrahim’, 17 August 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samira_Ibrahim.
The image is no longer there, although the blog is still active. See Aliaa Magda Al-Mahadi, A Rebel’s
Diary (blog), https://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com; Aliaa Magda Al-Mahadi, Facebook page (now deleted),
November 2011.
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49
Tahrir Square.21 Graffiti artists started painting one of the walls of AUC right after the
clashes that happened there between police and protesters on November 19, 2011.22
Fig. 6: Mohammed Mahmud Street, graffiti honoring martyrs by multiple authors. Courtesy of Mitra Azar.
The explosion of graffiti art in Mohammed Mahmud Street, the number of layering, erasures,
and additions, has no equal in Cairo, nor I believe in any other context of politically-engaged
graffiti art inside or outside of Egypt. As such, it discloses the truly unique dynamism
of this form of archival practice, capable of reacting in real time to the events of the
revolution, serving to both commemorate and activate the people. The complexity of the
symbols, often drawn from traditional Egyptian painting – such as in the work of Alaa Awad,
extensively featured in Mohammed Mahmud Street – discloses the depth of this form of
art and allows us to think of it as an attempt to re-write not only the current history of the
country, but also its roots.23
21
22
23
For a description of the function of the graffiti in Mohammed Mahmud by the very same artists who
realized it, see the conference held at AUC in April 2012: Abo Bakr, Ammar, Alaa Awad, Hanaa El
Deghem, and Ahmed Aboul Hasan, The Epic Murals of Tahrir: Visualizing Revolution, conference held
by American University Cairo, 2 April 2012,
http://www.aucegypt.edu/research/cts/Pages/TheEpicMuralsofTahrir,visualizingArtist.aspx.
Mona Abaza, ‘An Emerging Memorial Space? In Praise of Mohammed Mahmud Street’, Jadaliyya, 10
March 2012, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/25363/An-Emerging-Memorial-Space-In-Praise-ofMohammed-Mahmud-Street; Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Mohammed Mahmoud graffiti’, 29 July 2019,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Mahmoud_graffiti.; Jack Shenker, ‘Egypt: Violent Clashes
in Cairo Leave Two Dead and Hundreds Injured’, The Guardian, 19 November 2011, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/19/egypt-violent-clashes-cairo-injured; and Lucia Ryzova, ‘The Battle
of Cairo’s Muhammad Mahmoud Street’, Aljazeera, 29 November 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/
indepth/opinion/2011/11/201111288494638419.html.
For more information about the references to Egyptian traditional art in the work of graffiti artist Ala Awa,
see Mia Grondhal, Revolutionary Graffiti, Cairo: AUC Press, 2013.
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THEORY ON DEMAND
Fig. 7: Work by Ala Awad (detail), graffiti using paintings from the Ancient Tomb of Ramose, 18th Dynasty.
Courtesy of Mitra Azar.
Furthermore, once the military regime decided to erect walls in Mohammed Mahmud
Street and the vicinity of Tahrir Square to deter people from getting closer to the Ministry
of the Interior and other official buildings, graffiti artists started targeting those walls too.
Fig. 8: Graffiti over one the walls built by the military to block access to government buildings. Courtesy
of Ursula Lindsay.
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51
An interesting process is at work here: on the one hand, the military erects walls to block
people from approaching state buildings, confronting the police, and recording images of
these confrontations which could be shared online and worldwide. This attempt by the army
to render invisible the clashes between the people and the military reached its most gruesome
point with the deployment of snipers to specifically target the eyes of the protesters.24
Fig. 9: Graffiti by Amma Abo Bakr honoring the people shot in the eye by military snipers during the
Mohammed Mahmud demonstrations. Courtesy of Themba Lewis.
On the other hand, this attempt at erasure was somehow counteracted by the practice of
the graffiti artists, who moved archiving from the internet to the streets, developing a form
which hacked the visibility ban of the regime, keeping alive the possibility of sharing images
and information by enforcing an analogical sharing in physical space, rather than online.
The peculiarity of a graffiti-based form of archive rests in its immediate availability and yet
this quality pays the price of some sort of volatility. The regime promptly attempted either
to remove the graffiti, not only in Mohammed Mahmoud Street, but all over Cairo, or to
intervene via supporters of the regime re-drawing parts of them and thus changing (I should
say inverting) their meaning.25 This happened to the famous graffiti of the ‘Tank vs Bread Biker’
first produced by Ganzeer during the ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’, an initiative launched online by
Ganzeer himself to show that ‘the streets belong to the people […] They [the military officials]
think that they’re [the streets] some kind of official government-controlled entity. I think it’s
important to remind people that they’re not’.26
24
25
26
This is why Mohammed Mahmud Street was renamed Sharei‘ ‘Uyuun al-Hurriyyah (‘Street of the eyes of
freedom’) by protesters. See Abaza, ‘An Emerging Memorial Space?’.
Abaza, ‘An Emerging Memorial Space?’.
Jano Charbel, ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’, Egypt Independent, 22 May 2011, https://ww.egyptindependent.
com/mad-graffiti-weekend-challenges-military-tribunals/.; Kristen Chick, ‘Egyptian graffiti artist
Ganzeer arrested amid surge in political expression’, Christian Science Monitor, 26 May 2011,
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0526/Egyptian-graffiti-artist-Ganzeer-arrested-
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Fig. 10: Ganzeer, ‘The Tank and the Bread Biker’. Courtesy of the artist.
Ganzeer’s design was later joined by an image of a panda by the artist Sad Panda, and
then modified again by the graffiti artist Winged Elephant with the addition of bleeding
bodies crushed by the tank, a reference to the victims of the so-called Maspero massacre
of May 2011.27
Fig. 11: Winged Elephant’s graffiti addition referencing the Maspero massacre.
27
amid-surge-in-political-expression. The story of the ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’ and the ‘Tank vs the Bread
Biker’ graffiti is laid out in fuller detail in the film Art War, for which we also managed to interview the
people who modified the drawing in support of the regime.
Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Maspero Demonstrations’, 13 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Maspero_demonstrations.
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At this point, the collective work of the revolutionary graffiti movement became the target
of a military supporter group going by the name of the Badr Battalion, who attempted to
overturn the meaning of the graffiti by erasing the crushed human figures and adding a
cheering crowd with Egyptian flags in front of the tank.
Fig. 12: Cheering crowd by the Badr Battalion.
Fig. 13: Overview of the graffiti after the additions made by Winged Elephant and the Badr Battalion.
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Revolutionary graffiti artists Mohammed Khaled and the Mona Lisa Battalion answered by
erasing the crowd and adding a monstrous version of Tantawi, the General of the Supreme
Council, eating up protesters.28
Fig. 14: Tantawi eating up protesters by Mohammed Khaled and the Mona Lisa Battalion.
The story of ‘The Tank and the Bread Biker’ says a lot about the dynamism of a graffitibased form of archive, both in terms of authorship and of the form’s capacity to cope
with an ever-changing situation, in both cases echoing some of the features that define
the uploading and sharing of images online. As in the case of the Kazeboon or Mosireen
collectives, authorship is collaborative and in the service of the necessity to generate and
share images almost in real time. The difference between graffiti art, functioning as an
analogical archival practice, and the digital archives and related activism which emerged
from the Egyptian revolution – from which graffiti art also benefited, as we have seen
through the distribution of stencils and the organization of the ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’ – is
that graffiti art shifts the focus to physical public spaces rather than to the corresponding
online ones. This shift proves, once again, that online activism serves its purpose only when
it is subservient to and designed for mobilizing people in the offline world. The reactive
erasure in the form of analog white-washing enforced by the regime, who continuously
attempted to delete revolutionary graffiti, has been matched in the online world. This
happens not only through the regime’s removal of the means of communication used
by the activists (such as was the case with the internet), but also via the self-erasure
that certain activists have been forced to perform in order to protect themselves after
online and offline aggressions. To cope with this form of reactive erasure, the graffiti artists
manage to practice a form of active erasure that compromises both the online and offline
strategies of the regime. This active form of erasure consists in erasure by addition: an
affirmative form of erasure that, by layering graffiti, promotes a creative appropriation of the
28
The story of this graffiti is also fairly well described in an article by Soraya Morayef, ‘Army
Loyalists and Activists Battle on the Walls of Cairo’, Egypt Independent, 6 February 2012, https://
ww.egyptindependent.com/army-loyalists-and-activists-battle-walls-cairo/. For a comprehensive visual
story of the graffiti and of the unfolding of revolutionary street art during the Egyptian revolution, I
recommend Karl Don Stone and Hamdi Basma, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution,
Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing, 2014.
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55
urban space that accompanies and sustains the protesters in their actions and answers
the urgency and unpredictability of the events. One particular piece of graffiti I saw on the
walls of Cairo springs to mind: Twitter’s blue bird behind a back-slashed circle (the ‘no’
symbol): ‘The revolution will not be tweeted’.
Fig. 15: ‘The revolution will not be tweeted’, Courtesy of Mitra Azar.
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These images were shot by Mitra Azar in the spring of 2012 with the intention of showing
the erasure-by-adding strategy adopted by graffiti artists on one of the walls of the American
University of Cairo, located in Mohammed Mahmud Street.
Courtesy of Mitra Azar.
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References
18 Days in Egypt. http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/.
858: An Archive of Resistance. https://858.ma/.
Al-Mahadi, Aliaa Magda. A Rebel’s Diary (blog), https://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com.
_____. Facebook page (now deleted), November 2011.
Art War (dir. Marco Wilms, 2014).
Bakr, Abo Ammar, Alaa Awad, Hanaa El Deghem, and Ahmed Aboul Hasan. The Epic Murals
of Tahrir: Visualizing Revolution, conference held by American University Cairo, 2 April 2012,
http://www.aucegypt.edu/research/cts/Pages/TheEpicMuralsofTahrir,visualizingArtist.aspx.
Charbel, Jano. ‘Mad Graffiti Weekend’, Egypt Independent, 22 May 2011, https://
ww.egyptindependent.com/mad-graffiti-weekend-challenges-military-tribunals/.
Chick, Kristen. ‘Egyptian Graffiti Artist Ganzeer Arrested amid Surge in Political Expression’,
Christian Science Monitor, 26 May 2011, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/MiddleEast/2011/0526/Egyptian-graffiti-artist-Ganzeer-arrested-amid-surge-in-political-expression.
Cyberwar. ‘Civil Cyberwar in Egypt’, Express TV, Denmark, 2013, https://www.express-tv.dk/
civil-cyberwar/.
Eskandaar, Wael. ‘Egypt’s Kazeboon: Countering State Narrative’, Mei.edu, 12 July 2013,
https://www.mei.edu/publications/egypts-kazeboon-countering-state-narrative.
Ganzeer. ‘7 Things I Have Learned from the Mask of Freedom’, May 2011, https://ganzeer.
com/7-Things-I-have-Learned-From-the-Mask-of-Freedom.
Grondhal, Mia. Revolutionary Graffiti, Cairo: AUC Press, 2013.
Ghonim, Wael. Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in
Power: A Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Jankowicz, Mia. ‘“Erase and I Will Draw Again”: The Struggle Behind Cairo’s
Revolutionary Graffiti Wall’. The Guardian, 23 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/
cities/2016/mar/23/struggle-cairo-egypt-revolutionary-graffiti.
Kazeboon. ‘Haqiqat al-kazeboon – nuskha mu‘addala’, YouTube video, 25 December 2011,
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59
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_avXDAp44jA&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR21P7Ni1I6FSrUmL7oQerOfWD6tdM6Jvi_SSPA8wN0U1uLWfI9e1j67xdw.
Morayef, Soraya. ‘Army Loyalists and Activists Battle on the Walls of Cairo’, Egypt Independent, 6 February 2012, https://ww.egyptindependent.com/army-loyalists-and-activists-battle-walls-cairo/.
The Julian Assange Show. ‘Julian Assange’s The World of Tomorrow: Nabeel Rajab and Alaa
Abd El-Fatteh’, Episode 4, YouTube, 8 May 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdVoBlABSpc&list=PL19A6F6A10DCFB253&index=5&t=0s&frags=pl%2Cwn.
Ryzova, Lucia. ‘The Battle of Cairo’s Muhammad Mahmoud Street’, Aljazeera, 29 November
2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/201111288494638419.html.
Shenker, Jack. ‘Egypt: Violent Clashes in Cairo Leave Two Dead and Hundreds Injured’, The
Guardian, 19 November 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/19/egypt-violent-clashes-cairo-injured.
Stone, Karl Don and Hamdi Basma. Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution,
Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing, 2014.
Toma, Sally. Facebook chat with Mitra Azar, 21 September 2019.
_____. Facebook chat with Mitra Azar, 26 September 2019.
Vargas, Jose Antonio. ‘Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on
Facebook’, The New York Times, 17 February 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/
books/review/how-an-egyptian-revolution-began-on-facebook.html.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Alaa Abd El-Fattah’, 20 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Kazeboon’, 20 June 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazeboon.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Maspero Demonstrations’, 13 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Maspero_demonstrations.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Mohammed Mahmoud graffiti’, 29 July 2019, https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Mohamed_Mahmoud_graffiti.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Mosireen’, 23 June 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosireen.
Wikipedia Contributors. ‘Samira Ibrahim’, 17 August 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Samira_Ibrahim.
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05. THE DIGITAL SYRIAN ARCHIVE BETWEEN
VIDEOS AND DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
MOHAMMAD ALI ATASSI
After the images showing the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib Prison by American soldiers were leaked to the media in 2004, Susan Sontag published a long article in the New
York Times, titled ‘Regarding the Torture of Others.’ 1 The article, written a few months
before her death, revisited central arguments from her renowned book, Regarding the Pain
of Others, published in 2003 prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.2 In particular,
she argues that there is a need to publish images of victims, and that those images were
effective in putting pressure on American leaders and politicians. The latter already knew
that those practices were taking place in Iraqi prisons, but had not been forced to put
an end to them until the images were leaked. Dealing in her article with various issues of
colonialism, sovereignty, and racism involved in the practices depicted in those images,
elaborating on their details and condemning them at length, the famous American writer
failed to pose a central question regarding the Iraqi prisoners. Their bodies had been
photographed naked, under torture, and in humiliating postures, without their faces or
identities being covered. In short, the question was: did those prisoners have a right to
their own image?3
Many Western anti-war activists rushed to publish and circulate the images with the best
intentions, yet without bothering to obscure the faces and hide the identities of the victims. They also failed to consider that, after the sanctity of those prisoners’ bodies had
already been violated, and then violated again as they were photographed, they might
not appreciate being violated a third time through the publication and circulation of their
images in international media, especially since the majority or perhaps all of them were
still alive at that time.
Equally astonishing is Susan Sontag’s failure to note that the most powerful country in the
world had also established this spectacle of killing in Iraq for the first time – long before
ISIS – by publishing and circulating images of the corpses of Saddam Hussein’s two sons,
Uday and Qusay, disfigured and covered in blood; and a second time after the corpses
were preserved, made up with cosmetics, and placed in a tent for public display and global
media coverage. It was as if they were trying to prove to the entire world that the dictator’s
two sons had truly been killed.
1
2
3
Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times, 23 May 2004, http://www.nytimes.
com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html; ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, in
Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, London, Pluto Press, 2009, pp. 272-281.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2003.
See The Abounaddara Collective with Katarina Nitsch (ed.), The Questions of the Right to the Image,
supported by the Swedish Institute, March 2019, http://www.abounaddara.com/THE_RIGHT_TO_THE_
IMAGE.pdf?fbclid=IwAR19G-0bmwJ7jclthlEopYURL1rNjKf7ryv9aP-15-UJGbzAACfNoohsbdQ
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The complete neglect of the Iraqi prisoners’ rights to their own image, even as she defends
their rights to justice, dignity, and the sanctity of their bodies, is remarkable for a figure as
important and empathetic as Susan Sontag. Still, it does not inhibit her awareness of ‘the
other’ in photographic relations. To quote from Regarding the Pain of Others: ‘the more
remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead
and dying’.4 Nor does Susan Sontag hesitate to question the conditions surrounding the
production of those images, or the ways in which people use and consume images. In the
same book she writes that:
It seems exploitative to look at harrowing photographs of other people’s pain in
an art gallery. Even those ultimate images whose gravity, whose emotional power,
seems fixed for all time, the concentration camp photographs from 1945, weigh
differently when seen in a photography museum, in a gallery of contemporary art;
in a museum catalogue; on television; in the pages of The New York Times; in the
pages of Rolling Stone; in a book.5
Despite her silence on the issues of rights, Sontag was cautious and critical of the ways
in which such images of atrocity were used and exploited, notably with their entry into art
galleries, the pages of magazines, tabloids, and TV screens.
In 2004, when Susan Sontag posed these questions about the leakage of pictures of Abu
Ghraib prison, their media circulation, and their potential political impact, YouTube and
social media had not yet acquired the power and propagation they have now – most particularly demonstrated by the Arab Spring revolutions, specifically the Syrian revolution.
Back in 2004, pictures of demonstrations, acts of repression, and videos of torture and
murder were yet to be broadcast online daily and in huge numbers.
The contradictions in Sontag’s approach could be our entry point to the study of the varied
uses of videos and images coming from Syria.6 In the age of social media, images of the
Syrian tragedy have been uploaded on YouTube for over seven years, at times even livestreamed on international media. Their production is completely unregulated and lacks
professional standards, and little heed has been paid to the rights of those appearing in the
videos. In this age, it is common to re-use and re-mix such videos for media outlets, filmmaking or advertisement, or even for archives. In other words, the images often become
unimaginably detached from their original context.
Understanding how these images and videos were produced and subsequently used is necessary for any approach to the archival question being raised today. As counter-revolutions
and the rehabilitation of the old dictatorships continue to unfold, the issue of constructing
a new archive of these revolutions is being raised among activists and professionals in the
4
5
6
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 63.
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 107.
For a critical reading of Sontag’s text, see Judith Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 951-966.
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image industry. Such a revolutionary archive stands in opposition to the archives of the
ruling states and regimes, preserving the visual memory of the groups that were involved
in the revolutionary waves and who have attempted to break the Arab status quo and push
for real political and social change.
While the issue of archival and visual memory and their relation to artistic and cinematic
practices is being raised in most Arab countries that have witnessed revolutions, such
as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, in each case it takes on specific dimensions. As
regards Syria, not only did violence escalate and spiral into civil and regional war, but the
conflict at large was also unpredictable over the prolonged stretch of the past seven years,
encompassing most of the Syrian territory, villages, and cities alike.
Syrian Videos
There are no precise figures for the number of videos Syrians have shot and uploaded
on YouTube. Most estimates are in the hundreds of thousands. The majority are short
videos of no longer than three minutes, taking various types and forms and dealing with
various issues. Shot all across Syria, most of them are overwhelmingly anonymous and
even indifferent to the issue of authorship. A substantial amount of these clips was filmed
by people participating in the events they were filming, reacting to them in real time. They
were mostly shot with a single take, uploaded unedited and with little to no post-production.
Cécile Boëx notes that these videos were mostly shot as proof of witnessing, in order to
document, as well as to coordinate the work of revolutionary committees.7
When Syrian activists and citizen-journalists began to film protests taking place across
Syria and uploaded those videos to YouTube or sent them to international and Arab satellite
news channels, their concern at the time had nothing to do with producing an alternative
cinema or even reportage. Such questions were not part their priorities or even their fundamental practices. Rather, their concern was to attract the attention of the world to what
was happening in their country and to convey those events to the international media. They
were under the impression that the camera might protect them and their fellow protestors
from the regime’s crackdown, in the hope that documenting crimes as they were being
committed would someday stop them from happening. At the time, those activists and
citizen-journalists never expected that the world would look on impotently, or that their
videos, no matter how intense and enormously revealing, despite the drama and humanity
they contained, would not change much in the way Great Powers view the struggle in Syria,
nor inspire them to attempt to end to the killing of civilians. Because Syrian activists never
imagined that the crimes would continue and even worsen, despite all the images and the
documentation pouring out of the country, they never thought about the future of such
images, their fates, or the ways in which others might appropriate them in the aftermath.
7
Cécile Boëx, ‘La création cinématographique en Syrie à la lumière du mouvement de révolte: nouvelles
pratiques, nouveaux récits’, REMMM 134 (Décembre, 2013): 145-156.
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Alongside the images uploaded by activists and citizen-journalists, from early on the Syrian
regime and its supporters were manipulating activist videos to raise doubts about their
credibility, circulating videos that served their own propagandistic purposes. Many of the
Islamist and Jihadist factions did the same, flooding YouTube with their own promotional
videos, which would later lead ISIS to create their own specialized clips, i.e. scenes of horrific murders uploaded online and thrust into international media. From this point onwards,
Syrians no longer owned these Syrian videos, nor could they help support their case in
any way.8 Soon after, international media outlets appropriated the images for their own
purposes. Rather than being challenged by the videos, media outlets, such as Aljazeera
and CNN, coexisted with them. In other cases, this new form of media was co-opted by
killers of various stripes, including the Syrian regime and ISIS. These two actors produce
videos that serve their propaganda, upload them to YouTube, and circulate them for media
coverage, manipulating the videos and images of victims and raising doubt about their
authenticity. This was particularly the case when videos of the victims of the chemical
attack in Eastern Ghouta came out on 23 August 2013.
Which Category for Which Videos?
Differing from the media’s use of videos and from the celebratory and often romanticized treatment of those videos by critics, Stefan Tarnowski attempts to categorize those
videos and images according to the ways in which they were interpreted, treated, and
employed.9 He proposes a distinction between the ‘forensic’, the ‘commodity’, and the
‘poetic’ interpretation and treatment of images. The forensic treatment of images, according to Tarnowski, is not focused on the identity of the person who shot the video, their
political leanings, or the reasons behind shooting and uploading. The forensic treatment
of images means that:
a video from Syria can be many things: data to verify or disprove narratives by
cross-referencing; evidence of a crime that has been committed; the basis for
future justice … All of it is information, data that can be verified, and then mobilized
to attack or defend narratives in order to build up a picture of the truth that can
potentially be used in a court of law.10
On the other hand, says Tarnowski, the treatment of images as commodities leads to the
use of these videos for their exchange value in the economy of war. Tarnowski notes the
8
Jon Rich, ‘The Blood of the Victim: Revolution in Syria and the Birth of the Image Event’, e.flux Journal
26 (June, 2011),
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/26/67963/the-blood-of-the-victim-revolution-in-syria-and-the-birth-ofthe-image-event/.
9
See for example Chad Elias and Zaher Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, in Malu Halasa, Zahir
‘Amrin, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud (eds) Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline,
London: Saqi Books, 2014; Stefan Tarnowski, ‘What Have We Been Watching? What Have We Been
Watching?’, Bidayyat.org, 5 May 2017,
http://bidayyat.org/opinions_article.php?id=167#.Wae5qpOg9E4.
10 Tarnowski, ‘What Have We Been Watching?’.
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example of the British government funding a Free Syrian Army media office, the Revolutionary
Forces of Syria Media Office (RFS Syria), which uploaded nearly a thousand videos about a
number of themes, from the documentation of battles to aid work, all the way through to media
reportages in areas outside the regime control. In addition, Tarnowski refers to the massive
proliferation of YouTube videos documenting the use of American TOW anti-tank weapons,
estimated at roughly 20,000 uploads. Their primary aim was not to promote the Free Syrian
Army, nor to attract new recruits, but rather to confirm the way in which those TOW missiles
were being utilized, since evidence of use was a condition for extra replacement ammunition.
By the summer of 2015, there were over twenty thousand videos of TOW missiles sloshing
around on YouTube. From interviews, I learned that the weapon was provided under one condition: that there must be a video documenting every time it was fired, showing the act of
firing, the target, and whether or not the target was successfully hit, and that video must also
be uploaded on YouTube. Only after the video was uploaded would replacement missiles be
provided. Videos uploaded online were exchanged for munitions. For Tarnowski:
These clips are more than mere representational images, depicting the “reality” of
the battlefield. They are commodities, active in the economy of war, and contributing
directly to it. Traded for guns, funds and allies, under the direction of Western governments, making a YouTube clip can be an act of war.11
What about what Tarnowski calls ‘poetic’ images? He summarizes the position of those who
adopt a poetic reading of images as follows: ‘The foundational claim of the poetic interpretation of videos from Syria is: “The videos are cinema and the people who shot them … are
filmmakers”’.12 Of course, the poetic use and reading of those videos greatly differ from the
forensic and even the commodity ones. The poetic approaches are concerned with political and
emancipatory aspects, and the spontaneity of both the videos and the activists behind them,
as well as the aesthetic value of the revolutionary images as such. Despite their alternative and
revolutionary value, however, these are also low-resolution pixelated images, competing with
the high-resolution images associated with the authorities and the market.13 Here, the ‘poetic’
approach to revolutionary videos goes beyond the mere analysis of their use and value, and
problematizes their use by filmmakers in their films, especially within films entirely composed
of an edited collection of such videos. A good example of such a ‘poetic’ approach is Ossama
Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan’s documentary film, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait
(2014), in which YouTube videos are used abundantly and considered new cinema.
Documentary Films and Activist Videos
Any observer can spot the similarities between the activist videos and the numerous feature
and short documentaries produced during the revolution. They range in style from the markers
of haste that have shaped the filming and production, the similarity in equipment used (the
11
12
13
Tarnowski, ‘What Have We Been Watching?’.
Tarnowski, ‘What Have We Been Watching?’.
See Rabih Mroué, ‘The Pixelated Revolution’, TDR: The Drama Review 56.3 (Fall 2012): 18-35.
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absence of a production team, small digital cameras or mobile phones), and the pixelated
texture of the picture of some films reminiscent of the activist and citizen-journalist videos, all
the way through to the fact that many of these films were anonymously produced and uploaded,
just as were most activist videos. These similarities, however, do not necessarily mean that the
videos are ‘cinema’. In my opinion, the problem with this poetic reading of the Syrian images
is that it overlooks the conditions of their production and filming, together with the person who
filmed them and their primary drive to film them, as well as the way they have been utilized
or appropriated. In addition to these problems, this reading also considers those raw videos
‘cinema’, and goes as far as to sometimes term them ‘imperfect cinema’!14
Another problem with such a reading arises when some researchers and filmmakers consider
these videos a new cinema and the people shooting them amateur filmmakers, as in Silvered
Water mentioned above. Such interpretations begin to impose on those videos the formats and
categories of film analysis, ignoring the fact that these videos belong to a world far different
from that of cinema. The critical approach adopted towards these videos is not consistent
with the tools of film analysis, such as narrative, dramatic structure, authorial intention, visual
language, scope for interaction, boundaries and continuity between these new videos, and
previous cinematic experience, etc.
The majority of these videos were shot to document and convey a particular event. They do
not share any of the production values of films, nor do they make any cinematic or artistic
claims. Their producers usually do not term their productions ‘films’, and they do not identify
as filmmakers. While some of these videos can be used as evidence of a particular event, be it
in fiction or documentary film that tackles that particular event in its narrative structure, things
begin to become complicated when these videos are seen as cinema or considered footage,
material to be used for cinematic production.
Critics and filmmakers nonetheless call these videos ‘footage’ or ‘rushes’, and they deal with
them on that basis.15 Their state or form is defined as raw materials for films, waiting to be
claimed by a filmmaker, taken to an editing suite in order for their film to be re-written; they
just need to be edited together. The major issue here is not that the filmmaker did not shoot
the specific YouTube video they are appropriating themselves, nor that they did not pay for
using it. It is rather that the person behind the footage did not film and upload for the sake of
this film, or for the sake of any film! No one asked their opinion about the use of their material
in this film or that, or for this purpose or that. Even if it is possible to find certain clips, frames
or images that are poetically cinematic and visually aesthetic, that does not mean that these
videos are cinema or that their makers are filmmakers.
What we are talking about here are visual practices that belong to two different worlds, ruled
by different professional ethics and contexts, and with different technical and moral stakes.
This is not to say that the boundaries between the two worlds are clear or impervious, nor that
it is unattainable to cross from one side to the other. These videos might have an impact on
14
15
Elias and Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’.
Elias and Omareen, ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’.
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the relationship between filmmakers and images, as well as on the formulas by which they
produce their films, narratives, fictions, and stories. They might have an impact on the form
of actual cinematic language and on the way in which people produce and direct films. However, this does not make the videos films, nor does it turn their producers into filmmakers. As
said, the person who shoots such videos does not claim to be a filmmaker; the video usually
comes in one take and without editing, no credits, and there is no claim of belonging to the
field of cinema.
Digital Syrian Archives: What are its Sources, and What Is its Use?
Given these differences between activist videos, with their own particular origins, and the
way they are used and interpreted, and given the distinction I have made here between these
videos and the documentary films that have been produced in recent years, I think that we can
address the question of the digital archive in post-revolutionary Syria from a different angle. The
idea of constructing a digital archive for the past eight years is primarily based on an attempt
to collect and preserve the memory of the oppressed by way of building a different narrative,
one that stands in opposition to that of the state and the dictatorial regime that triumphed over
its people. Such an archive draws on the huge amount of visual material accumulated on the
internet and the hard drives of professionals in the image industry. Yet good intentions, good
material, and logistical capabilities are not sufficient to achieve real and tangible progress in
this regard. In particular, the attempt to limit the process of constructing and collecting the
material for the archive to a single party or single data bank can itself turn into a totalitarian
action that contradicts the diversity of these visual materials, not to mention the security and
authoritarian risks that act would present.
The chief and most meaningful step towards an archive would be to define the professional and
legal regulations of the collection of such an archive, and to define the themes and sections
under which the archive will be indexed. In addition, regarding the image material, there is a
need for accountability, sorting, and proper investigation of source, use, and purpose. There
are countless issues to be addressed, such as the identification of the people who shot the
films. Why did they shoot it? Who uploaded it? Who first used it and how? Equally important is
the verification of the images, their validity, timing, original location, subject matter, and the
rights of their owners and of those appearing in them.
One may ask what the relationship is between the new documentary filmmaking and the question of constructing and collecting the archive, when the internet hosts thousands of videos
and millions of hours of pictures uploaded as Creative Commons? There is no doubt that the
documentary, as a creative artistic work that deals with and demonstrates reality, is in itself
a visual (and sometimes an archival) document that adds extra dimensions to the Syrian situation. Not least given the important role that the Syrian documentary cinema has played in
recent years in documenting events and telling people’s stories, as well as in producing and
supporting a narrative challenging the regime’s authoritarian narrative. Hence, the inclusion of
any documentary as a finished art product into a digital archive must be governed by the rules
of collecting that goes into the making of an archive in addition to regulations such as employer
approval, respect for copyright, and respect for the finality and completeness of the artwork.
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67
On the other side, we are now facing a new situation that is constantly changing through
the propagation of digital technology: the sheer amount of footage accumulating during the
filming of documentary films in crises such as the Syrian one. When finalizing the editing of
some films, there often remain hundreds of unused hours in the film’s narrative and visual
structure. This in itself poses another challenge regarding the fate of such materials, especially
if they are associated with highly symbolic events, people, or places. The question that arises
here is whether such material should remain in the director’s personal archive, or whether it
is better to keep it in a digital archive whose task is to preserve collective memory and make
it available to researchers. I believe that the basic aim should be to preserve the rights of
production and those of the author, and to respect the latter’s ownership of their material
and their desire not to contribute the remaining rushes of their film to the construction of any
archive, if that is indeed the case.
Many Syrians suffered from the trauma of open wounds and the difficulty of mourning their
dead following the 1982 Hama massacre, which killed dozens of thousands. Not only were
they unable to find the bodies of most of these victims, who had been secretly buried in mass
graves, but there was also a lack of any images or videos that could serve as visual evidence of
the massacres and help to establish their narrative in national memory. Today, however, the
exact opposite is true. Syrians are suffering precisely from the abundancy of images, videos,
and visual materials documenting the massacres committed against the Syrians in the last
eight years, sometimes live. Despite that and because of that, the trauma is still there, growing
boundlessly, and mourning is still pending if not impossible. As Zeina Halabi writes about the
fate of Arab revolutions:
In all such instances, the photographs and footage are there but the truth is not.
Although lenses captured these tragedies, the narrative surrounding them was
constantly challenged, undermined, or erased. Hegemonic narratives continue to tell
us that the tragedies we have seen never really took place, that what we have seen
is not real. Here, melancholic affect does not feed on an absent archive – for the
archive is there, so haunting in its tragedy – but rather on a tragic experience that is
not validated.16
But the disaster is here and now, and what has happened is still happening. Victims are not
figures, prisons are not unpopulated structures, and the destroyed cities are not decorations
in a video game. As such, our salvation may not lie in the construction of this archive, but
rather in its ambiguous and shocking presence, which will preserve for victims their names,
for places their memories, for truth its meanings, and for life its seeds.
16
Zeina Halabi, ‘The Missing Archive of Loss’, Bidayyat.org, 28 April 2017,
http://bidayyat.org/opinions_article.php?id=166#.WwW7LlOFNE4.
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References
Boëx, Cécile. ‘La création cinématographique en Syrie à la lumière du mouvement de révolte:
nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux récits’, REMMM 134 (Décembre, 2013): 145-156.
Butler, Judith. ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 25 (2007): 951-966.
Elias, Chad and Zaher Omareen. ‘Syria’s Imperfect Cinema’, in Malu Halasa, Zahir ‘Amrin,
Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud (eds) Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline,
London: Saqi Books, 2014.
Halabi, Zeina. ‘The Missing Archive of Loss’, Bidayyat.org, 28 April 2017, http://bidayyat.org/
opinions_article.php?id=166#.WwW7LlOFNE4.
Mroué, Rabih. ‘The Pixelated Revolution’, TDR: The Drama Review 56.3 (Fall 2012): 18-35.
Nitsch, Katarina and The Abounaddara Collective. The Questions of the Right to the Image,
supported by the Swedish Institute, March 2019, http://www.abounaddara.com/THE_RIGHT_
TO_THE_IMAGE.pdf?fbclid=IwAR19G-0bmwJ7jclthlEopYURL1rNjKf7ryv9aP-15-UJGbzAACfNoohsbdQ.
Rich, Jon. ‘The Blood of the Victim: Revolution in Syria and the Birth of the Image Event’, e.flux
Journal 26 (June, 2011), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/26/67963/the-blood-of-the-victimrevolution-in-syria-and-the-birth-of-the-image-event/.
Sontag, Susan. ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times, 23 May 2004, http://www.
nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html.
____. ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, in Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, London, Pluto
Press, 2009.
____. Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2003.
Tarnowski, Stefan. ‘What Have We Been Watching? What Have We Been Watching?’, Bidayyat.
org, 5 May 2017, http://bidayyat.org/opinions_article.php?id=167#.Wae5qpOg9E4.
THE ARAB ARCHIVE
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06. THE CONTROVERSIAL ARCHIVE: NEGOTIATING
HORROR IMAGES IN SYRIA
ENRICO DE ANGELIS
Introduction: The Orphan Images of Syria1
On the 4th of April 2017, early morning, Adham al-Hussein intercepts a call with his walkietalkie. The call informs him that a chemical attack is underway in Khan Shaykhoun, a small
town situated in between Hama and Ma’arrt al-Nu’man, and that assistance is urgently
needed. Al-Hussein immediately takes his car and drives with a few other people towards
the location where the missile supposedly fell. When he arrives, he finds the White Helmets,
a group specialized in providing assistance to civilians, already lining up the bodies of those
exposed to the gas. He helps with the first aid activities. He faints for a few minutes, as the
effects of the gas have not yet vanished. As soon as he can, he grabs his camera and begins
to shoot video and take pictures – he is a freelance journalist, providing visual content to
different local and international media.2
He decides to send the videos and the photos to Smart, a Syrian media organization born after
2011. The material is received by Nisal al-Haddad, herself a photographer and photo editor
at the outlet. Usually, she says, Smart does not publish pictures showing corpses. However, in
this case the children are shown alive, even if they are suffocating. It was a difficult decision,
she adds, but they decided it was necessary. She mentions the massacre of Deir Ezzour,
in January 2016, when ISIS killed hundreds of people, but no pictures documenting what
happened were published.3
Around nine in the morning, the first images were already online.4
Smart selects five photos. They all include very emotional content. One portrays men lying
down, half naked, their clothes and shoes abandoned between them. One is a close shot of
a child in agony. Another shows a group of children huddled together. The last portrays a
1
2
3
4
Methodological note: This article is based primarily on a series of interviews and conversations with a
number of Syrian photographers and image-makers inside and outside Syria: Mohamed Abdullah, Maya
Abyad, Abd al-Kader Habak, Adham al-Hussein, Mohamed Abo Kasem, Hosam Katan, Orwa al-Mokdad,
Amer al-Mouhibani, Muzaffar Salman, Yahia Alrejjo, Rafat al-Zakout. Five photographers still living
inside Syria at the time of writing asked for their names not to be revealed. Additionally, I observed
Facebook conversations around the images produced by some of these photographers and others such
as Sameer al-Doumy, Mohamed Badra, Zakaria AbdelKafi, and Baraa al-Halabi. All the interviews in
Arabic were translated by the author.
Adham al-Hussen, Interview, 22 May 2017.
Nisal Mohana al-Haddad, Interview, 23 May 2017.
The photos can be seen at: Smart News, https://smartnews-agency.com/ar/album/225625#33623.
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young man agonizing, his body visibly contracted. The images rapidly invade social media.
Several professional media outlets also republish the material. Additional images and videos,
produced by media activists and journalists, soon begin to circulate. The news of the chemical
attack in Khan Shaykhoun provokes strong international reactions. A few days later, the US
navy bombs a Syrian military airport in retaliation. President Trump explicitly mentions the
images of ‘poor children’ as the main trigger behind the attack.5
The story of Khan Shaykhoun, Adham al-Hussein, and Smart News offers a typical example
of the context of production of horror images in Syria, i.e. photos portraying forms of violence
against individuals. A large part of the visual content in Syria is produced by local, freelance,
or citizen journalists.6 The victims portrayed in their photos may be friends, relatives, or
people from their neighborhood. Only a very limited portion of the content makes its way to
international media, while most of it is archived and circulates only on the web. In the process,
often the name of the photographer and the victims disappear, and the images circulate alone.
They are orphan images, images that, in the words of the photographer Muzaffar Salman, ‘do
not have a father, a mother, or a story, or a background, nothing’.7
In this specific case, Adham’s name is reported with the photos on Smart News’ website.
However, his name soon disappears when the images are published on Facebook profiles and
groups. In other cases, Smart News does not disclose the name of their reporters operating
in Syria for security reasons. The names of the victims also often remain unknown. In the
end, the images circulating on social media do so without references, as bare documents of
what happened: a chemical attack against civilians. Who were those children and the other
photographed persons? Who was the photographer? Why were they there and what was the
relationship with the photographed subjects? Under which conditions did they shoot those
images and with what kind of equipment? All of this is forgotten as a means of producing
only an image symbol of a war crime, in this case so strong as to trigger a foreign intervention.
However, not all anti-regime activists share the pictures on their Facebook profiles and some
of them criticize the exposure of the victims for ethical and strategic reasons. Some of them
invite those involved to stop publishing them, pointing out that they deprive the victims of their
dignity and do not provoke any form of international solidarity. It is not the first time. On similar
occasions, a debate on how to handle images including violent content emerges among Syrian
civil society groups and figures: artists and intellectuals, journalists and media activists. It is an
intermittent discussion, surfacing whenever violent pictures flood social and corporate media.
Indeed, the Syrian uprising, since escalated into a conflict, constitutes an unprecedented
case when it comes to visual documentation. The production of audio-visual material by
journalists, media activists, and ordinary citizens is overwhelming, probably making the Syrian
5
6
7
On Trump’s reaction to the chemical attack, see for example: Luke Harding, ‘It Had a Big Impact on
Me’: Story Behind Trump’s Whirlwind Missile Response, 7 April 2017, The Guardian, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/07/how-pictures-of-syrias-dead-babies-made-trump-do-unthinkable.
Enrico De Angelis, ‘The State of Disarray of a Networked Revolution: The Syrian Uprising’s Information
Environment’, Sociologica, 3 (2011): 1.
Muzaffar Salman, Interview, 10 April 2018.
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issue one of the most documented international events of all time.8 As a recent article by
AFP describes, the verification and contextualization of the available material is prohibitive
for any media organization.9 All this production shapes what I define here as a ‘controversial
archive’. The very notion of whether we can call it an archive is indeed an object of debate.
Some writers, as Marlene Manoff points out, tend to consider a digital archive everything that
exists anywhere in digital format. However, the storage dynamics of social media, the access
to the material, and its classification pose several questions to the political nature of archival
processes at their core.10
The archive of horror pictures is especially controversial because its inner raison d’être is
often put strongly into question by the same constituencies (Syrian activists, journalists,
intellectuals) who are supposed to be its main producers and consumers.
In this article I aim to analyze the cultural negotiation surrounding the controversial archive in
the Syrian networked public sphere that emerged from the 2011 uprising against the Syrian
regime. It explores how Syrians discuss and define the status of the horror images, and how
they frame and react to its current apparent failure.
Indeed, if one of the main aims of the archive’s production was to create visual narratives
capable of changing the course of the conflict according to their political desires, as many of
the interviewed photographers described, its failure appears undeniable today. The cultural
negotiation of images I consider here takes several forms: public and private discussions,
articles, but also individual practices characterizing the approach to digital images. To look
or not look? Share them or not? How to use them? How to comment or present them? These
forms shape a discourse denouncing the deficiencies of the ‘field of vision’ that characterizes
the ways most horror images are produced, distributed, and looked at.11 In this sense, the
discussions around images can be considered as an ‘archival work’ aimed at collectively
negotiating what of these events should be remembered, and how.12 Also, the negotiation of
horror images serves as a base to elaborate strategies of resistance against the dominant field
of vision. It helps to create alternative individual and collective ways of approaching horror
images in order to establish, even if only for a limited time and group of people, strategies of
resistance. In the end, the aim is to identify a status for the horror image that is more respectful
of the relationship between the photographer, the photographed, and the spectator.
8
9
10
11
12
Joshka Wessels, ‘YouTube and the Role of Digital Video for Transitional Justice in Syria’, Politik 19.4
(2016): 30.
Christian Chaise, ‘Behind AFP’s Syria Coverage’, AFP Correspondent, 18 March 2018, https://
correspondent.afp.com/behind-afps-syria-coverage.
Marlene Manoff, ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, portal: Libraries and the Academy
4.1 (2004): 9.
For a description of the concept of ‘field of vision’ see: Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography,
New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Marlene Manoff, ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’: 19.
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The Interpretive Communities of the Visual Narrations
I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Syrian photographers, media activists, and
authors in order to investigate their relationships with horror images and their consideration
of the media, political, and social environments in which such images are immersed (see
note 1 for the complete list of interviewees). Some of them still live inside Syria and some
left during the uprising. I also examined articles about visual production in Syria that were
published in different Syrian electronic magazines over the last few years. Some posts on
Facebook were also taken into account.
One’s relation to the controversial archive is an individual matter. Each individual has a
personal approach to images depending on their past experiences, current life conditions,
and psychological state. The relation changes not only from individual to individual, but
also according to different phases in a single individual’s life. Even during the same day,
some Syrian photographers point out, there are moments you feel you can look at the
horror and others when you just cannot.
At the same time, distinct patterns shared by different groups can be identified. Around
the controversial archive different ‘interpretive communities’ emerge. By ‘interpretive
community’ I refer here to a fluid group of individuals who constantly discuss the status
of horror images and the practices surrounding them.13 The negotiation produces shared
values and behaviors, even if a definitive agreement can never be achieved. In this context,
a specific tension has emerged in the last few years in relation to the controversial archive.
At one extreme, we find ‘image-savvy communities’ composed of individuals who carry a
more critical approach to images and who today mostly live outside of the country. They
are able to follow the entire cycle of life of the images and their effects on different publics.
These people are generally above thirty years old and have lengthier experience in cultural
production. At the other end of the spectrum, we find groups of younger activists and
citizen journalists who live inside the country and who produce most of the material that
constitutes the controversial archive. I will refer to them as the ‘unknown photographers’,
as their names are usually lesser known or even completely lost in the networks and the
flows of information.
All of these communities are quite fluid, and contacts between single individuals enable
a continuous exchange between them. In fact, they embody diverse stances towards
the images that can often coexist within one single individual. Some of the professional
photographers who work or worked for international agencies and organizations have a
particularly relevant role in connecting different communities, having worked inside Syria
after 2011 and often having trained young photographers.
13
Sue Robinson and Cathy DeShano, ‘“Anyone Can Know”: Citizen Journalism and the Interpretive
Community of the Mainstream Press’, Journalism 12.8 (2011): 963; Dan Berkowitz and James V.
TerKeurst, ‘Community as Interpretive Community: Rethinking the Journalist-Source Relationship’,
Journal of Communication (Summer, 1999): 125.
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The image-savvy communities and the unknown photographers are bound by a complex
relationship, symbiotic and conflicting at the same time. The first group generally tends
to adopt a very critical stance towards the controversial archive. They aim to expose the
fantasies that characterize the bare and uncritical exposition of Syrian pain and they question
its strategic validity. At the same time, anyone who is engaged, in some way or another, in
cultural production about Syria, has no choice but to rely on the controversial archive. The
criticism of the archive, and even its complete rejection, is ultimately possible only because
the archive exists. A moral issue also interconnects the different communities. Staring at
horror images is, in the eyes of many Syrians in the diaspora, a moral obligation: you must
stare at least at the conditions under which your fellow citizens are still living. Doing otherwise
would mean denying the very existence of the unknown photographers.
The complex relation between different approaches to horror images among Syrians
encourages us to avoid any simplistic analysis of the controversial archive. If it is true that
images in Syria failed, the controversial archive offers the raw material through which single
individuals and collectives can experiment with practices of resistance and different relations
to the image.
The (Im)possible Syrian Civil Contract of Photography
The debate Syrians engage with in relation to horror images can be interpreted through the
lens of what photographer and photography theorist Ariella Azoulay defines as the ‘civil
contract of photography’.14 Azoulay circumscribes the civil contract of photography as a social
fiction: a tacit agreement that is never formally set. It primarily embroils the participants
involved in the act of photographing (the photographer and the photographed) as well as
the public (the spectator). In her view, the photos can be a powerful tool, and often the
only one available, to express the flawed, non-existent, or temporarily suspended nature of
the photographed persons’ citizenship. The picture can rehabilitate a negated citizenship
and testify to the violations perpetrated by human violence or natural disasters against it. It
exposes how some citizens are not granted the same rights as others. In the community of
photography, everyone is a citizen, independent of state institutions, gender, origin, or class.
However, the civil contract of photography requires a certain field of vision be established.
Azoulay imbues the act of staring at the picture with a great responsibility in this process. The
spectator has to take on a ‘cinematic watching’,15 which enables the photographed victim to
become an active participant in the act of photography.16 A single photo is only ‘a projective
14
15
16
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. I use here Azoulay’s approach as it has the advantage of
placing at its center the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, which in the
complexity of digital flows risks being marginalized. For this reason, I will not indulge here in an analysis
of the status of the images in relation to the wider dynamics of the networks. On this topic, see for
example Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria, London: Pluto
Press, 2018; and De Angelis, ‘The State of Disarray of a Networked Revolution’.
For an analysis of the concept of ‘cinematic watching’ see also Justine Carville, ‘Intolerable Gaze: The
Social Contract of Photography’, Photography & Culture 3.3 (2010): 353.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 342.
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surface that never discloses anything in itself’.17 It is a statement among other statements and
its content is always partial and obscure. Approaching the photo through cinematic watching
also implies not reducing it only to what is immediately visible within the frame. Rather, the
picture has to be treated as a document that in the first place testifies to the immanent
encounter between the photographer and the photographed person. In this sense, a sort
of archaeology of images has to be established. As Georges Didi-Huberman does with four
photos taken by the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz in his book Images in Spite of All, the
spectator has to use the photo as a fragment to reconstruct the act of photography, including
the positioning of the photographer.18
Cinematic watching enables the avoidance of an ‘identificatory gaze’, which reduces the
photographed persons to a pre-fixed meaning that ruling systems of vision try to impose.19 The
photo has to be approached critically, as a space through which new political relations can be
constantly re-negotiated and the grievances of the photographed person rightly addressed.
The criticism of the controversial archive is an appeal against the systematic violation of the
civil contract of photography in Syria, even if this concept itself is never explicitly mentioned.
In the aftermath of the chemical attacks against Khan Shaikhoun, when images of dying
children were circulating on social media, Razan Ghazzawi, a prominent feminist and
dissident activist, wrote on her Facebook profile: ‘disseminating images of naked children
bodies on social media as means of documentation does not help restore their humanity killed
by Assad’.20 In a statement entitled ‘We are not artists’, the cinema collective Abounaddara
writes:
The world’s screens showed corpses deprived of Dignity, talking only of religions and
sects, of geopolitics, and The Thousands and One Nights. […] Remember: images
of the victims of terrorist attacks in Europe and North America are never published
in the name of a principle of Dignity inscribed in the charters of journalistic ethics in
both the traditional media and YouTube.21
The Syrian leftist magazine al-Jumhuriya hosted a series of articles between March and June
2015 dedicated specifically to the issue of horror images. The debate begins with an article
by Yassin al-Haj Salah, a prominent dissident intellectual, criticizing Abounaddara’s stance
towards images. Even if problematic, al-Haj Salah maintains there is a moral obligation to
stare at the horror for those who have not witnessed it directly. The rights of single individuals
to manage their own images come only after the right of the public to know what happened
and the need for Syrians to build up a visual memory for future generations.22
17
18
19
20
21
22
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 311
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, pp. 202, 375.
Razan Ghazzawi, Facebook update, 7 April 2017. Text no longer available.
Abounaddara, Facebook update, 24 March 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/abounaddara-films/
dignity-has-never-been-photographed/1404543922939644/.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, ‘Tahdiq fi wajeh al-fazia’, al-Jumhuriya, 29 May 2015,
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/33487.
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Other authors, however, responded to al-Haj Saleh in the same magazine, criticizing his
position. Al-Hay al-Sayeed, a human rights lawyer, says:
We will not break this system of watching unless we present the pictures of the
victims differently: a critical presentation that aims at making accountable the preexistent meanings of the predominant system of watching and the recognition of the
necessity to deeply shake it, and this will not happen by flooding the market of vision
with pictures that attract little or no attention.23
Ali Atassi, the founder of the documentary production company Bidayyat, also stresses this
point:
Unfortunately, the majority of the images that detail the torturing and defaming of
Syrian bodies circulate in the Western world, where they are consumed without any
accountability. […] How and why do we accept and contribute willingly to being
treated in that world as second-degree citizens?24
For Ali Atassi, al-Sayeed, and others, horror images should be collected only within nonpublic, organized archives, and not circulated on social media. The ruling system of vision is
accused of exploiting the images of Syrian victims for different reasons than those for which
they are produced. As Azoulay points out, the ‘hit-parade’ of images automatically prevents
the spectator from establishing a mode of cinematic watching.25 The orphan image, deprived
of the name of the photographer and the photographed, condemns the victim to being a
symbol of any victim, a ghost of the real photographed person. A process of territorialization
of the disaster becomes impossible.
The over-exposure of Syrian pain, Abounaddara and others point out, trivializes the horror,
de-politicizing it into representing an abstract, universal, human condition. As Rana Aisa
writes:
the problem the artist today faces is not that of spatial definition, but rather the
emptying of this space of its meaning, […] and the artist contributes to the coverage
of a political obscuration that is part of how the peaceful world deals with the world at
war.26
In the Syrian case, the visual insistence on violence also culminates in reinforcing the
narratives that local and international powers try to impose on the Syrian conflict. It
encourages the representation of Syria as a sectarian, barbaric, orientalist conflict, in which
23
24
25
26
Abd al-Hai al-Sayeed, ‘Surat al-dhahiya wa karamat al-dhahiya’, al-Jumhuriya, 20 July 2015, https://
www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/33651. All the translations from Arabic and the italics are mine.
Mohamed Ali Atassi, ‘Al-karame fi hudhur al-faza’a’, al-Jumhuriya, 2 June 2015,
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/33499.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 299.
Rana Aisa, ‘Al-sura wa al-‘anf”, Bidayyat, 21 February 2018,
http://bidayyat.org/ar/opinions_article.php?id=178#.Wr3eZ9NuaRs.
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political responsibilities are nowhere to be found and Syrian society and identity disappears.
Another problem is inherent to the photographic act in and of itself. The photographed Syrian
is treated as a citizen of ‘second order’.27 As Abounaddara point out, Western victims have a
right to privacy and dignity that is not conceded to Syrians. Ali Atassi asks:
How we can persuade a mother or a sister or a wife, or a son, that someone has
the right to publish the image of their tortured son or his corpse? How do we allow
ourselves to do this, in the name of what is right, according to which human principle,
heavenly legitimacy, legislation, logic, or art?28
Dellair Youssef, a video-maker, adds: ‘In Syria we do not respect privacy. There is no
photographic culture […] I am against showing the victims and especially their faces. This
does not respect the dignity of the victims, nor the identity of those victims.’29 The lack of
professional ethics among many young and unknown Syrian photographers is then associated
with their exploitation by a global media industry they do not know or control, caught as they
are in a desperate act of photographing the horror. However, the criticism of the controversial
archive and its failure also exposes some paradoxes and unresolved issues at its core.
Reviving the Unknown Photographer
While the condemnation of the ruling field of vision in which horror images are immersed
is crucial to identifying the violations at the base of the civil contract of photography, it also
comes with a paradox: thousands of Syrians keep producing and spreading these images.
We should then recognize that the problem cannot be reduced to the commodification of
Syrian pain by international media. Indeed, Syrian photographers inside the country keep
incessantly documenting the horror and many Syrians all over the world often decide to share
and stare at violent images.
The photos are orphan, circulating mostly without the name of the photographer or the
photographed. Often without even a caption or any other reference. The photographic act is
very problematic, as most of the times the victims do not formally agree to be photographed.
Without other information, the photo alone is vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation
even more than it usually is. And yet, the photos are there. The unknown photographers keep
taking and spreading them.
These photographers are predominantly young people, well under thirty, and they mainly
started to take pictures with their mobile phones and then cameras only after the eruption of
the protests. There are several reasons why they remain unknown. Sometimes it is for security
reasons. Other times it is because of the policies of local media and organizations. Other times
because the photographers want to avoid any publicity or reward for their activity. When
asked about the criticism that some other Syrians throw at their work, their reaction is always
27
28
29
Ali Atassi, ‘Al-karame fi hudhur al-faza’a’.
Ali Atassi, ‘Al-karame fi hudhur al-faza’a’.
Dellair Youssef, Interview, 17 April 2018.
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astonishment. Not only do they not see the problems inherent to the ruling field of vision, they
also do not see any alternative to their actions. Usually, they do not even come into contact
with critical stances towards images. None of the interviewed photographers inside Syria, for
example, had ever heard of the name Abounaddara. Their act of photography is desperate
and immediate. For them, it is the only possible way to create a memory of the victims against
attempts at erasing them from history and the world. The conditions of photographing are
often extremely dangerous. Planes often come back to bomb the same site a short while later,
in order to prevent both relief operations and documentation. Many photographers have died
while they were documenting, and many I spoke with had been injured several times. Under
these conditions, the relationship the photographer establishes with the photographed is very
problematic and cannot be compared with other, much more controlled disaster situations
in the West, as for example in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
The photographic act becomes the last resource against the danger of oblivion. Here we can
clearly identify the deepest impulse that drives any other archive building: the need to retain
memory. As Saeed al-Batal, a documentary filmmaker, writes:
The camera, as it films, mirrors the plane: its exact opposite. The camera strives to
protect, clinging on to every reflected shaft of light in order to preserve it forever,
while the plane seeks to obliterate everything, to wipe out every memory and the keys
to that memory, even smell itself.30
Film director Orwa al-Mokdad writes about taking images of the victims after the bombings:
Here the camera that insists on a mutilated body becomes a ritual that replaces the
burying of the dead. The anonymous death and the dehumanization of the human
being are the worst forms of oppression and humiliation practiced by the regime,
even in death. The camera is not only an eye or tool that accompanies the event: it
is a ritual through which the victims’ beloved wants to give meaning so that the dead
did not die unknown. […] Because the killer wants to erase his crime, and when a
barrel bomb, missile, or grenades fall on an inhabited area, the names, features, and
forms of the victims are lost.31
Some of the photographers burst into tears when they tell about losing their photo archives
in Aleppo and other areas that have fallen back into the hands of the regime.
How the figure of the unknown photographer is considered, plays a crucial role in the cultural
negotiation of horror images. Many Syrians who distance themselves from a total rejection
of the photos do so in the name of reintegrating the unknown photographer into the frame.
This comes with a conscious change of perspective towards the issue. While it should be
30
31
Saeed al-Batal, ‘A Cigarette, and My Anti-Craft Camera’, Bidayyat, 27 April 2015,
http://bidayyat.org/opinions_article.php?id=124#.WsEZPdNuaRs.
Orwa al-Mokdad, ‘Dafan al-Mawta bil swar’, Bidayyat, 28 February 2014,
http://bidayyat.org/ar/opinions_article.php?id=70#.WtM2cNNuaRt.
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acknowledged that the civil contract of photography is globally hindered by a ruling field
of vision, there is also an individual moral responsibility when it comes to establishing a
different relationship with the photo. The single individual, and specifically a Syrian, has the
responsibility to set up a cinematic watching, in spite of the wider field of vision. This implies,
first of all, re-imagining the unknown photographer as an indispensable actor within the civil
contract of photography.
The accent no longer falls on the effects of the photos on the public after they begin to
circulate, but rather on the cultural meaning of the photographic act itself. The unknown
photographer in this context is not to be evaluated as a professional photographer. They often
come from within the community, or a neighboring village. They live the same war reality. The
photographic act not only documents the victim portrayed in the photo, but also what the
photographers see every day and their state of mind. On this point, Muzaffar Salman says:
I know that those images are not effective in relation to the West, but my relation
with them is not to think about the victims: I think about the photographer, who sees
these images each day. He shares this with me so that I can see it. He does not feel
the violence [of the images]. So, I developed another kind of empathy: the empathy
towards those who see this violence every day, and do not perceive the violence
anymore.32
In this context, we could say those images have to be stared at ‘in spite of it all’, to paraphrase
Didi-Huberman.33 As Maya Abyad, a Syrian video journalist and trainer, points out: ‘I look
at them because I think it is the bare minimum responsibility we have to undertake. We are
not being subjected to the same level of violence. And we are hiding way too much in our
bubble if we refuse even to see it’.34
The Controversial Archive and its Different Uses
Through the controversial archive, different interpretive communities can agree on what
is wrong and what is right when it comes to visually narrating the horror. Its bare presence
avoids a problem that Azoulay describes in relation to, for example, the absence of images
documenting rape in Western culture. Without images, it becomes extremely difficult
to properly analyze what rape, in all its forms, looks like, and its divergences from and
similarities to portrayals of women in advertising or the porn industry.35 Even when Syrians
decide to critically reject horror images, they can do so only because these images are
there. Anyone can stumble on them, decide when and how to look at them, and, in this case,
evaluate what has to be changed in the field of vision.
32
33
34
35
Muzaffar Salman, Interview, 10 April 2018.
Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of all.
Maya Abyad, Interview, 16 April 2018.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 217.
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The controversial archive is pervasive. Even when not explicitly mentioned, its presence offers
a materiality that floats in the background. It is a necessary point of reference for any other
visual production that tries to narrate the horror. We could ask ourselves: would Abounaddara
productions make sense, or simply possess the same critical power, if the controversial archive
did not exist? Orphan horror images, in other words, play a dirty but not eliminable role in
exposing fragments of reality in a way that can then be criticized, rejected, and transformed.
I will now analyze in detail three cases illustrating different approaches to the controversial
archive. Each one presents different ways of conceiving, using and relating to it, and ultimately
of shaping alternative forms of resistance against the ruling field of vision.
The Syrian Archive
Hadi Al Khatib is one of the founders of the Syrian Archive.36 The organization was founded
in 2014, with the aim of collecting, verifying, and analyzing visual documentation related to
human rights violations in Syria since 2011. The material is collected primarily in order to
support legal court cases and advocacy campaigns. Another of its aims is to build up a memory
repository for a future process of transitional justice.37 Until now, the organization has focused
mainly on chemical and other illegal weapons, as well as attacks on hospitals and other civilian
facilities. The eight people who work within the organization are mainly software developers,
engineers, and data analysts. They have developed software aimed at automatically collecting
visual content (videos and photos) from over 5,000 sources on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
The relation between organized archives such as this and the controversial archive is
complex. Hadi Al Khatib presents it as a dilemma. The content distributed on social media is
overwhelming and often does not abide by basic professional and ethical norms. Al Khatib
recognizes that the amount of violent content and the way it circulates can bring about a
de-humanization of the victims. Additionally, valuable but isolated videos and photos risk
being lost in the networks and ignored. For these reasons, the content should be verified,
contextualized, curated, and stored. The Syrian Archive takes care of all these aspects,
congregating the material on only one platform. Significantly, Syrian Archive chose to make
the database available online, so that anyone can further use the material.
At the same time, the Syrian Archive could not have been created without the controversial
archive and its dispersed, unregulated, and pervasive content. If the flows of content production
on social media suddenly stopped, so would the organized archive. The pervasiveness of the
networks is what assures preservation and completeness, at least in the Syrian context. Local,
smaller archives are always in danger of becoming lost because of the war or when the country
is not accessible to journalists. Without the controversial archive and those who produce it,
Syria would be engulfed in silence. The availability of content on social media exists without any
realistic alternative in terms both of safety and outreach. Al Khatib explains this point clearly:
36
37
Syrian Archive, https://syrianarchive.org/en.
On this point, see, for example, Sune Haugbolle, ‘Evidence, Justice, and Peace-Making in Syria’,
SyriaUntold, 8 December 2016, http://syriauntold.com/2016/12/evidence-justice-peace-making-syria/.
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We are a small civil society organization. Even if we had many more resources, we could
not compete with those companies (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter). They have a huge
outreach and infrastructure. Even if people were willing to send their material directly
to the archive, well, many of them may not even know about us. Also, the archive would
need the capacity to store everything and this is simply impossible.38
FROM PHOTOGRAPHING TO CURATING
Mohamed Abdullah is a Syrian photographer known as Artino. Before 2011, he used to take
photos as a hobby, but during the conflict he started to work for Reuters. He lived for one and
a half years in Eastern Ghouta, documenting the siege, until he left in August 2014. Artino
describes how his relationship with horror pictures changed gradually during his years as a
photographer in Syria. In the beginning, documenting the war’s impact on civilians was an
automatic, more or less uncritical operation. He used to publish pictures with violent content
on social media, guided by the idea that the public had the right, but also the obligation, to look
at what was happening. With time, he started attributing more importance to the relationship
with the photographed persons, and tried to produce more photos of daily life and personal
portraits. Also, he began to investigate the effects of his work on the spectators. He says:
I was talking to other people, friends outside the agencies, asking them what the
impact of these pictures was. I also started to pay attention to what some NGOs and
organizations were posting and publishing. I started to receive comments from people
telling me that too much blood was coming out. I started to avoid sharing pictures of
violence in the way I used to do in the beginning. In 2014, I met with Abounaddara in
Beirut and I learned a lot from them and about their way of showing the situation. And
I met many Syrian artists who were narrating the horror in different ways. I learned lot,
while I was still under the siege. I learned how to show the situation but in a different
way.39
The case of Artino illustrates well the cultural negotiation around horror images and their
ramifications for creating common guidelines when it comes to dealing with them. Like many
other photographers, he stresses the moral obligation of documenting the horror and staring
at it. However, he also acknowledges the issues related to the visual narratives characterizing
most of the images’ production.
The predominance of violent pictures in Syria is itself a problem. As photographer Muzaffar
Salman describes, photojournalism has almost no tradition in Syria. Before the uprising, it was
an activity mainly relegated to the production of touristic postcards. When the power and the
relevance of photography emerged, combined with the availability of cheap digital devices, the
lenses were directed almost exclusively at the war.40 As Mohamed Abdullah relates:
38
39
40
Hadi Al Khatib, Interview, 21 May 2018.
Mohamed Abdullah, Interview, 20 April 2018.
Muzaffar Salman, Interview, 10 April 2018.
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When I was in Aleppo, I was working with activists who were also working for Reuters
and I was training them. And I was trying to tell them what it means to produce photos
of daily life, because they do not know how to do it. If there is violence they shoot and
publish it. If you ask them to portray daily life, they do not know what you are talking
about. One day a young photographer asked me: were you photographing before the
revolution? Yes? But what you were photographing?41
This context contributes to creating a huge gap between ‘normal’ and ‘horror’ images,
augmenting a portrayal of Syrians based on the dichotomy of victims and executioners. For
these reasons, many professional photographers like Mohamed Badra, Sameer al-Doumi,
and others consciously began trying to produce visual narratives that could balance out the
blood filling most of what was being produced.
Artino went even further. He started to work for the organization The Syria Campaign,
selecting photos for circulation on the web and writing short articles about them. Instead of
only producing photos, he also curates already existing content. Having identified the issues
related to the orphan images and their negative impact on the civil contract of photography,
Artino acts as a curator of the controversial archive. In fact, he provides a ready-made
archeology of the images, rendering the identity of the photographer and the photographed,
as well as the story behind the photographic act, accessible to the public.
As an example, he mentions a photo taken in Douma (see Fig 1). The photo depicts a number
of people, among them children, sitting in what appears to be an ancient cave or catacomb.
The photo is in black and white, and, in the background, under an arc, a religious metal
frame hangs. The photo circulated on Facebook without the name of the photographer and
the photographed people, and without any description. It was difficult to reconstruct when
and where it was taken, and what it represented. Artino thought the photo was interesting,
but also that it needed more information in order to be properly contextualized. He decided
to search online for the photographer and soon found him. His name is Abou al-Hussein and
he is not a professional photographer. He revealed that the people in Douma dug the cave
themselves, as a refuge against the bombings. It took a month and a half to make it. Given
the lack of space, it was reserved mainly for children, old and injured people. Poor people in
Eastern Ghouta, who do not have the possibility of fleeing, often dug these holes in order to
have more chances of survival. The photo was then republished, together with an interview
with the photographer.42
41
42
Mohamed Abdullah, Interview, 20 April 2018.
The Syria Campaign, ‘This photo memorialises life […]’, Facebook update, 27 March 2018,
https://www.facebook.com/TheSyriaCampaign/photos/a.608812989210718/1711973765561296/?ty
pe=3&theater.
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Fig. 1: Abou al-Hassan al-Andalusi, courtesy of the author.
ART AS CINEMATIC WATCHING
Diala Brisly is a Syrian sketch artist and painter. Her work focuses mainly on children. She
defines her relation with the controversial archive as a constant and irresolvable ‘internal
battle’. On the one hand, she completely understands those who tend to reject horror
images. For many Syrians, it is a matter of protecting themselves from the horror. Also, she
recognizes that the overabundance of visual violence can anesthetize or even push people
away from the Syrian tragedy. Horror images do not necessarily make one understand or
feel what it means to live through a war. On the other hand, Brisly’s work relies heavily on
the controversial archive. This is not only because of a moral responsibility to those who
left the country. It is also because, if someone from outside pretends to produce narratives
about Syria, this is the only way Syrians can maintain contact with the reality on the ground.
At the time of writing, she was working on an illustrated book about a group of Syrian
children who left the country between 2015 and 2016.43 The book covers their stories in
Syria during the war and then as refugees in Lebanon, and is based on a series of interviews
conducted by Italian journalist Francesca Mannocchi. Brisly uses the controversial archive
extensively when it comes to producing her illustrations. When the children describe
43
Francesca Mannocchi and Diala Brisly, Se Chiudo gli Occhi: La Guerra in Siria nella Voce dei Bambini,
Roma: Round Robin Editrice, 2018.
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scenes of war, she does not feel she possesses the necessary visual knowledge or proximity
in order to draw them immediately. She then engages in what she calls ‘visual research’
into the horror. She goes on Facebook or Google and looks for images related to a certain
scene. In one of the interviews, a young girl for example tells how she goes out to buy
something for her mother and on her way back a bomb hits her. She wakes up in hospital.
In order to depict a scene like this, Brisly collects several images portraying children in field
hospitals. Most of the time, they are photographed sitting and waiting, often covered in
their own blood, for someone to give them treatment. She then creates ‘puzzles’ of images.
She stares at them for a long time before she is able to start drawing. She is interested in
understanding how the children feel after going through such a traumatic event. She says:
Most of the time the children look at their own bodies. They are shocked and they
do not understand what has happened. Their gaze is empty. Sometimes they stare
at their hands, as to see if their bodies are still complete. The horror is present in
their look and in their minds, even more than in the scene itself.44
Other times, she works on a single photo she has spotted on Facebook. She is especially
interested in images taken with mobile phones by non-professional photographers. It is
this kind of image, she says, that sometimes strikes her as particularly relevant. Some of
these images can reveal fragments of reality if you stare at them properly, but on Facebook,
as they are, they often pass by completely ignored.
One such example is an orphan photo portraying a group of people removing a child from
under the debris of a bombed building. The episode takes place at night and the rescuers
use mobile phones to illuminate the scene. Brisly has made an illustration based on the
photo (see Fig 2). The light is much stronger and its range wider than in the original photo,
and she has also added more mobile phones in the hands of the people surrounding the
hole.
This is a typical scene in Syria that has occurred thousands of times during the last few
years. The added light stresses the value of the nocturnal rescue act. The abundance of
mobile phones represents the role of this technology in Syria today. They document the
scene, have produced the original photo that served as inspiration. They are also the lamps
enabling the search for the people buried under the rubble. Instead of being used for
entertainment purposes only, as anywhere else in the world, the phone-as-lamp acquires
a completely different meaning.
44
Diala Brisly, Interview, 11 May 2018.
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Fig. 2: Diala Brisly, courtesy of the author.
Another example is a photo of a young boy in a hospital. He is photographed standing up,
with bandages enveloping him and blood sacks swinging from his body. Brisly reworked the
photo with only a few changes (see Fig 3). The boy’s feet do not touch the ground, as if he is
levitating. She also added, next to the blood sacks, other objects: a kite, a heart, and some
photos. Brisly says her idea was to shift the attention from the physical loss (the blood, the
wounds) to other elements: the boy’s dreams and memories, his childhood and innocence.
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Fig. 3: Diala Brisly, courtesy of the author.
In both cases, the translation of the images into illustrations can be interpreted as an operation
of cinematic watching. Both photographer and the victim remain unknown. However, the
illustration imposes on the spectator a type of cinematic watching that the artist has
performed on the original photo. The horror cannot be trivialized anymore. The drawing
does not document the horror that has happened: it becomes a visual document trying to
understand what the photographed persons (and the artist) may feel in that instant. It avoids
the identificatory gaze that invites the spectator to indulge in the meaning of the framed event.
The child is no longer only the ghost of a victim; the scene over the rubble is isolated from the
series of photos of destruction that risks reducing it to a normal event of war.
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Conclusion
Different stances towards the controversial archive at a collective or individual level, constantly
confront each other, from those who uncritically contribute to a ‘slaughterhouse’ of images
generated from a desperate photographic act,45 to those who would prefer to relegate these
images to organized archives, keeping them out of the public eye. However, even the criticism
of horror images ultimately relies on the controversial archive. It is the presence of images
that make it possible to identify the deficiencies of the field of vision, the issues that arise
from the current visual narratives and their consumption.
The overwhelming, unprofessional, and dispersed production of orphan images in Syria
can develop due to a lack of control over the field of vision, rather than the opposite. In
contradistinction to conflicts in which military powers can regulate the flows of images more
easily, in Syria the overabundance of audiovisual material reveals how the regime, as any
other armed actor, has limited control on the ground of the production of visual narratives. In
this sense, the Syrian conflict is at least not invisible. The deregulated production of horror
images, albeit very problematic, offers the raw material through which the issues inherent to
the current visual narratives can be debated and, in the end, even rejected.
The very presence of these images is what enables people to denounce the failure of the civil
contract of photography in Syria and discuss the unresolvable questions related to how to
narrate the horror. A contradiction exists in the heart of those who reject horror images when
their rejection relies on ethical and strategic grounds. Without the controversial archive, it
would be extremely difficult to explore different and innovative types of narratives. Individual
or collective efforts in relating differently, and painfully, to the controversial archive expose
this contradiction. As the analyzed cases prove, endless interpretations of and approaches
to horror images coexist, while at the same time recognizing the problems inherent to the
wider field of vision.
References
Abdullah, Mohamed. Interview, 20 April 2018.
Abounaddara Films, Facebook update, 24 March 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/
abounaddara-films/dignity-has-never-been-photographed/1404543922939644/.
Abyad, Maya. Interview, 16 April 2018.
Aisa, Rana. ‘Al-sura wa al-‘anf’, Bidayyat,
45
See Abounaddara, ‘The Revolting Animals’, Facebook update, 8 March 2018, https://www.facebook.
com/notes/abounaddara-films/the-revolting-animals-de-revolterande-djuren-la-r%C3%A9volte-desanimaux/1745373475523352/.
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21 February 2018, http://bidayyat.org/ar/opinions_article.php?id=178#.Wr3eZ9NuaRs.
Al Khatib, Hadi. Interview, 21 May 2018.
Ali Atassi, Mohamed. ‘Al-karame fi hudhur al-faza’a’, al-Jumhuriya, 2 June 2015, https://www.
aljumhuriya.net/ar/33499.
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books, 2008.
al-Batal, Saeed. ‘A Cigarette, and My Anti-Craft Camera’, Bidayyat, 27 April 2015, http://
bidayyat.org/opinions_article.php?id=124#.WsEZPdNuaRs.
Berkowitz, Dan and James V. TerKeurst. ‘Community as Interpretive Community: Rethinking
the Journalist-Source Relationship’, Journal of Communication (Summer, 1999): 125-136.
Brisly, Diala. Interview, 11 May 2018.
Carville, Justine. ‘Intolerable Gaze: The Social Contract of Photography’, Photography &
Culture 3.1 (2010): 353-358.
Chaise, Christian. ‘Behind AFP’s Syria coverage’, AFP Correspondent, 18 March 2018, https://
correspondent.afp.com/behind-afps-syria-coverage.
De Angelis, Enrico. ‘The State of Disarray of a Networked Revolution: The Syrian Uprising’s
Information Environment’, Sociologica 3 (2011): 1-24.
Della Ratta, Donatella. Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria, London:
Pluto Press, 2018.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of all, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Ghazzawi, Razan. Facebook update, 7 April 2017
Mohana al-Haddad, Nisal. Interview, 23 May 2017.
al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. ‘Tahdiq fi wajeh al-fazia’, al-Jumhuriya, 29 May 2015, https://www.
aljumhuriya.net/ar/33487 .
Harding, Luke. ‘It Had a Big Impact on Me’: Story Behind Trump’s Whirlwind Missile Response,
7 April 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/07/how-picturesof-syrias-dead-babies-made-trump-do-unthinkable.
Haugbolle, Sune. ‘Evidence, Justice, and Peace-Making in Syria’, SyriaUntold, 08 December
2016, http://syriauntold.com/2016/12/08/evidence-justice-peace-making-syria/.
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al-Hussein, Adham. Interview, 22 May 2017.
Mannocchi, Francesca and Diala Brisly. Se Chiudo gli Occhi. La Guerra in Siria nella Voce dei
Bambini, Roma: Round Robin Editrice, 2018.
Manoff, Marlene. ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, portal: Libraries and
the Academy 4.1 (2004): 9-25.
al-Mokdad, Orwa. ‘Dafan al-Mawta bil swar’, Bidayyat, 28 February 2014, http://bidayyat.org/
ar/opinions_article.php?id=70#.WtM2cNNuaRt.
Robinson, Sue and Cathy DeShano. ‘“Anyone can know”: Citizen journalism and the
interpretive community of the mainstream press’, Journalism 12.8 (2011): 963-982.
Salman, Muzaffar. Interview, 10 April 2018.
al-Sayeed, Abd al-Hai. ‘Surat al-dhahiya wa karamat al-dhahiya’, al-Jumhuriya, 20 July 2015,
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/33651.
The Syria Campaign, ‘This photo memorialises life […]’, Facebook update, 27 March 2018,
https://www.facebook.com/TheSyriaCampaign/photos/a.608812989210718/1711973765
561296/?type=3&theater.
Youssef, Dellair. Interview, 17 April 2018.
Wessels, Joshka. ‘YouTube and the Role of Digital Video for Transitional Justice in Syria’, Politik
19.4 (2016): 30-54.
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07. CORPORATIONS ERASING HISTORY: THE CASE
OF THE SYRIAN ARCHIVE
HADI AL KHATIB
Fig. 1: Photo by Muzaffar Salman in Aleppo 2014.
The World Health Organization has revealed that between April and June 2017, 41 medical
facilities in Syria had been attacked, amounting to one attack every two days.1 Many civilian
casualties and injuries as a result of those attacks were reported, and damage or destruction
to the facilities caused a shortage of medical care that affected over a million people.
Most of those medical facilities were located in Idlib, the largest remaining opposition-controlled city during the 2017-2019 period. Earlier in the Syrian conflict thousands of Syrians
were displaced from the rural areas around Damascus, as well as from the cities of Daraa,
Aleppo, Homs, and other locations, with the majority relocating to Idlib or Aleppo’s countryside.2
1
2
World Health Organization, ‘Attacks on Health Care’, 1 April 2017,
https://www.who.int/emergencies/attacks-on-health-care/Attacks_Dashboard_2017_Q2.pdf?ua=1.
Patrick Wintour, ‘Thousands of Syrians Displaced as Threat of Idlib Attack Grows’, The Guardian, 10
September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/10/thousands-of-syrians-displacedas-threat-of-idlib-attack-grows.
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Fig. 2: WHO reported attacks on medical facilities in ten countries including Syria between April 1 and
June 30, June 2017.
We at the Syrian Archive worked to collect, preserve, and verify videos, photos, and other
social media materials documenting these attacks on medical facilities. The Syrian Archive is
an organization made up of human rights advocates, archivists, technicians, and open source
investigators.3 We are dedicated to preserving, memorializing, and adding value to publicly
available information related to human rights violations committed by all sides during the
Syrian conflict through verifying and enhancing digital content, establishing verified databases
for reporting and advocacy purposes, and acting as an evidence tool for legally implementing
justice and accountability efforts as concept and practice.
Content Takedowns
On June 26, 2017, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube jointly announced the formation
of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.4 In their announcement, the companies
stated that they would be working on developing and utilizing technological solutions
for content moderation, including the use of machine learning. Since that time, Google
3
4
The Syrian Archive, https://syrianarchive.org/en.
YouTube Official, ‘Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube Announce Formation of the Global Internet
Forum to Counter Terrorism’, YouTube Official (blog), June 2017,
https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/06/facebook-microsoft-twitter-and-youtube.html.
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has removed 7,762,431 videos from their YouTube platform, of which they have claimed
6,182,263 were initially detected by automated flagging before being manually reviewed
and removed.5
Shortly thereafter, in July 2017, we at the Syrian Archive, together with Syrians for Truth
and Justice and Justice for Life, published a report that focused on eight attacks on medical
facilities perpetrated either by the Syrian or Russian armed forces.6 At the time, those facilities
served a combined population of 1.3 million people (a beneficiary group larger than the
population of Brussels).7 Just before publishing the report, we checked the status of all the
videos that we had used as source material for our report. We wanted to ensure that the videos
were accessible online so that readers could review our findings and analysis. However, we
found that despite having the videos archived within our internal infrastructure, most of the
ones from YouTube that we had included in our analysis had been removed or otherwise been
made unavailable.
This would not have been a problem had the videos been glorifying violence or promoting
terrorism, which supposedly are the justifications for stricter content moderation policies
by platforms. But we found that, in many cases, videos documenting attacks on medical
facilities were published by established media groups like Aleppo Media Center, Baladi News
Network, SMO Syria, Sham News Agency, and Qasioun News Agency.8 Others were published
by humanitarian groups, including the Idlib Health Directorate, well-regarded human rights
documentation groups, for example the Violation Documentation Center, or citizen reporters
like Muaz Al Shami.9
YouTube channels such as the one for Shaam News Network, have been active since the
early days of the Syrian uprisings and have uploaded videos of peaceful protests from various
cities in Syria.10 At the time that this YouTube channel was made unavailable, on November
4, 2017, it housed over 200,000 videos. Similarly, Aleppo Media Center held 4,700 videos
prior to their removal.
5
6
7
8
9
10
Google Transparency report, ‘YouTube Community Guidelines enforcement’, October 2017, https://
transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals?hl=en.
Syrians for Truth and Justice, https://stj-sy.org/en/; Justice for Life, https://justiceforlife.net/; The Syrian
Archive, ‘Medical Facilities Under Fire’, July 2017, https://syrianarchive.org/en/investigations/MedicalFacilities-Under-Fire/.
The Syrian Archive, ‘Medical Facilities Under Fire’.
Aleppo Media Center, YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/
UCoUs821xB8HYAXBHdDcygdg; Baladi News, https://www.baladi-news.com/en; Syrian Media
Organisation, YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/smosyria; Shaam News Network,
YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/SHAMSNN; Qasioun News, https://www.qasiounnews.com/en.
Idlib Health Directorate, https://ihd-sy.org/en/; Violations Documentation Centre in Syria, https://vdc-sy.
net/en/; Muaz Al Shami, YouTube Channel,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUIMqmvEsSY1zJvpV539z8g.
Shaam News Network, ‘18-3-2011 ’مظاهرة درعا أمام المسجد العمري, YouTube Video, 18 March 2011,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiUA7M0gGVM.
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One of the videos published by Aleppo Media Center11 features the first moments of the attack
that targeted the Al Rahmah hospital in Khan Sheikun.12 This video documents what happens
inside the medical facility, where children’s voices are clearly heard in the background.
Another video published by Aleppo Media Center includes an interview with one of the workers
at the hospital, who explains:
The hospital received hundreds of injured people as a result of the chemical attack.
This included women and children. The Russian and Syrian air force attack targeted the
medical point with fifteen airstrikes which damaged the medical point very badly, and
it’s out of service now.13
Fig. 3: AMC video published on YouTube documenting the damage to the interior of Al Rahmah hospital
in Khan Sheikun.
We reached out to Aleppo Media Center, Shaam News Network, and many other news agencies
to get copies of the emails they received from Google in order to gain a better understanding
of the reasons why the content had been taken down. As an example, Shaam News Network
received three separate emails explaining that the channel received ‘strikes’ for three specific
videos, allegedly for violating YouTube’s community guidelines about violent or graphic content,
content that incites violence or encourages dangerous activities.14 Two of the videos were
published online in 2012. These videos documented people and children killed as a result of
alleged shelling by the Syrian government.
11
12
13
14
Aleppo Media Center, ‘’اللحظات األولى لقصف الطائرات الحربية مشفى خان شيخون في ريف إدلب الجنوبي, YouTube Video, 4
April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mZa0S94eXU.
The Syrian Archive, ‘Medical Facilities Under Fire’.
Aleppo Media Center, ‘4-4-2017 ’شاهد آثار الدمار الذي خلفته الغارات الجوية على مشفى الرحمة في مدينة خان شيخون, YouTube
Video, 4 April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtDy8xoRuSc.
YouTube, ‘Community Guidelines’, https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines.
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Starting in July 2017, when we were finishing our report on medical facilities that had been
attacked, our team began communicating with Google to try to reinstate the materials that
had been taken down. As a result of our discussions, over 200,000 videos and hundreds
of YouTube channels have been reinstated, but numerous problems remain unsolved.15
Hundreds of YouTube channels documenting human rights violations remain currently
unavailable, such as the YouTube channel of KafrZita media group. One of their videos that
was taken down documents a chlorine attack that targeted the city of KafrZita on April 18,
2014, as reported by the OPCW fact finding mission.16 This video is archived and accessible
via the Syrian Archive platform.17
Fig. 4: Removed video from the KafrZita media group YouTube channel.
15
16
17
The Syrian Archive, ‘Technology and Advocacy’, https://syrianarchive.org/en/tech-advocacy.
Security Council Report, ‘Third Report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical WeaponsUnited Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism’, 24 August 2016, http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/
atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2016_738.pdf.
KafrZita Media Group, ‘4 18 ’هام لإلعالم حماة كفرزيتا اخالء الجرحى وطاقم احد المشافي نتيجة استهداف المدينة بغاز الكلور السام,
YouTube Video, 18 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1NksAJHhDU.
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Fig. 5: Syrian Archive’s video database.
It is very difficult to reach out to each and every person who has uploaded videos documenting
crimes to YouTube, in order to reinstate their channel. Many of those citizen reporters have
been displaced within Syria, are refugees in third-party countries, or have been killed during
the war. These are just some of the reasons why the removed videos might remain lost forever.
This problem is not specific to the Syrian context. With the proliferation of mobile phones and
better-quality internet and communication infrastructures, many other conflicts and human
rights violations, such as in Yemen, are being documented on social media platforms by brave
people who imperil their lives to do so. These materials risk being removed from social media
platforms due to political and technical decisions, such as the EU Proposal on the Prevention
of Terrorist Content Online, and the implementation of machine-learning to detect graphic
videos and photos, which partially automates their removal.
Why Visual Documentation Is Important
There is an emerging body of literature and case law in which user-generated digital content
from social media platforms is scrutinized or has been used in legal claims. Archiving and
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preserving digital materials that provide information about human rights abuses and war
crimes are increasingly recognized as critical for justice and accountability efforts globally.
There are a number of cases that illustrate this. In August 2017 and again in 2018, the
International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for a Libyan national accused of being
directly responsible for the killing of 33 people, based on video material and transcripts, as
well as posts made on social media platforms.18 And in both Germany and Sweden, individuals
have been found guilty of terrorist offenses and human rights violations due to incriminating
content posted to social media platforms.19
In Syria, content preserved and verified by the Syrian Archive project might offer the only
evidence indicating whether a human rights violation even happened. Such material can
help implicate potential perpetrators in the many areas where the Syrian government has
gained control and has been destroying physical evidence and reconstructing crime scenes.20
But visual documentation is also important for other reasons. Content can strengthen the
political campaigns of human rights advocates by providing, for instance, documentation
on the violation of children’s rights, sexual and gender-based violence, violations against
specifically protected persons and objects, or the use of illegal weapons. Visual documentation
can also feed into humanitarian response-planning by helping to identify areas of risk or need,
and contributing to the protection of civilians.
Such materials also allow us to tell untold stories, by amplifying the voices of those on the
ground. Not every incident in the Syrian conflict has been reported by journalists. Very
challenging conditions have made it extremely difficult for local and especially international
media to work in Syria, meaning that many incidents have been missed or under-reported.21
Finally, verified visual content can help human rights activists and Syrian citizens to set up a
memorialization process and create dialogue around issues related to peace and justice. Such
dialogue has the potential to recognize and substantiate the suffering of citizens. It provides
multiple perspectives on the conflict, which prevents revisionist or simplified narratives,
while raising awareness of the situation in the country and highlighting the futility of violence
to future generations.22 Video and images often complement official narratives and press
accounts of an event or situation, adding both detail and nuance. At other times, they directly
rebut certain factual claims and contradict pervasive narratives.23
18
19
20
21
22
23
International Criminal Court, The Prosecutor v. Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf Al-Werfalli, Case No. ICC01/11-01/17, Warrant of Arrest (15 August 2017 and 4 July 4 2018), https://www.icc-cpi.int/libya/
al-werfalli.
Södertörn District Court, Sweden, Prosecutor v. Mouhannad Droubi, Case No. B 13656-14, Decision
(26 February 2015), http://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/3296/Prosecutor-vMouhannad-Droubi/.
Jeff Deutch and Hadi Habal, ‘The Syrian Archive: A Methodological Case Study of Open-Source
Investigation of State Crime Using Video Evidence from Social Media Platforms’, State Crime Journal 7.1
(Spring, 2018): 46-76.
Deutch and Habal, ‘The Syrian Archive’.
Deutch and Habal, ‘The Syrian Archive’.
Jeff Deutch and Nico Para, ‘Targeted Mass Archiving of Open Source Information: A Case Study’, in
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As social media companies remove these important materials, archiving becomes necessary
to ensure that this content is available and accessible in the long term, in order to reconstruct
and verify the digital collective memory of what happened and when, and who has been
responsible for committing crimes in Syria over the last eight years.
Preserving this material will also avoid manipulation of the Syrian historical narrative and
provide means to search for the truths that Syrians have wanted the whole world to witness
and not forget. Hopefully one day it can be used to prosecute war criminals who have been
responsible for killing thousands of people with full impunity.
References
Aleppo Media Center. YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/
UCoUs821xB8HYAXBHdDcygdg.
Aleppo Media Center. ‘’اللحظات األولى لقصف الطائرات الحربية مشفى خان شيخون في ريف إدلب الجنوبي, YouTube
Video, 4 April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mZa0S94eXU.
Baladi News. https://www.baladi-news.com/en.
Deutch, Jeff and Habal, Hadi. ‘The Syrian Archive: A Methodological Case Study of OpenSource Investigation of State Crime Using Video Evidence from Social Media Platforms’,
State Crime Journal 7.1 (Spring, 2018): 46-76.
Google Transparency report. ‘YouTube Community Guidelines enforcement’, October 2017,
https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals?hl=en.
Idlib Health Directorate. https://ihd-sy.org/en/.
International Criminal Court. The Prosecutor v. Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf Al-Werfalli, Case
No. ICC-01/11-01/17, Warrant of Arrest (15 August 2017 and 4 July 4 2018), https://www.
icc-cpi.int/libya/al-werfalli.
Justice for Life, https://justiceforlife.net/.
KafrZita Media Group. ‘هام لإلعالم حماة كفرزيتا اخالء الجرحى وطاقم احد المشافي نتيجة استهداف المدينة بغاز
4 18 ’الكلور السام, YouTube Video, 18 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Nks
AJHhDU.
Sam Dubberley, Alexa Koenig, and Daragh Murray (eds) Digital Witness: Using Open Source Methods
for Human Rights Investigation, Advocacy and Accountability, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019
(forthcoming).
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Qasioun News. https://www.qasioun-news.com/en.
A l S h a m i , M u a z . Yo uTu b e C h a n n e l , h t t p s : / / w w w .y o u t u b e . c o m / c h a n n e l /
UCUIMqmvEsSY1zJvpV539z8g.
Security Council Report. ‘Third Report of the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism’, 24 August 2016,
http://www.securitycouncilreport.org /atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2016_738.pdf.
Shaam News Network. YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/SHAMSNN.
Shaam News Network. ‘18-3-2011 ’مظاهرة درعا أمام المسجد العمري, YouTube Video, 18 March
2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiUA7M0gGVM.
Södertörn District Court. Sweden, Prosecutor v. Mouhannad Droubi, Case No. B 13656-14,
Decision (26 February 2015), http://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/3296/
Prosecutor-v-Mouhannad-Droubi/.
Syrians for Truth and Justice. https://stj-sy.org/en/.
Syrian Media Organisation. YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/smosyria.
The Syrian Archive. https://syrianarchive.org/en.
The Syrian Archive. ‘Medical Facilities Under Fire’, July 2017, https://syrianarchive.org/
en/investigations/Medical-Facilities-Under-Fire/.
The Syrian Archive. ‘Technology and Advocacy’, https://syrianarchive.org/en/techadvocacy.
The Syrian Archive Observation Database. https://syrianarchive.org/en/database?after=2014-0417&before=2014-04-19&unit=fd03b8c.
Violations Documentation Centre in Syria. https://vdc-sy.net/en/.
Wintour, Patrick. ‘Thousands of Syrians displaced as threat of Idlib attack grows’, The
Guardian, 10 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/10/
thousands-of-syrians-displaced-as-threat-of-idlib-attack-grows.
World Health Organization. ‘Attacks on Health Care’, 1 April 2017, https://www.who.int/
emergencies/attacks-on-healthcare/Attacks_Dashboard_2017_Q2.pdf?ua=1.
Yo uTu b e . ‘ C o m m u n i t y G u i d e l i n e s ’ , h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / y t / a b o u t /
policies/#community-guidelines.
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YouTube Official Blog. ‘Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube Announce Formation of
the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’, June 2017, https://youtube.googleblog.
com/2017/06/facebook-microsoft-twitter-and-youtube.html.
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08. WHY THE SYRIAN ARCHIVE IS NO LONGER
(ONLY) ABOUT SYRIA
DONATELLA DELLA RATTA
Introduction: The Archive as Evidence
February 2019 marked a milestone in the history of international justice against war crimes
and crimes against humanity. Two Syrian citizens, who had sought asylum in Germany in
2012, were arrested in their hosting country on allegations of ‘carrying out or aiding torture
and crimes against humanity’.1 The charges were mostly built around an investigation carried
out by the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) who
had interviewed torture survivors. Substantial evidence was gathered from the archive of a
former member of the Syrian military intelligence known as ‘Caesar’, who had turned into a
‘forensic’ photographer and smuggled thousands of images documenting torture and human
rights abuses committed by the regime.
‘Codename: Caesar’ was an exhibition of selected material from the 55,000 photographs
documenting torture inflicted on around 11,000 Syrians between 2011 and 2013.2 It toured the
world and, in 2015, made it to the UN headquarters in New York, where it generated outrage
and indignation. ‘It is imperative that we do not look away,’ the US deputy representative to
the UN declared at the time.3 Articles, interviews, and awareness campaigns followed. And yet,
despite the media buzz and the appalled declarations of politicians around the world, for many
years ‘Codename: Caesar’ remained just an exhibition; a visual representation, an ‘aesthetic’
object, although a very graphic one – until February 2019 when, for the first time, it finally
turned into visual evidence to bring perpetrators to trial.
‘Why do you risk your lives to film?,’ I asked my Syrian friends back in 2011, when I was still living
in Damascus. ‘The world does not know what is happening in Syria,’ they replied. ‘Once the
world knows, the world will act. As soon as information flows, mobilization will start.’4 Syrians
started their networked, visual, online uprising in parallel to the street protests on the ground,
with the absolute faith in the ‘evidence-image’, an image born from its makers’ aspiration of
serving proof of human rights violations.5
1
2
3
4
5
Kate Connolly, ‘Germany Arrests Two Syrians Suspected of Crimes Against Humanity,’ The Guardian,
13 February 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/germany-arrests-two-suspectedsyrian-secret-service-officers.
GOAL, https://www.goalglobal.org/stories/post/the-caesar-photographic-exhibition.
Raya Jalabi, ‘Images of Syrian Torture on Display at UN: “It Is Imperative We Do not Look Away”’, The
Guardian, 11 March 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/11/images-syrian-tortureshock-new-yorkers-united-nations.
Donatella Della Ratta, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of the Image: Unfinished Thoughts on Filming in
Contemporary Syria’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 10.2-3 (2017): 109-32.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, Chicago: University
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The Syrian image possesses an ‘unbearable lightness’. It is light, almost imperceptible, as
its pixelated, blurred qualities equal little to no aesthetic value in the professional newsmaking business. Yet this very lightness becomes unbearable in the moment when it is
‘burdened with an ethical demand’ that the pixelated aesthetics themselves help construct
through their immediacy, liveliness, and apparent lack of mediation.6 It is as if the being
there of the filmer would necessarily guarantee the truth-value of the image and push the
viewer to act.
Syrian image-makers discovered quite early in the uprising and at their own expense,
that there was no ‘straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact
of understanding the state of the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to
political action’.7 Shooting as in filming was quite soon matched by the parallel movement
of shooting as in killing, the only relevant difference being that Syrians, who once ‘used to
be killed in the dark’, were now murdered in broad daylight.8 Syrians started to lose faith
in the ethical power of the image and turned to its aesthetic qualities instead. In the past
years, international art venues and film festivals have paid tribute to the Syrian image with
successful exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and prestigious awards.9
Yet February 2019 marked a new beginning in the history of the Syrian image, or perhaps
rather a ‘homecoming’. The Syrian image came back to its original evidentiary purpose.
Its ethical stance seemed to have been restored, its call for justice revived. Perhaps the
German court sentence can pave the way to similar decisions by other countries and the
visual material accumulated during almost a decade can finally meet its initial goal of
serving as the historical documentation of a genocide. Projects such as the Video and
Documentation Center in Syria (VDC) or the Syrian Archive, striving for justice through
the visual, can help bring those who are responsible to court and, at the same time,
accumulate layers of visual knowledge in order to build a counter-narrative to that of the
regime.10
The battle on the ground has moved to the digital. The Syrian image, once the quintessential
tool of unarmed and peaceful resistance, has now opened a new frontline in the domain
of the immaterial, in the fight for control over the past to build a narrative for the future.
The Syrian archive functions as a collection of evidentiary forms that aspire to become
6
7
8
9
10
of Chicago Press, 2008. For a discussion of the evidence-image in the Syrian uprising see Donatella
Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria, London: Pluto Press, 2018.
Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution, p. 158.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2009, p. 75.
Josepha Ivanka Wessels, “Syria: The Role of Grassroots Videos in Conflict Escalation’, in Ole Waever
and Isabel Bramsen (eds) New Theories and Approaches in Peace & Conflict, London: Routledge,
forthcoming.
Many Syrian films have been awarded in prestigious venues in the past years, such as Coma (dir. Sarah
Fattahi, 2015, Visions du Reel) and Chaos (dir. Sarah Fattahi, 2018, Filmmakers of the Present golden
award, Locarno Film Festival 2018), Still Recording (dir. Saaed al Batal and Ghyath Ayoub, 2018,
Fipresci prize, Venice Film Festival 2018), and Last Men in Aleppo (dir. Firas Fayyad, 2017, nominated
for the Oscars, won the World Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 2017).
The Syrian Archive, https://syrianarchive.org/en.
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historical documentation and crystallize into memory to be passed down from generation
to generation.
While this digital frontline has been opened and the German court sentence seems to
have brought a renewed faith in the evidentiary power of the Syrian image, other issues
remain more opaque and ambiguous, requiring highlighting and dissection. Focusing
exclusively on the evidentiary function of the Syrian image bears the risk of losing sight of
other features and functioning mechanisms that have emerged from Syria, while they are
no longer (only) Syria-related.
This essay is an attempt to think and theorize the Syrian archive in light of these dynamics
that manifested in post-2011 Syria, but have turned into issues of global concern in relation
to the political economy of contemporary image-making and image-distribution. To many
extents, Syria proved to be a laboratory for experimenting with techniques and tactics of
surveillance, repression, and control that are image-related and are now implemented
globally and often by corporate subjects with commercial purposes. The hegemonic web
2.0 or ‘social web’, particularly after the boom of social networking platforms such as
YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, has connected narratives of socio-economic wealth
and political progress with networked practices such as open access and peer-production,
and sharing and remixing user generated content.11 And yet the Syrian case brings to
the surface the dark side of participatory cultures, which is now also becoming apparent
globally with increasing levels of surveillance and repression performed through the visual
– facial recognition being just the latest of these techniques.
In this regard, Syria provides us with an extremely compelling case study of a hypertrophic
visual production that, when taken out of the exceptional context in which it was generated
(the 2011 uprising turned into civil war), suggests that concerns of storage, access,
ownership, and distribution should be analyzed in the broader framework of contemporary
visual political economy on a global scale.
Who Owns the Syrian Image?
‘Poor revolutionary fools, millionaires in images,’ is Jean Luc Godard’s bitter comment on
the loss of thousands of lives of Palestinian activists who had filmed their revolution in the
1970s in the hope of celebrating its ‘victory’, but instead had to face military defeat, and
eventually death.12 They had lost not only their political struggle, but also the ownership
and control over of the images of the revolution. Those were appropriated by third parties
who violated their ‘here’, their place of origin, their revolutionary goal, and transposed
them into an ‘elsewhere’, where their fate was ‘to be distributed and commodified just
11
12
Tim O’Reilly, ‘What is Web 2.0’, O’Reilly, 30 September 2005, https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/
archive/what-is-web-20.html.
Ici et ailleurs (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1976); Until Victory (Jusqu’a la victoire) was the original title of the
film when the shooting took place in 1970. Six years later, after Black September and the defeat of the
Palestinian uprising, the film was released with the new title of Ici et ailleurs.
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like any other good’.13 Godard’s film Ici et ailleurs (‘Here and elsewhere’) is a tribute to the
Palestinian activist-filmmakers and a critical reflection on the increasingly visual quality of
contemporary capitalism, which generates a disjunction between those who make images
and inject them into the global circulation circuit, and those who keep, preserve, and own
them.
Godard’s distinction between image-makers and image-keepers couldn’t be more
appropriate for describing the circumstances under which Syria’s visual production takes
place. Syrian video activists, who filmed and shared their footage in the excitement of
the revolutionary moment, firmly believing in the distributed ownership and anonymous
authorship of what was made in the name of the collective ‘we’, later had to realize that
they were no longer keepers of their own images.14 As soon as the revolutionary moment
faded away, to be replaced by the armed conflict, the revolutionary commons were also
exposed to disruption and looting.
Those who had filmed anonymously claimed back ownership when they realized that the
Syrian image was highly commodified and sought-after by international subjects, from
NGOs and TV networks to art galleries and film festivals. Paradoxically, the more Syria as
a geographical entity was disrupted by violence, destruction of buildings and cities, and
displacement of the population happening on the ground, the more it was in high demand
as an immaterial good, whether in the form of media or an art commodity.15 Sadly, the
dispute over copyright and ownership of immaterial goods previously identified as collective
commons has materialized in a number of legal controversies that have oftentimes, for
example, prevented Syrian films from being distributed and watched in public.16
When it comes to the ownership of the Syrian image, the decisive power is no longer
located in Syrian hands. Rather, it’s Silicon Valley platform capitalism that controls the fate
of the Syrian archive and rules over what images should be passed to future generations
and become ‘memory’, and what images ought to be condemned to digital removal and
eternal oblivion. ‘It is like we are writing our memories – not in our own book but in a third
party’s book. We don’t have control of it,’ says Hadi Al Khatib, co-founder of the Syrian
Archive project, commenting on this paradoxical situation.17
13
14
15
16
17
Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution, p 146.
Peter Snowdon, The Revolution Will Be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and Documentary Film Practice After
the Arab Spring, PhD diss., Hasselt, Belgium, University of Hasselt, 2016, p. 18.
See, for example, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Sundance, who have all
featured Syrian films, which oftentimes have won major prizes. In terms of art exhibitions, I have myself
curated a show with 141 Syrian artists, Syria off-frame, which was supported by Luciano Benetton
Foundation and hosted by the Fondazione Cini in Venice, 2015.
Jellyfish (dir. Khaled Abdulwahed, 2015) is one of these. See Chapter 4 and 8 in Della Ratta, Shooting a
Revolution.
Sarah El Deeb, ‘History of Syria’s War at Risk as YouTube Reins in Content’, AP News, 13 September
2017, https://apnews.com/d9f1c4f1bf20445ab06cbdff566a2b70.
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In 2018, YouTube deleted 33 million videos deemed ‘terrorist propaganda’.18 Between
June and September 2017, around 180 channels connected to Syria were eliminated from
the online realm.19 Among them, Shaam News Network, a popular opposition group that had
nearly 400,000 videos on his YouTube channel.20 These clean-up operations are legitimate
and lawful, as their rationale is based on the company’s terms-of-service to which every user
has to subscribe before being allowed to sign-up and open a channel. The same applies to
Facebook and every other social networking site, which are private companies by nature, with
(so far) no obligations to preserve a country’s digital memory and history. However, things
risk becoming even more complicated when an institution decides to rule over the chaotic
environment of social networking sites, which is what has been debated within the European
Union, particularly since the March 2019 massacre in Christchurch’s mosque live-streamed
on Facebook.21 A new anti-terrorism bill at the EU level could put tech companies into an
‘even more assertive enforcement role’ that, under the threat of massive fines, could push
them ‘to invest more in aggressive machine-learning content filters to suppress potentially
objectionable material.’22
Paradoxically, this combined action between market and state censorship could end up
benefiting authoritarian regimes. Syrian activists’ endeavors to build an evidentiary archive
to hold crime perpetrators responsible in international courts could be sabotaged, albeit
by accident and unwillingly, by the joint action of technology and law, by the compromise
between corporations and governments in the name of anti-terror laws, hate speech, and
violence regulations. The evidence-image, to the production of which many Syrians have
sacrificed their lives, is at risk of disappearing not as a result of an openly coercive act of
censorship from an authoritarian regime, but in the most neoliberal fashion of all, silently and
sophisticatedly choked by market and state regulations.
The survival of the Syrian archive is thus threatened by the very nature of today’s visual
political economy. The disjunction between image-making and image-keeping, the latter
lying in the hands of Silicon Valley platform capitalism, generates the paradoxical situation
by which the memory of an historical event – albeit one as controversial as the March 2011
uprising – is controlled and managed by a third party not directly involved in that very event.
Tech companies are the custodians of the Syrian image. They do not have a ‘biological’ relation
to it but they have to take care of it within a sort of foster-care framework.
Sometimes these images are ‘orphan’, as Enrico De Angelis calls them in this volume. Orphan
images ‘do not have a father, a mother, or a story, or a background’, they are uploaded to
social networking sites, circulated, manipulated, and downloaded in the seemingly endless
18
19
20
21
22
Bernhard Warner, ‘Tech Companies are Deleting Evidence of War Crime’, The Atlantic, 8 May
2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-itharder/588931/.
El Deeb, ‘History of Syria’s War at Risk’.
El Deeb, ‘History of Syria’s War at Risk’.
Heather, ‘Facebook Changes Live Stream Rules After New Zealand Shooting’, CNN, 15 May 2019,
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/14/tech/facebook-livestream-changes/index.html.
Warner, ‘Tech Companies are Deleting Evidence of War Crime’.
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stream of data where the tracks of their original makers get lost.23 But even when images
are identified, attributed or copyrighted, even if carrying a certified paternity, they are still
submitted to an involuntary regime of foster-care and subject to the rather arbitrary and cruel
possibility of being removed from the digital past, and therefore from the future, of the country.
And yet the question of digital oblivion, which dramatically hits Syria as a war-torn country, is in
fact a more general question that should interest individuals living in neoliberal democracies
as well. Every time we upload a piece of content on a proprietary platform we should be aware
of the volatility of this very act, which exposes our digital past, and therefore our future, to
the arbitrary nature of choices made by private actors and to the constant fluctuation of the
market rules to which they are subject. For example, our belief in the ‘cloud’ as a safe and
always accessible storage space is ideological. The cloud, as much as social networking sites,
is a private environment ruled by regulations that are set up by the platform owner and might
therefore theoretically be subject to change any time, arbitrarily. Until open-source, nonproprietary alternatives are implemented, we will be somewhat like Syrian image-makers:
deprived of maternity, looking for our expropriated images, begging our custodians to allow
us even to see them.
Content Moderation, Gatekeeping, and the Fate of the Syrian
Image
So far, the process of image-keeping and ruling over the fate of digital images has been
discussed publicly mostly by focusing on the role played by non-human agents, such as
algorithms and AIs. However, humans play a crucial part in the game of gatekeeping digital
data. ‘Commercial content moderation’ (CCM) is a whole field of digital labor performed in the
shadows by workers bound by non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from shedding
light on the backstage of their daily jobs, which consist of policing and cleaning up the web
from the toxic waste of social media, such as hate speech, child pornography, and explicitly
graphic content.24
Digital utopias have long preached the horizontality, decentralization, and leaderless nature of
the social web, crafting a fantasy of an unmediated, unfiltered communication flow exclusively
managed by the users in the complete absence of ‘gatekeepers’.25 However, the wave of
popular uprisings that erupted in the Middle East starting late 2010 with the self-immolation
of Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi, known as the ‘Arab Spring’, and the sheer amount of visual
media produced by all subjects involved, from protesters and regime officials to armed and
jihadi groups, has brought to the surface the necessity of curating and sanitizing such material,
thus revealing the ideological nature of thinking of the digital as a free, uncensored space.26
23
24
25
26
See Enrico De Angelis, ‘The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria’, in this volume.
Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: the Hidden Digital Labor of Commercial Content Moderation, PhD
diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014.
This is a popular term in media studies referring to those, in broadcast media, who filter the information
and present it to the general public, see Melvin and Margaret DeFleur, Mass Communication Theories:
Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects, Boston MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2010.
For a problematization of the definition of the ‘Spring’ and the ideology behind it, see Donatella Della
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With ISIS’ horror media spectacles being just the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly violent
visual culture produced by organized armed groups as well as by isolated individuals, the
urgency to police and repress the once idealized domain of digital expression has become
apparent.
The visual culture originated from the Syrian conflict has inaugurated this trend, pushing
Silicon Valley tech giants to act fast and start filtering and cleaning up the content generated
in the area. This endeavor, however, has exposed the contradictions implicit in the nature
of contemporary social networking sites, which are increasingly playing the editorial and
gatekeeping role of a media company, rather than the much more aseptic function of crafting
a digital environment for people to interact in, where the the people themselves bear the whole
responsibility for the content produced. This has always been the official justification brought
up by tech giants when facing problematic situations such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal,
when the company abused the personal data of as many as 50 million Facebook users.27
Defending Facebook in front of US Congress, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared: ‘I consider us
to be a technology company because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who
write code and build product and services for other people.’28 Yet the reality of the day-today digital realm is quite far from this statement. As they staunchly deny any editorial role of
content moderation and flagging, social networking platforms are in fact increasingly policing
the web and deleting problematic items, afraid of retaliation and criticism, as in the case of
the live-streaming of the Christchurch massacre.
While the moderation task is sometimes processed by non-human or post-human entities,
such as algorithms and AIs, there is still a sheer amount of content that is too complex for
machines to analyze. Operations involving sense-making and the understanding of the context
of uploaded items are delegated to human workers who are also in many cases less expensive
than automated processes. Recent works, such as Sarah T. Roberts’ groundbreaking
ethnographic research on CCM, or the documentary film The Cleaners (2018), have shed
light onto this very dark side of the web, where underpaid digital labor mostly operating in the
shadows from India, the Philippines, but also from rural Iowa and Germany, has to rule over
the fate of global digital content in a matter of seconds, sometimes thousands of times a day.29
Besides underlining the shifting nature of contemporary social networking sites from platforms
for interaction to de facto media companies, this situation raises a number of crucial concerns.
27
28
29
Ratta, ‘On the Narrative of the Arab D.I.Y. Revolutions and How it Fits into our Neoliberal Times’, in Pete
Bennet and Julian McDougall (eds) Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth: Hard Times Today, London:
Routledge, 2017, pp. 139–55.
Sam Meredith, ‘Here’s Everything You Need to Know About the Cambridge Analytica Scandal’,
CNBC, 21 March 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/facebook-cambridge-analytica-scandaleverything-you-need-to-know.html.
Meredith, ‘Here’s Everything You Need to Know’
See Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019; Sara T. Roberts, ‘Social Media’s Silent Filter’, The
Atlantic, 8 March 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercial-contentmoderation/518796/.
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Firstly, it transposes dynamics of factory exploitation that were typical of Fordist economies
into the domain of immaterial production. Whether located in developing countries or in the
suburbs of Western capitals, CCM workers are the new digital slaves, blatantly exploited by
global platform capitalism, sometimes having to review as many as 800 pieces of distressing
content – from child pornography to war executions – in a single shift for just a few dollars.30
Even when hired by big corporations such as Facebook, they are treated as second-class
employees, constantly reminded of their lower status and denied the perks and benefits that
those working at tech companies usually receive.31 Secondly, the very nature of their job, the
fact that they are ‘the cleaners’ of the garbage that is produced daily on the internet, exposes
them to all sorts of traumas and disorders, for which they have to seek counseling and which
might lead them to burnout and permanent damage, including committing suicide.32
Thirdly, and more relevant to our discussion on the fate of the Syrian image, there are issues
of cultural sensitivity at play in CCM, which combine with crucial features of the political
economy of contemporary social networking sites, to determine the final pronouncement
over what is allowed to stay in the digital domain and acquire the status of ‘memory’ for future
generations, and what should be deleted and therefore forgotten forever. Lisa Parks highlights
the dramatic importance of this cultural factor when reviewing the documentary The Cleaners,
which focuses on a group of people working in CCM from Manila: ‘What does it mean, for
instance, to have content parameters moderated by eighteen- or nineteen-year-old workers
from conservative Christian cultures, some of whom, the film reveals, also happen to support
the repressive policies of the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte?’33 What does it mean to
rule over the fate of Syria’s evidence-images, produced in the belief that violence should be
explicitly shown and exposed to the wider public?34 Oftentimes these images are (and have
been) deleted by workers who are not required to have any knowledge of or background in
the conflict in Syria and the parties involved, with a handful of seconds to decide whether the
footage should be kept or deleted, therefore most likely following the easy path of removing
the content to conform to the community standards and terms of services of the hosting
platform.
And yet other factors might come into play in ruling over the fate of the Syrian image, ones
that are related to the politics of the hosting platforms rather than to their policy. One of the
CCM workers interviewed by Roberts accounts for his decision of deleting a Syria-originated
30
31
32
33
34
See, for example, Sam Biddle, ‘Trauma Counselors Were Pressured to Divulge Confidential Information
About Facebook Moderators, Internal Letter Claims’, The Intercept, 16 August 2019, https://
theintercept.com/2019/08/16/facebook-moderators-mental-health-accenture/?amp=1; Brian
Hanrahan, ‘At Facebook, the Content Police Are Faceless’, Handelsblatt, 14 May 2018, https://
www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/controlling-filth-at-facebook-the-content-police-arefaceless/23582122.html?ticket=ST-25864056-iFyGy4kAaH5fixhA5w7c-ap1.
See Biddle, ‘Trauma Counselors Were Pressured’.
Roberts, Behind the Screen: The Hidden Digital Labor of Commercial Content Moderation.
Lisa Parks, ‘Dirty Data: Content Moderation, Regulatory Outsourcing, and The Cleaners’, Film Quarterly
(Fall 2019): 11-18.
Many of the workers interviewed by Roberts cited Syria-originated videos ‘as examples of the worst
material they had to see on the job in terms of its level of violence and horror’; Roberts, ‘Social Media’s
Silent Filter’.
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video which, in his opinion, violated the company’s code of conduct by being too explicitly
gory. An order came from above, however, to allow the item to stay online. ‘It was important
to show the world, they decided, what was going on with Syria and to raise awareness about
the situation there.’35 Other videos originating from Mexico that, according to the same
employee, presented the same level of gruesomeness, were permanently removed. The
worker’s conclusion was that, ‘whether or not the policy group realized it […] its decisions
were in line with U.S. foreign policy: to support various factions in Syria, and to disavow any
connection to or responsibility for the drug wars of Northern Mexico.’36
Things are not as straightforward as they seem, though. There are well documented cases of
Silicon Valley companies removing videos from Syria that were meant to document regime
atrocities that, theoretically, would be at odds with U.S foreign politics supporting the
opposition against Bashar al-Asad.37 Yet there are many elements at play here: the foreign
politics of a country hosting the most powerful tech companies, combined with corporate
considerations driven by competition and other market-related factors, and decisions
established by standardized algorithmic procedures or taken by humans within just a handful
of seconds, for example.
The issues emerging from CCM and the process of ruling over the Syrian (and any) image are
dramatically complex and politically charged. What the Syrian archive pushes into emergence
is a dynamic at work on a global scale, which is too often operating in the shadows and
should in fact be brought to the surface and properly analyzed. CCM remains one of the
most ambiguous and shady places in the digital realm, and more ethnographic studies and
research should be carried out to unveil the truly political role played by those insisting to be
perceived by the general public as mere platforms, while in fact being powerful media editors.
The Syrian image clearly shows that, in the battle for the control of the future, it will be crucial
to unveil what is been cleaned, by whom, and for what purposes.
Open Access, the Commons, and Other Digital Tragedies
Digital utopias have built a narrative of the ‘commons’ being a space not subject to private
ownership and the rules of the market; a sort of repository of immaterial goods whose
preservation as an open-access environment will help protect knowledge and creativity from
the past in order to build innovation for the future.38 The ‘sharing cultures’ or ‘participatory
cultures’ sprouting out from the social web would provide a human infrastructure for the
commons to thrive and ensure that the latter coexist with the corporate side of the web paving
the way to a sort of ‘hybrid economy’.39
35
36
37
38
39
Roberts, ‘Social Media’s Silent Filter’.
Roberts, ‘Social Media’s Silent Filter’.
Malachy Brown, ‘YouTube Removes Videos Showing Atrocity in Syria’, The New York Times, 22 August
2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-youtube-videos-isis.html.
To this extent, see the work of Lawrence Lessig, e.g. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in
a Connected World, New York: Random House, 2001; Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
Hybrid Economy, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Lessig, Remix; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New
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Images created in Syria in the post-revolutionary moment are the quintessential materialization
of this fantasy of the commons. Visual media generated in the name of a collective ‘we’ have
given life to what Peter Snowdon calls the ‘anarchive’, where the terms ‘archive’ and ‘anarchy’
are there to signal a non-authoritative and anti-authorial repository.40 This repository stores
and preserves the Syrian image, yet it does so in an anarchic fashion, in a logic that does
not comply with market ideas of distribution and consumption, nor with rules dictated by
the surveilling authority of the state. The only authority that the anarchive recognizes is the
‘authority of anyone to speak to and for it’, a sort of ‘distributed leadership’, a diffused power
whose strength lies in a politically savvy collectivity.41
But what happens to the anarchive when this revolutionary collectivity is disrupted by a
violent repression and the descent of the uprising into a civil war? Where do the commons
go, to whom do they belong? The violent turn of the Syrian uprising does not only signify
the development of the struggle on the ground in the form of a militarized conflict. It also
implies a shift at the level of the digital frontline, where the collectively understood space
of the commons becomes disputed, with individual subjects claiming back ownership and
authorship over what was once produced in the name of the ‘we’. Commodification takes
over the commons, as commons become commodities to be distributed and sold on a global
market fetishizing the Syrian image.
Not only has the idea of the revolutionary commons been disrupted, it has also been
appropriated by armed terrorist groups, such as ISIS, that are indifferent to issues of
intellectual property and reject the idea of individual recognition, cultivating instead collective
ownership and diffused authorship. Don DeLillo once noticed that ‘the artist is absorbed, the
madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated…Only the terrorist stands
outside.’42 Today ISIS materializes the very idea of ‘the anonymous, grassroots, amateur,
web 2.0 terrorist as “auteur” with its incredibly spectacular production of a visual culture of
terror.’43 ISIS has succeeded in creating completely new forms and formats of violence that
are performed on its victims on the ground, but also reproduced virally through networked
technologies. And, in spite of the joint efforts of Silicon Valley tech companies and Western
governments engaging in policing and removing ISIS-made media, the group seems to have
managed to resurrect and thrive in the domain of the open web. Paradoxically, the Internet
Archive – the brainchild of the ‘Californian ideology’ materializing its fantasies of openness
and public access at all costs44 – now serves as an uncensored and uncontrolled repository
of what is left of the digital commons, and as a space where ISIS’ compelling visual creations
can still circulate freely without being removed or redacted.
The tragedy of the digital commons also pervades the question of the archive. If the only
alternative to proprietary social networking sites, in order to store and access digital material,
40
41
42
43
44
York University Press, 2006.
Snowdon, The Revolution Will Be Uploaded, p. 25.
Snowdon, The Revolution Will Be Uploaded, p. 121.
Don DeLillo, Mao II, New York: Penguin, 1991, p. 157.
Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution, p. 7; On ISIS media see also Chapter 7 in the same publication.
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, Mute 1.3 (1995).
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is to build an open-source platform, a common and shared immaterial space, then what
about access? Politically engaged collectives, such as Egypt’s Mosireen, have raised this
question of access when designing their online archives.45 As Bidayyat’s Ali Atassi remarks
in this volume, leaving the digital archive open and accessible to all exposes its makers to
the likely possibility that the footage is appropriated by conservative groups or pro-regime
thugs and used to build a counter-narrative. However, locking up the archive would also imply
preventing the population of a war-torn country like Syria from accessing its own past, the
digital being the only domain where the memory of destroyed areas and raided cities can be
stored and preserved.
The question of open access is not an easy one to solve. Most importantly, it is no longer a
Syria-related question. Last January, IBM released a collection of nearly one million photos
taken from the photo-sharing platform Flickr and distributed under Creative Commons
licenses, the latter giving more flexibility than traditional copyright in terms of sharing,
manipulating, and reusing original items, sometimes also allowing commercial use. An NBC
News investigation highlighted that these photos and the textual descriptions attached to
them (which included details such as facial geometry, pose, or skin tone) have likely been used
to train facial recognition algorithms that might enhance surveillance and repression.46 IBM
had previously sold facial recognition technology to the New York City police department that
allowed searching particular skin tones or hair colors, and released video analytics products
that detected people according to their ethnicity.47 Joy Buolamwini, an MIT researcher and
founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, has shed light on the potentially racial and ethnic
oriented bias of algorithms designed for facial recognition, a technology that is increasingly
used for surveillance and pre-emptive crime purposes.48 Currently, a coalition of more than
85 racial justice and civil rights groups has lobbied tech companies to cease selling facial
recognition technology to governments, as it ‘exacerbates “historical and existing bias” that
harms communities already “over-policed and over-surveilled”.’49
The IBM case has thrown into sharp relief the contradictions implicit within concepts such as
open access and free sharing that are deemed inherently progressive by digital utopias. The
idea of being able to share freely and under legal conditions established by the author of an
original work, rather than by lobbies or market rules, together with the possibility for the wider
public to access such a space created by the ‘sharing economies’, lies at the foundation of
the digital commons.50 However, neither ideas consider that the nature of the internet has
45
46
47
48
49
50
See Mosireen’s essay, ‘858: No Archive is Innocent’, in this volume.
Olivia Solon, ‘Facial Recognition’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Millions of Online Photos Scraped Without
Consent’,
NBC News, 12 March 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-littlesecret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921.
Solon, ‘Facial Recognition's “Dirty Little Secret”’.
Richard Feloni, ‘An MIT Researcher Who Analyzed Facial Recognition Software Found Eliminating Bias
in AI Is a Matter of Priorities’, Business Insider, 23 January 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/
biases-ethics-facial-recognition-ai-mit-joy-buolamwini-2019-1?IR=T.
Solon, ‘Facial Recognition's “Dirty Little Secret”’.
This is the basic idea behind Creative Commons, www.creativecommons.org; Lessig, Remix.
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increasingly become privatized and colonized by corporate capitalism. The commons have
been turned into a ‘privately held public sphere’ managed by Silicon Valley platform capitalism
and submitted to ‘the norms of private property’.51 Syrians have been deceived precisely by
this: they thought they would generate image-evidences, i.e. proof denouncing human rights
abuses. They thought themselves to be acting within the domain of freedom of speech, to
be contributing to a healthy, democratic dialogue that would foster justice and progress. Yet,
they were unwillingly contributing to the building of an opaque and ambiguous space that,
while being understood by them as a commons, was in fact a corporate environment subject
to rules set up by private actors.
As much as the Syrians were naively building their archive of evidence-images within the
space of what they thought was a digital commons, many citizens of neoliberal democracies
have also been deceived by the sharing economies. ‘None of the people I photographed had
any idea their images were being used in this way’, is the bitter comment of someone who
innocently uploaded his pictures on Flickr using a permissive Creative Commons license, in
the belief that this act would have helped build an open-access and free digital commons,
while in fact it ended up contributing to the IBM facial recognition training dataset.52 And it
did so lawfully, as Creative Commons is expressly designed to allow frictionless sharing on
the web. Creative Commons’ CEO Ryan Merkley commented at the time of the IBM scandal:
We are aware that fair use allows all types of content to be used freely […] but there
are also real concerns that data can be used for negative activities or negative
outcomes. CC licenses were designed to address a specific constraint, which they do
very well: unlocking restrictive copyright. But copyright is not a good tool to protect
individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the
use of surveillance tools employed online.53
Creative Commons’ licensed images have also ended up in another facial recognition
database created by Microsoft, by scraping visuals off the web that were distributed to be
re-used for academic purposes. The database, known as MS Celeb, contained 10 million
faces, and was used to train facial recognition systems globally, including those of military
research projects and commercial ventures originating from countries under authoritarian
regimes such as China.54 The existence of MS Celeb was revealed by Adam Harvey, a Berlinbased artist and researcher working closely with the Syrian Archive project in the field of visual
justice.55 And that’s not by chance.
51
52
53
54
55
Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDOs Actions, Hactivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet, New
York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 94-5.
Solon, ‘Facial Recognition's “Dirty Little Secret”’.
Ryan Merkely, ‘Use and Fair Use: Statement on Shared Images in Facial Recognition AI’, Creative
Commons, 13 March 2019, https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/13/statement-on-shared-images-infacial-recognition-ai/.
Madhumita Murgia, ’Microsoft Quietly Deletes Largest Public Facial Recognition Data Sets’, Financial
Times, 6 June 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/7d3e0d6a-87a0-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2.
Adam Harvey and Hadi Al Khatib, ’Accelerating Human Rights Investigations with Computer Vision’,
re:publica 18 conference, Berlin, May 2-4, https://18.re-publica.com/en/session/accelerating-human-
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There seems to be, in fact, a common element that connects a violent situation such as Syria
with the apparently pacified western neoliberal democracies. The contradictions and fragility
of the digital commons that first emerged in the exceptional context of the 2011 uprising that
turned into civil war, have later fully unfolded on a global scale, becoming a sort of pattern.
The tragedy of the digital commons is that they are no longer commons, and they will no
longer be. Neither because of the exceptional situation of a civil war, in which building an
undisputed, shared space, even if only immaterial, is unlikely; nor because of a flaw of the
infrastructure that should contribute to the making of such commons, but precisely because
of the features of the technological infrastructure supporting the sharing economy, which is
private and commercially oriented by design.
It’s the inner structure of the sharing platforms we use today, from YouTube to Instagram and
the likes, that is inherently pushing the commons towards commodification and has hijacked
the very definition of ‘sharing’. Sharing economies are no longer what the founder of Creative
Commons, Lawrence Lessig, so brilliantly conceptualized a decade ago, i.e. non-monetary
exchanges and economies that run alongside ideas of solidarity. Today, sharing economies
are made by Airbnb and the like, who have managed to inject monetary transactions and
incorporate the idea of commodification even in the once innocent and absolutely free domain
of hospitality.
Conclusion
The Syrian image remains a highly disputed territory. Its authorship, ownership, preservation,
storage, and the very access to it, are being questioned. Yet the dynamics that it has brought to
surface are not just related to Syria, but rather to the nature of today’s global ‘communicative
capitalism’.56 When thinking that such issues have become problematic because of the
peculiar situation of Syria being a crisis zone, we are misled. When believing that Syria does
not concern us living in comfort zones, we make a big mistake, as the features of the visual
political economy emerging from there are, in fact, global patterns silently ruling over our
domestic environment and infiltrating apparently innocuous day-to-day situations, in which
surveillance, repression, and control happen in visual forms that we are still struggling to
understand and manage.
The fate of the Syrian image highlights that the nature of today’s archive goes far beyond
being a collection of evidentiary forms, although this is a very crucial function that it should
cover. Future discussions should necessarily include issues of ownership, authorship, storage,
preservation, access, and the crucial question of the algorithmic gaze, which determines the
visual as much as humans do. We have to take the Syrian lesson and bring it to our neoliberal
democracies, take out the explicitly violent element and apply it to our mundane domesticity.
Syria is no longer (only) about Syria.
56
rights-investigations-computer-vision.
Jodi Dean, ‘Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics’, Cultural Politics 1.1
(2005): 51-74, https://commonconf.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/proofs-of-tech-fetish.pdf.
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09. THE ‘FLÂNEUR’, THE ARCHAEOLOGIST, AND THE
MISSING IMAGES: DOING RESEARCH WITH/ON
ONLINE VIDEOS
ULRIKE LUNE RIBONI
The uprisings in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East that initiated in 2011
resulted in hundreds of thousands of still images and videos, uploaded online every day by
thousands of anonymous people. Together with the mobilization in the streets, riots, clashes,
and sit-ins, the shared visual production constituted a collective enterprise and a stake in
the struggle. Understanding the terms of this struggle and the forms of this collective visual
monument as it was erected from day to day in Tunisia has been the subject of my thesis work.1
In it, I have questioned the types of situations that were recorded and shared online, their
formal characteristics, the specificities of the sharing practices, the intentions that choices
may reveal, and by extension the construction of (collective) meaning and the social tensions
that these practices designate.
Working on images shared online and not on the ones that were shot but maybe never
uploaded, implies working on the internet platform that hosted them. The construction of
the research corpus was therefore the most complex step of this project and required more
than two years of work, demanding methodological as well as theoretical choices. Research
is contingent on its material conditions of production and, in many universities around the
world, the latest technical developments are not accessible. French research is unfortunately
produced with very few technical resources as public and private investments are insufficient.
But if chronic underfunding is to be denounced, what we lack more than computer software
is time. My proposal is to strive for de-growth (in French: décroissance) or a slow science
perspective on the analysis of ‘big video data’ or, rather, to not consider it big data at all.
Vernacular videos on the internet appear to be free of any indexation and ties, and to spread
and spill without control, constituting what looks like a bottomless archive.2 The researcher
might seem released from the structure of institutional archives, but the videos are actually
organized, through opaque hierarchies designed by unknown algorithms and submitted to an
endless circulation that is difficult to follow without adapted tracking software. They become
elusive, forcing the researcher into ‘a diving, an immersion, even a drowning […]’, as says
the historian Arlette Farge.3 The very nature of the objects I have studied has necessitated a
specific methodology. The videos are indeed produced and uploaded online anonymously
1
2
3
Ulrike Lune Riboni, ‘Juste un peu de video’, La vidéo partagée comme langage vernaculaire de la
contestation: Tunisie 2008-2014, PhD diss., Université Paris 8, France, 2016.
Tom Sherman, ‘Vernacular video’, in Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (eds) Video Vortex Reader:
Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 161-168.
Peter Snowdon, ‘The Revolution Will be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring’, Culture
Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014): 401-429.
Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive, Paris: Le Seuil, 1997, p. 10.
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and contain few intentional traces such as, for example, editing. How then to interrogate
these images? How to constitute a corpus without knowing the limits and extent of the online
‘collection’? How to dive without drowning? We could answer like Lev Manovich does, by using
powerful software capable of collecting and analyzing ‘one million images’.4 But such as
method, as I will show, would miss the goal. Of course, creating a coherent corpus of digital
videos produced and shared during the insurgency weeks in January 2011 in Tunisia, without
any specific software to do so5, has been a complicated venture. But I eventually found some
ways to float, or maybe navigate in the ‘ocean of sounds and images’.6.
The Internet Is not an Archive
‘The Internet is not an archive’.7 But ‘YouTube might […] be an archive […] an ideal form of
archive,’ argues Rick Prelinger.8 Indeed, YouTube appears as a ‘complete collection’, where
everything can be found, which is open to users’ contributions, thus destroying ‘the mystique
of archives as rarefied and impenetrable containers’.9 The accessibility of YouTube also
contrasts with traditional archives: no access has to be asked for, nor any specific software
downloaded. But when doing scientific research YouTube should be considered not only for
what you can find there, but for how you can search it.
Social networks like YouTube or Facebook do not offer suitable tools for researching contents,
especially if the research is on a specific geographic area and time period. Generalist search
engines like Google partly allow us to circumvent these restrictions, but research remains
based on textual recognition of the words associated with the content and so obviously
provides unsatisfactory results when it comes to visual content. Indeed, a search can only
relate to the textual environment of the image. For a video on YouTube, there are three
textual resources that are defined by the users: the title of the video, the description, and
the associated tags. Since description and tags are optional, indexing a video on YouTube is
sometimes based on its title only. When description and tags do exist ,they are not necessarily
descriptive and often imprecise. The descriptors are therefore very thin and rarely relevant
to the content, when looked at from the researcher’s perspective.
4
5
6
7
8
9
Jeremy Douglass, Lev Manovich, Tara Zepel, ‘How to Compare One Million Images?’, Software Studies
Initiative Project, 2011, http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/how-to-compare.
The research work depends on the working environment in which it is carried out. In France, the access
to softwares and technical tools developed for research are extremely limited within public research,
particularly in social sciences. Our thesis work carried out between 2011 and 2016 was therefore
marked by this lack of founds. The reflection developed here, however, attempts to consider how this
lack can be an asset.
Gunnar Iversen, ‘An Ocean of Sound and Image: YouTube in the Context of Supermodernity’, in Pelle
Snickars, Patrick Vondereau (eds) The YouTube Reader, Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010, p.
347.
Geert Lovink, Social Media Abyss, Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2016, p. 166.
Rick Prelinger, ‘The Appearance of Archives’, in Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vondereau (eds) The YouTube
reader, Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010, p. 268.
Rick Prelinger, ‘The Appearance of Archives’, p. 270.
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The scale is also a factor of difficulty. YouTube offered about 32,000 results for the keywords
‘Tunisia Protest’ and 123,000 for ‘Egypt Protest’ in 2014.10 Since these numbers are based on
textual data, they can only be considered as indicative and it is simply impossible to accurately
assess the number of videos uploaded over a given period from one of these countries. Still,
it is clear that the number of videos posted during these events runs up to tens of thousands.
In this swarm of images, it is impossible to circumscribe, evaluate, or define the beginning or
the end; it makes the researcher’s work delicate.
Lev Manovich describes the problems of apprehension, which arise from the visualization of
online ‘collections’ made up of tens of thousands of elements: ‘Given the size of many digital
media collections, simply seeing what’s inside them is impossible (even before we begin
formulating questions and hypotheses and selecting samples for closer analysis).’11 As my
colleagues Fabien Granjon and Christophe Magis have pointed out, the risk is to respond with
a quest for exhaustion, considering the internet collections as a ‘whole’:
If digital tools “make it possible to study all the data as a whole”12, the whole in question too
often resembles an abstract totality gathering data that are difficult to refer to as concrete
[…] realities. It is thus not certain that the knowledge of the whole using “big data + data
mining” is also knowledge of a social subject and one often flirts with what one could call
“data fetishism”.13
Digital tools like the ones used by Lev Manovich for photo collections on Flickr, give precisely
the illusion that exhaustion can be reached, but to what social reality does this exhaustion
refer? To avoid ‘data fetishism’ and to renounce exhaustion we need to take up a point of view
on data, to remember what we make of it, how we search and how we find.14 It also means
that we have to reconsider the people(s) in the ‘people generated content’.
Context is Context, even on the Internet
Understanding a social phenomenon can’t be done without context: social, political, and
economic context, but also the technical conditions of production in a delimited space and
timeframe. It means considering how vernacular images produced around the globe can’t
be compared that easily. In our case, even if we can draw a timeline connecting the Iranian
uprising in 2009, and the Tunisian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Syrian uprisings from 2010-2011,
that shows how video uses were similar in their purposes and intentions and were connected
10
11
12
13
14
On 27 February 2014.
Lev Manovich, ‘Media Visualization: Visual Techniques for Exploring Large Media Collections’, 2011,
http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/media-visualization-visual-techniques-for-exploring-largemedia-collections.
Bruno Bachimont, ‘Le nominalisme et la culture: questions posées par les enjeux du numérique’, in
Bernard Stiegler (ed.) Digital Studies: Organologie des savoirs et technologies de la connaissance, Paris:
IRI/FYP, 2014, p. 70.
Christophe Magis and Fabien Granjon, ‘Vers une “nouvelle anthropologie” critique?’, Journal des
anthropologues (2015): 297.
Magis and Granjon, ‘Vers une “nouvelle anthropologie” critique?’: 297.
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to each other, taking on board the specific national and local context is still unavoidable. The
aim is precisely to find out which uses or characteristics are internationally shared and which
are contextually specific.
Therefore, I have taken into account the conditions of producing and uploading video content
in the specific time and place my research focused on, being Tunisia in 2010-2011, and have
so identified the technical constraints: the level of equipment, the possibilities of individual
access to the internet, but also censorship and the different forms it adopted during the
period. Thus, I measured the commitment that uploading videos online represents for most
of the Tunisian users who do not have personal computers and are forced to go to cybercafés
where the bandwidth is low and the upload may take hours. I found out which websites were
accessible and which were not, and what kind of technical knowledge was necessary for
shooting and uploading, but also for remixing. In that way I gained an idea of what kinds of
social categories were concerned. As Rick Prelinger writes, ‘though streaming files could be
captured and saved by expert users, to most people streaming video was the most ephemeral
of all media, incapable of being downloaded, edited, annotated, referenced, indexed or
remixed’.15 Although this quotation is ten years old and users now do not need to be ‘experts’
in order to know how to download and remix videos, we can still conclude that video platforms
are not designed for downloading and remixing, and downloading, remixing, and re-uploading
are actions reserved for advanced internet users. The same can be said about using proxies for
connecting to the internet. This leads to three conclusions: firstly, that shooting and sharing
videos can not have been afforded to every Tunisian, especially in 2010-2011; secondly,
that people under restrained technical conditions develop skills and technical knowledge
as a mode of survival; and thirdly, the risks that people ran by undertaking these practices,
reveals that they were experienced as a necessity.
Considering context also allows us to identify significant territorial disparities in technical
equipment levels, which coincided with the geographical spreading of revolution. Without
access to YouTube, Facebook, and other websites’ servers, it is hard to get a clear view on this
territorial and temporal distribution, but we can still make interesting inferences: the territories
with the lowest access to equipment were the most marginalized, the ones from where the
revolt began, but also the ones from where most of the images came from. This observation
led me to a hypothesis that continues to propel my research: filming a social movement, a
riot, a revolution, means participating in a collective gesture of documentation; it is not only
about registering ‘events’, but also about people, ways of being together, of feeling together,
of feeling part of a whole, maybe being part of a people.16 And this need for being ‘part of’ or
being considered part of, is linked to the need for recognition.17 Therefore, it seems that shared
image practices are often more invested in by individuals suffering social marginalization.
15
16
17
Prelinger, ‘The Appearance of Archives’, p. 269.
Judith Butler, ‘“Nous, le people”: réflexions sur la liberté de reunion’, in Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu,
Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari & Jacques Rancière (eds) Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?,
Paris: La Fabrique, 2013.
Daniela Huber, Lorenzo Kamel, ‘Arab Spring: The Role of the Peripheries’, Mediterranean Politics 20:2
(2015): 127-141.
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Fig. 1: Snapshots. A man telling his family story of poverty and toil.
Such considerations could be synthesized as follows. Firstly, observing a media practice
involves considering the technical skills and expertise required, always remembering the
determination of social distribution18 and that there are also internet non-users.19 Secondly,
considering that the practice is not only about skills, but also about needs, and so social
conditions have to be taken into account, not for the competences they allow but for the social
needs they bring with them. Finally, considering context is considering history, and although
I cannot develop this topic here, I believe that connecting contemporary representational
issues to historical representation experiences can be illuminating, especially in post-colonial
societies.
Searching
Constrained by the impossibility of ‘visualizing [...] before starting to formulate questions
and hypotheses’,20 I chose to adopt an inductive approach. The process had two stages:
the establishment of an initial corpus and the conducting of exploratory interviews, both
18
19
20
Dominique Pasquier, L’Internet des familles modestes. Enquête dans la France rurale, Paris: Presses des
Mines, 2018.
Fabien Granjon, ‘Le “non-usage” de l'internet: reconnaissance, mépris et idéologie’, Questions de
communication 18 (2010): 37-62.
Lev Manovich, ‘Media Visualization: Visual Techniques for Exploring Large Media Collections’.
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of which were then expanded. The first phase, which I called ‘reasoned wandering’, was
intended to view a large number of videos first on YouTube and then on Facebook. The first
filter therefore concerns the choice of the platform I explored. Because video content was
uploaded on various platforms due to censorship, I chose to work on YouTube and Facebook,
having observed that most content was relayed there, in particular by members of the
Tunisian diaspora or Tunisians with access to the internet or advanced technical skills.21 This
‘wandering’ on YouTube was guided by keyword searches in French, English, and Arabic,
and by paying attention to the suggestions of the platforms explored. The aim of this first
exploration was to identify recurrences or ‘observable regularities’ in filmed situations and in
ways of filming.22 On the basis of the recurrences identified, I was able, in the second phase,
to direct the search towards specific topics, locations, and forms in an attempt to confirm or
invalidate the norms or conventions of use that I identified. The research made a qualitative
leap that was allowed by the fieldwork carried out for several months in Tunisia, and that
permitted the observation of the Facebook pages of Tunisians I encountered and interviewed.
I observed and discussed filming and sharing practices.
‘Reasoned Wandering’
For the insurgency period of December 2010 and January 2011, I established general search
keywords such as ‘revolution’, ‘riot’, or ‘manifestation’. I then directed these keywords towards
specific ‘episodes’ such as the massacres of Kasserine, Thala, and Regueb on January 8 and
9, 2011 or the events of the ‘Kasbah 1 and 2’ in January and February 2011. The descriptors
employed varied enormously from one user to another. Moreover, a video from Thala that
would not use the word ‘Thala’ in the text descriptors and that would have been put online
in February, would be almost undetectable. As said, these constraints thus partly condition
the terms of the research: the videos that can be identified as related to an event, a date, or
a particular place are those that are identified as such by their authors and/or broadcasters.
The text descriptors therefore become objects of research. Indeed, because the contents are
named and described by their authors and/or broadcasters themselves, unlike the audiovisual
archive hierarchized by an archivist, these texts likely testify intentions as much as the images
themselves.
My ‘wandering’ was also driven by the videos recommended by the hosting platforms. In
the case of YouTube, this includes the suggestions of videos appearing in the column on
the right-hand side of the page. Taking into account these suggestions implies complying
with the algorithm of the platform and agreeing to be ‘wandered’ from one video to another
according to rules that remain opaque.23 The suggestion column is built according to the terms
of the search, the videos selected by the user, and algorithmic preferences. Considering these
21
22
23
I tried to trace the circulation of some videos and explored, in this way, other sites too, like Dailymotion
and other platforms for sharing contents that were used by the Tunisians when YouTube was no longer
accessible.
Pierre Bourdieu, Un art moyen, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1965.
YouTube’s algorithm seems to have some strange bias pointed out by many newspapers lately, see for
example: Kevin Roose, ‘The making of a YouTube radical’, The New York Times, 8 June 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.
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suggestions and at the same time trying not to be trapped by their logic is a difficult exercise.
It implies mapping one’s circulation and regularly cleaning one’s traces by starting over
again. It also requires significant vigilance as an Algerian or Moroccan-produced video with
no link to the Tunisian situation can appear among Tunisian ones, for example. Learning from
wandering in the end meant identifying users (the independent ones and the organizations)
and identifying videos, for example by following and pursuing some that I found several times
across different accounts or platforms.
Fig. 2: Snapshots. Versions of the same videos found after multiple hours of ‘wandering’
Targeted Research: What I Find Is what I’m Looking for
From ‘reasoned wandering’ to targeted research, several problems arose that I have tried to
take into account rather than bypass. After a primary analysis of hundreds of videos, some
shooting modes (filming from above the scene, raising a hand, climbing on a promontory, from
behind a window, a door, turning the camera phone onto oneself...), figures (crowds, lonely
speakers, mothers, wounded bodies), and situations (music and chants, clashes, waiting
moments, talks and speeches, testimonies) were searched more accurately. Searching for
specific objects can, however, be a bias in itself. Indeed, in a database whose hierarchies
and organization are based on an algorithm that is unknown to us, we find only what we are
looking for. Therefore, looking for specific videos necessarily reveals content that may remain
invisible to another YouTube user.
Let me go back in time a bit to clarify my point. Studying the pre-uprising period for example,
I noticed interesting uses of football game videos that reveal the sharing of illegal practices
(clashes with the police, use of fumigants that were banned from stadiums etc.). In what
appeared to be a very harmless video practice – documenting football games in videos
that were probably shared and viewed only by football lovers (but that still means a lot of
people) – subversive gestures were shared. I noticed it by chance and then sought out these
very specific videos for hours. But do football lovers search this way? Would any Tunisian
searching for clash videos find these? How to consider such a find? It is difficult to determine
the influence of this content or to figure out the predominance of recording and sharing one
type of situation over another. The researcher must beware of hasty conclusions: the forms
and situations that emerge may have been emerged by the research itself.
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However, like the archaeologist who cannot dig the entirety of the soil of a territory, the
researcher on YouTube cannot account for all strata and sedimentations, yet it is still
possible to designate movements, regularities, and ‘patterns’, which can, in turn, reveal
social practices. The video platforms as such began to be a kind of territory in which I could
identify certain architectural traces that lead to constructions or collapses. The stadium videos
described above, for example, were made before 2011 and work as a kind of graffiti on a wall
that reveal underground opinions, practices, and activities that are about to hatch. Bringing
to light rare or poorly viewed content is a way to consider the margins of the most visible
practices, margins that could be extremely relevant.
Fig. 3: Snapshots. A woman shouting alone in the street, addressing insults and threats to the government
and praising the courage of the people.
Margins, Absences, Missing Images
In this way I was able to determine ‘patterns’, such as videos in which filmmakers turn the
camera onto themselves or videos that capture what I have called ‘isolated people’, people
shouting alone in the streets or giving improvised speeches to the crowd.24 These recurrences
in production and content are the thread of my work. The contextual perspective then offered
the possibility of grasping the implication of certain uses that, when solely considered in
comparison to others, would have been misinterpreted. The gesture of turning the camera
onto oneself, for example, is implemented in a context of strong repression in which anonymity
is a necessity and free speech is constrained and threatened.25 What would have been
considered a practice of ‘self-representation’, when compared to selfies, cannot be thought
of in the same way in a context where people are threatened and fear for their lives. This
practice is more of a signature for anonymously released images and a silent affirmation that
the makers fear no more, that they claim to be mobilized. Although numerically marginal, the
gesture turned out to be particularly significant. This is an important point: an automated
24
25
Ulrike Lune Riboni, ‘Juste un peu de video’.
It is interesting to note that all videos of this type we found in 2011-2012 are no longer available online.
More generally, a huge part of the videos is gone now. It seems that the remaining ones on YouTube or
Dailymotion are those with the most accurate titles and description, probably uploaded or shared by
more ‘advanced users’. But the dynamics of content disappearance could be an investigation in itself.
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analysis of millions of images generally excludes the contents, practices, or objects that are
numerically marginal. Such a computer-assisted method can serve the approach defended by
Manovich and the types of questions he asks, but in this case, the margins of practices are of
interest as a means of grasping social uses. This is the case firstly, because rarity is valuable,
as in any economic system, and an unconventional recording may have had more impact
than a more widespread one; secondly, because such a video potentially reveals a turning
point for its author; and finally, because it might have been a precursor to other practices
that are wrongly considered as ‘new’.
Fig. 4: Snapshots. Video-makers turning the camera to their faces.
Like this gesture of turning the camera upon oneself, what I call ‘recurrent absences’ would
probably also have been ignored by a quantitative approach: practices or places that did
not appear to be pictured or shared. For example, self-immolations have marked the events,
from 2008 up to today, and well beyond the sole case of Mohammed Bouazizi. Dozens of
young people and adults have set their bodies on fire in desperate and fighting gestures.
These gestures have only extremely rarely been turned into images. Why? If the hypotheses
remain difficult to verify, we can argue that self-immolations may be an ‘image-making’ in
themselves, visually too powerful to allow or require additional imaging.26 The same goes
for the interiors of homes, which are rarely filmed or shared.27 In fact, the images shared
during the insurrectional weeks are mainly of the public spaces where the confrontation with
institutions played out. Home interiors were sometimes filmed documenting mourning scenes,
paradoxically revealing that mourning was no longer a private experience but a public and
collective one. These rarities appear to be full of meaning, and I have tried to think of them
in the same way as we are used to do with widespread practices.
26
27
Ulrike Lune Riboni, ‘Juste un peu de video’.
This shows an interesting difference with the Syrian context, where the interiors were used as protest
places such as in the ‘home sit-in’ videos, as observed by Cécile Boëx and Donatella Della Ratta in
Cécile Boëx, ‘La grammaire iconographique de la révolte en Syrie!: Usages, techniques et supports,
Cultures & Conflits No.91-92, (2013): 65-80; Donatella della Rata, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media
and Warfare in Syria, London: Pluto Press, 2018.
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Fig. 5: Snapshots. Mourning scenes inside homes.
Conclusion
Content on the internet is distributed in neither a neutral nor necessarily biased way. The
storage and broadcasting platforms do not differ so much from the following definition of an
archive: ‘an archive must be considered as a set of textual data, in the broad sense of the term,
that both document, preserve and transmit the discourse of a social actor (an institution, a
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social group, a community or even a person) on a domain, an object or even a time period’.28
What most clearly distinguishes online contents from an archive are access and the technical
possibilities of research on offer, and the subjectivity and variables of the textual descriptors.
Working on online videos implies taking into account the subjectivity of the users as much as
the researcher’s online activities, and to accurately consider the context. A good knowledge
of the field, of the technical as well as socio-political context of the production of the contents,
seems to me therefore to determine the comprehension of such contemporary image practices.
Online research should benefit from and rely on offline research, in order to avoid detaching
certain practices from the sociological realities that give rise to them.
Computer-assisted analysis, however, can be useful for understanding complex phenomena.
Access to the servers of YouTube or Facebook would indeed answer many questions, as would
the ability to trace the circulation of content. However, we have to be careful not to believe
that the number of people ‘affected’ by certain content is sufficient to determine its scope,
or its mobilizing efficiency, just as the number of visualizations for example does not say
anything about who looks at them and for how long. The development of image recognition
also brings interesting advances while at the same time posing new problems. For example,
researchers at Stanford University, in collaboration with Google, have developed an automatic
image description program that can generate captions.29 As noted by André Gunthert, these
developments are not devoid of ethical problems, as these tools are rarely developed for
scientific purposes, and also engender methodological problems:
In all visual recognition projects, the image is considered a container, like a sentence that
would simply be broken down to make it translatable. But this approach, which corresponds
to the most widespread understanding of the image, does not take into account the reality
of our practices, which rely decisively on elements of context in order to understand a visual
document. [...] the meaning of an image is built less from the information contained within the
frame than through the indications provided by its uses and formats.30
The eye of the machine will definitely have to struggle to reach the level of understanding of
the human eye. But, in waiting for technological solutions that are adapted and accessible to
the entire scientific community, we must remember that the internet is neither a whole nor a
hole, that what is there is also what is not – the images that were not shot and the ones that
were not shared (online) – and that searching is still only half of our work.
28
29
30
Peter Stockinger, Steffen Lalande and Abdelkrim Beloued, ‘Le tournant sémiotique dans les archives
audiovisuelles. Vision globale et éléments conceptuels de mise en œuvre’, Les Cahiers du numérique 11
(2015): 14.
Samy Bengio, Dumitru Erhan, Alexander Toshev, Oriol Vinyals, ‘Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption
Generator’, CVPR Conference, Boston, 7-12 June 2015, http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content cvpr
2015/papers/Vinyals Show and Tell CV PR paper.pdf.
André Gunthert, ‘Quand les images parleront’, L’image sociale blog, 12 December 2014, http://
imagesociale.fr/826.
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Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?, Paris: La Fabrique, 2013.
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The YouTube Reader, Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010, pp. 268-275.
Riboni, Ulrike Lune. ‘Juste un peu de video’. La vidéo partagée comme langage vernaculaire de
la contestation: Tunisie 2008-2014, PhD diss., Université Paris 8, France, 2016.
Roose, Kevin. ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’, The New York Times, 8 June 2019, https://
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.
Sherman, Tom. ‘Vernacular video’, in Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (eds) Video Vortex
Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 161-168.
Snowdon, Peter. ‘The Revolution Will Be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring’,
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014): 401-429.
Stockinger, Peter, Steffen Lalande, and Abdelkrim Beloued. ‘Le tournant sémiotique dans les
archives audiovisuelles. Vision globale et éléments conceptuels de mise en œuvre’, Les Cahiers
du numérique 11 (2015): 11-38.
Illustrations
Fig. 1: MrTounsiHorr, Tunisie Tunisia Drama Family Sidi-Bouzid Kasserine Gafsa.mp4, 11
January 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW720yW1-I8.
Fig. 3: Sidi Bouzid News, 23 وينك يا ليلى الحجامةOctober 2011, http://vimeo.com/30984016.
Fig. 4: Kantoula3, Youtube Tunis évènement, 18 January 2011, Youtube video, http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=El3dJ_6TZYE Facebook video, 19 January 2011, https://www.facebook.
com/photo.php?v=371663282960742
Fig. 5: Med BMN, 9 شهداءTunisie al kram 12-13/1/2011, 28 December 2011, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Be1_0BCo0uE MrTounsiHorr, Tunisie Mère Martyre Kasserine Genocide
10 January 2011, Daylimotion video, 11 January 2011, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/
xgimae_tunisie-mere-martyre-kasserine-genocide-10-january-2011_news
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10. THE VANISHED IMAGE1
LULU SHAMIYYA
Part I
Voice:
Bassel is a geek.
We meet one day, by chance at the zeroonezero café.
I am in a chatroom, so is he.
We sit in front of each other, alone with our computers.
An American friend has e-introduced us but we e-meet screen to screen in the zeroonezero
café by chance.
Bassel is a geek, he doesn’t speak but performs magic on the computer.
If he’s in the mood he jokes. Talks about sex, swears.
Bassel’s home is the computer, he only understands that world.
Once he went to China for two weeks.
I said: tell me about China.
He said: what do you want to know? I only saw the computer, and some whores. But they
fuck well...
Bassel and I are always together. He installed Ubuntu for me and initiated me into open source.
We go to
1
This text is part of a multimedia work written by Lulu Shamiyya and live performed with visual artist
Marco G Ferrari and musicians Ludovica Manzo, Luca Venitucci, Giacomo Ancillotto, Igor Legari. A
tribute to the late Syrian activist Bassel Safadi Khartabil, executed by the Syrian regime in 2015, The
Vanished Image was performed in several festivals across Italy. A video excerpt from the performance
can be found here: https://vimeo.com/289289838
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geek fests
barcamps
twestival
tech meetings
net conferences
unconferences
PechaKuchas.
We post/tag/tweet/upload/pass endless hours on the internet zeroonezerooooooooooooooooo.
The word ‘Arab blogger’ is fashionable. The New York Times writes articles, Repubblica writes
articles, even better if a woman: ‘The veiled Arab blogger’...
I bring him to a meeting of ‘Arab bloggers’ and Bassel says: what the fuck are these people? If
you’re a blogger do it seriously or better sell potatoes... you think you can seriously talk about
politics here, in this fuck damn Middle East?
A year later, and Bassel is the idol of ‘Arab bloggers’. He no longer lives inside his computer,
but in a filthy prison in the suburbs of Damascus. If his wife wants to visit him, she has to walk
through the crossfire, the regime, the rebels, other rebels, regime, rebels, free army, Nusra,
ISIS, ISIL, sons of the prophet, free sons of the prophet, prophet of free sons, prophet freed
from sons, free but not liberated sons of the prophet, liberated but not free sons...
Bassel is a zeroonezero bit. He is the #hashtag of himself. His face is in all the newspapers,
on all the world’s sites, on all the screens in the solar system...
poor little Syrians, trampled, violated, raped, cut open, swallowed by the mouthful by the
whole world
poor-poor-poor things
small-small-small pixels of blood 24 frames per second devoured on smartphones and tablets,
constantly refreshed so as not to lose the high definition of horror
Knowledge is the greatest asset.
I know, you know.
I do, you do.
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You do not know, so you do not do.
I want you to know, so you will do.
Seven years have passed by....
Two million, four hundred thousand, five hundred and twenty two videos.
Ten million five hundred and forty three zero zero zero hashtags.
One billion and twenty thousand three hundred billion million likes, shares.
The world knows.
The world does nothing.
The world shares zerooneonezerozerooneonezerooneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
You too Bassel, now, you are a bit zeroonezeroonzeroonzerooneeeeeeeeee that travels at
the speed of light from Beijing to Silicon Valley, from Norway to Berlin in the classrooms of
universities in cool gatherings in the fight for human rights in squares in the social centers in
TVs in international prizes...
You can travel without a passport, not giving a shit, reproduce yourself, copy and paste
yourself, share yourself, tag yourself, upload yourself, become the avatar of yourself...
...you finally have your freedom, Bassel: the freedom zeroonezerooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Part II
Voice 1: The image is an act and not a thing, Sartre says.
Voice 2: Sometimes you don’t want to see the image, Godard says.
The image is difficult.
Voice 1: Film at any cost. Film to inform. Film to see and to be seen.
The image is difficult, it’s true, Jean-Luc.
Voice 2: Resist, little Syrian, resist, and film for us.
Voice 1: ...guerrilla warfare by hundreds of thousands of mobile phones... our great pixelated
revolution…
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Voice 2 (as in a Greek chorus): Our Lady of the camera, pray for us.
Voice 1: (a kick in the mouth, the beautiful mouth of the little Syrian who films, blood on all
sides,
‘Are you the one who shot that stuff? I saw you, don’t give me that bullshit’.
The Tubescreen knows everything, sees everything.
Kicks. Blood. Flying teeth.
And now let's move on to electricity...)
Voice 2: Lady of the camera, pray for us.
Voice 1: The whole of the Syrian people film: the young people demonstrating on the streets
film...
Voice 2: This is a smartphone, megapixel and how! to grab all the freedom!
Voice 1: ...torturers in prisons film...
Voice 2: (millions, hundreds of millions of clips invade the Tubescreens of the entire world.
Foreground, middleground, background, out of focus, reverse angle, point-of-view shot, highangle shot, low-angle shot, close-up, one shot, long take.)
Voice 1: ... the armed rebels film, the dictator’s soldiers film.
Voice 2: ..and it’s not just that today a film can be made of other people’s images, because
there is no image of other people.
Voice 1: (we film, we transfer, we upload, we share …
we share, we upload, we transfer, we film.
The nights, the days, the days, the nights.)
Voice 2: Tell me, Bassel...
take one: first martyr,
take two: second martyr,
take millions of millions of
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martyrs.
Voice 1: I’m looking for the image.
I walk the streets, fly in the streets,
chasing the image.
I look for it in those faces, I ask myself why, I ask you why, why are you here?
Voice 2: He doesn’t look for the image, he makes the image...
...invincible, unbreakable, flashing like lightning.
Voice 1: I stop, I look at her, I admire her...
Swooping down to make the image,
the race of those like Bassel who ran to catch you, to capture you....
Voice 2: ... damned, cursed, infernal images!
Voice 1: ...there is some left, there’s a residue, it is stranded among the pixels of death and
says:
Voice 2: I am the race before death, I was there, I am there.
Voice 1: ...the race before death, the race before life becomes death... the race...
Voice 2:
Lady of the camera, pray for us.
An homage to Bassel Khartabil Safadi (1981-2015), executed by the Syrian regime for filming
freedom, and to the thousands of young Syrians who, like him, died for the Image.
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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
Hadi Al Khatib is the founder and director of The Syrian Archive, an organization made up of
human rights advocates, archivists, technologists, and open source investigators. They are
dedicated to preserving, memorializing, and adding value to publicly available information
related to human rights violations committed by all sides during the Syrian conflict. The Syrian
Archive verifies and enhances digital content, establishes verified databases for reporting
and advocacy purposes, and acts as an evidence tool for legally implementing justice and
accountability efforts as concept and practice.
Mohammad Ali Atassi is a journalist, producer, and documentary filmmaker born in
Damascus, Syria. Atassi obtained a diploma in civil engineering from Damascus University
in 1992 and a DEA in history from the Sorbonne Paris 4 in 1996. Since 2000, he has been
writing for various Arab and international newspapers on political and cultural topics. Since
2001, he has directed two short documentary films and two feature documentaries and
produced several short and documentary films. His films have been shown in numerous
festivals worldwide and have gained several awards. He is the founder and the director of
Bidayyat for Audio-Visual Arts in Beirut.
Mitra Azar is an eclectro-nomadic video-squatter and ARTthropologist with a background in
aesthetic philosophy. For the last ten years, he has been investigating crisis areas in some of
the most controversial places on the planet, building an archive of site-specific works through
the lens of visual art, filmmaking, and performance. He is currently a PhD candidate at Aarhus
University and a member of the Geneve2020 (Institute of Research and Innovation, Pompidou
Centre) and Ways of Machine Seeing (Cambridge Digital Humanities Network) think tanks.
His theoretical and practice-based work has been featured at the Venice Biennial, Cambridge
University, NYU, the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Spectacle Cinema, the Hong
Kong School of Creative Media, Goldsmiths University London, the Havana Biennial, The
Influencers, Fotomuseum Wintertur, Transmediale Festival, Macba [Sonia] Podcast, Berlinale
Film Festival, and more.
Enrico De Angelis researches new media and the public sphere in Syria and Egypt, along
with grassroots media, political communication, and journalism in the MENA region. He is
one of the co-founders of the Syrian media platform SyriaUntold and currently works as a
media researcher at Free Press Unlimited. He has held teaching positions at the American
University of Cairo, Roberto Ruffilli Faculty and the Political Science Faculty at the University
of Bologna, and has served as a consultant for organizations such as UNESCO, International
Media Support, Hivos, Deutsche Welle, and Canal France International.
Donatella Della Ratta is a scholar, writer, performer, and curator specializing in digital
media and networked technologies, with a focus on the Arab world. She holds a PhD from
the University of Copenhagen and is a former affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University. She managed the Arabic-speaking community for the
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international organization Creative Commons from 2007 until 2013. In 2012, she co-founded
the website SyriaUntold, recipient of the Digital Communities Award at Ars Electronica 2014.
She has curated several international art exhibitions and film programs on Syria, including
‘Syria off frame’ (Fondazione Luciano Benetton and Fondazione Cini, Venice, 2015), and
‘Syrian New Waves’ (Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, 2017). Shooting a Revolution: Visual
Media and Warfare in Syria (Pluto Press, 2018) is her latest book.
Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. She is the
author of Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (BFI, 2016)
and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution
(Palgrave, 2018). She is also a member of the Regards syriens and Regards palestiniens
screening collectives in Montréal.
Sune Haugbolle is Professor in Global Studies at Roskilde University and has published widely
on political culture and history of the modern Middle East, including War and Memory in
Lebanon (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Rhetoric of the Image: Visual Culture in the
Modern Middle East (edited with Christiane Gruber, Indiana University Press, 2013). He leads
the research project Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left.
Ulrike Lune Riboni is a teacher and researcher at the Center for Studies in Media, Technology
and Internationalization (CEMTI) at Paris VIII University. Her research focuses on the
contemporary uses of digital images, especially video, in social movements and collective
mobilizations. She has undertaken a five-year research project on the uses of vernacular
videos during the Tunisian revolutionary process and has published several articles on the
topic. She now works on so-called ‘riot porn’ and develops more general reflections on the
concepts of voyeurism, the vernacular, and visibility/visuality.
Lulu Shamiyya is a pseudonym of a writer and performer who has left her heart in Damascus,
Syria.
Soursar_mosireen is a member of the Mosireen video collective that formed in Cairo in 2011.
Mark R. Westmoreland coordinates the Visual Ethnography specialization at Leiden University.
He previously served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review before co-founding the
Writing with Light journal for anthropological photo-essays. His work engages both scholarly
and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and politics. He
has written extensively on the interface between sensory embodiment and media aesthetics in
ongoing legacies of contentious politics, including the crucial role experimental documentary
practices play in addressing recurrent political violence in Lebanon, and the activist mode of
resistance-by-recording in mass street protests in Egypt.
Theory on Demand #35
The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows
As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war
and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency.
The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented
fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement
and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and
copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists,
artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been
created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural
productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked
after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits,
doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly
removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands
of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local,
regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts,
we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten.
Donatella Della Ratta is a scholar, writer, performer, and curator specializing in digital media
and the Arab world.
Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.
Sune Haugbolle is Professor of Global Studies, Roskilde University.
ISBN: 978-94-92302-56-4