Although the title of this presentation might suggest an involvement with a physical archive as a site, I hope that throughout the presentation it will become clearer that my research is not necessarily tied to the archive as a location but to the archive as a status as described by Mbembe in his essay the power of the archive and its limit when he writes the archive therefore is fundamentally a matter of discrimination discrimination and of selection, which in the end results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged unarchivable. The archive is therefore not a piece of data but a status Foucault reminds us that the archives as places of storage And redistribution of information are never passive They are places heavily charged with political and historical discourses And for Derrida, archiving is both an endeavor To preserve something to be remembered And an attempt to leave out something to be forgotten. In this manner, I'm approaching the National Archives and the erasure of the role of women competence from the following two positions. First, I approach it from a feminist perspective, where our relationship with the archives has always been defined by erasure through patriarchal archival methods. Western gaze, but also to examine as Tina M. Kamps writes, and to resist the silencing effects of the serial bureaucratic grammar of the archive. The presentation will consist of two parts. In the first one, I will be reflecting on a very recent thought I had in my research. I don't know how smart it is, but we will judge that together after the presentation. I don't know how smart it is, but we will judge that together after the presentation. So the first part is not an introduction, but rather a reflection. To strike through. You may have noticed a very slight difference between the title in the symposium booklet and the title of the PowerPoint presentation. And if you didn't, I will give it away. It's the strike through the word archives. To strike is to withdraw one's labor, to refuse to work as a form of protest. To strike is to attack. To strike back is to defend oneself. A strike through is a typographical representation of words with a horizontal line through their center. Striking through is intended to maintain the word's readability while highlighting any mistakes or unnecessary usage. And in physical terms, that is with a pen and a pencil, it's an act of scratching a surface in order to omit or to retract a statement. Striking through the archives does not aim to fill in the gaps or attempt completion. Rather, it aims to leave a trace and acknowledge the unachievable nature of completion. Here, the stroke through word archives is a reflection on a set of gestures and movements and acts that I'm considering, not only as a form of critique of the notion and the status of the archive, but also as a reflection on my relation to the usage of the term archive, since almost all the sites of the archives that I'm interested or working with are inaccessible. Among those gestures are those that spiral through, circle through, contaminate, resist, and survive. It goes without saying that I'm neither a historian nor an archivist, nor do I attempt or aspire to be one. No offense to anyone, but you will know later. But my work explores how gaps condition historiography and memory. Sometimes those gaps arise by chance, but often, however, they are owed to a different narrative that has prevailed to an equal power relation, or because material carriers of memories have gone forever forgotten or lost as a result of destruction and displacement. When I began thinking of this specific gesture striking through, I had in mind Ariella Aisha Azoulay's words from her book, Potential History and Learning Imperialism, where she invites us to imagine museum workers, photographers, historians, and the governed going on strike. Later, she asks us to imagine ourselves going on strike until we restore our world. She writes, archive both those that I'm using or refuse to use and those that I have created have played a pivotal role in enabling alternative histories, but also in realizing that something is wrong with a paradigm of alternative history. The problem is that it proposes some things as hidden histories in need of discovery. But in fact, these aren't hidden things or histories, but rather open secrets known far beyond the archive and the grammar invented as guardian of its orderly uses. This is exactly how I feel about my work, and it's exactly the case. It's like the perfect written words for what I think of. The histories and stories of women competence, engagement, and roles are not hidden, nor are they secrets. For example, almost in every Algerian household, there's a story of a female figure's engagement in the Algerian anti-colonial fight against France, either a grandmother or a great-grandmother, as shown in Zeynep Siti Ra's video from 2012, retelling histories my mother told me. As a child growing up in Syria in the 90s, I encountered these histories and stories through my parents' leftist and pan-Arabist magazines and newspapers that were laying around everywhere in our flat, and through my mother's telling of her engagement in the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 80s, and her stories of what she and many others call the Revolutionary Era. The names and stories of numerous, I don't want to use Middle Eastern anymore, South, West Asian, and North African women, because the term Middle Eastern is also a colonial political term, if we ask ourselves middle of what or far of what, and so on. The stories of these women are familiar to my generation and older generations. And as Olay perfectly describes, they remain open secrets. However, the national erasure of these histories goes hand in hand in the way in which patriarchal systems function. Therefore, my work is not about making the invisible visible, or unearthing or reconstructing hidden narratives or histories, as many might think. The aim of what I do is to leave traces while I'm tracing back, tracing forward, and tracing within. Traces that work as a reminder that absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence. If we accept Azoulay's invitation to imagine historians going on strike until their work can help repair the world, can we imagine the possibilities of us striking through and against the archive at once? Since our relationship with the archives have always been defined by forms of violence, can the archive ever be settled or fixed in any form? A very short answer for the second question, no. I have been struggling for some time to find ways in which I can call the work that I'm doing anything else other than archives. As my aim is not to create or propose another form of an archive. It certainly is not counter-archive, nor counter-memories. It's not a sub-archive, nor it is an active archive. Fluid, maybe. Hybrid, maybe. But certainly the word that follows these two words cannot be archive. Fluid, maybe. Hybrid, maybe. But certainly the word that follows these two words cannot be archive, but a space shifting between the factual and the fictional. A space of production where multiple timelines can overlap to act as mediums of resistance, aiming to preserve a broader range of memories than the ones currently used by dominant narratives. The two terms hybrid and fiction can be referred to by historians and archivists as an act of contamination. And that's why I said I don't aim to be one. One that can threaten, spread and affect the whole body mass of the archive. And that is exactly why it's important to highlight before that I'm not under one. Contamination here for me is above all a form of resistance and a form of survival. of survival that is frequently associated with what Agamben calls bare life, with a zero degree of existence, with a life rendered neglectable and negatory by adverse and antagonistic forces. Now the second part of it. How am I with time? Okay. To introduce the Battle of Algiers and the collective memory of the Algerian Liberation Revolution. As many might be familiar with the film of Guillaume de Gourfort from 1966, the Battle of Algiers, many might not be familiar with the fact that it was based on the autobiography of Yassif Saadi, one of the leaders of the FLN, the National Liberation Front, in the autonomous zone of Algiers, who also had commissioned, produced, and played his own role in the film. And while the film leaves a certain mark on our feeling of the engagement of women in the Algerian revolution, one cannot notice that the women who were betrayed were always portrayed as passive figures, only taking orders, not engaging in any form of decision making. Nevertheless, both Ponte Corvo and Saadi describe the film as the true face of history on screen. To understand the importance of this film in shaping the national narrative around the Algerian revolution and independence, we have to look back into the early 60s when the secret army organization OAS, a group of far-right partisans of French Algeria, destroyed the archive of French Algeria as part of their scorched earth policy. of French Algeria as part of their scorched earth policy. The story goes that they tried to first drown the document. When that failed, they set them on fire. It was not an act of resentment, but part of a larger strategy to deprive the Algerians of anything that could potentially be useful for constructing a state. Hence, since the release of the film, the film gets screened annually on the 5th of July as part of the Algerian Independence Day celebration in schools, universities, televisions, and cinema across the country in an attempt to fill the gaps between the archive that has been destroyed by the OAS, the Algerian archives that are located in Aix-en-Provence in France to this day, and they are not being returned to Algeria, and the memories of those who have witnessed the war. When that film, what that film fails to address or even mention is that those women who were depicted as silent and obedient were in fact the ones who helped to flip the scale of the power during the revolution. As the French army couldn't comprehend the idea that an Arab Muslim woman would engage in armed struggle. Later on, these women have caught the collective imagination in metropolitan France after the French army arrested and tortured many of them. Famous names are Jamil Abu Hayired and Jamila Boubasha. However, this enduring symbol of third world women confronting the might of colonial armies, which has been depicted in the FLN newspaper, the Mujahid, reflects more propaganda success of the FLN in manipulating the representation of Algerian women than any real attempt on their behalf for the future transformation of their positions or rights. As it was also clear in the feminist fight in Algeria since the 80s against the family code which was implemented in the constitution, and which restricts the freedom of women in society. Now I will not be reading, I will be talking. So yeah, that's even better. So one of the important things for me were in the film, and also that it was based on the autobiography of Yassif Saadi, one of the leaders. But then in 2017, there was an autobiography of Zohra Drif, one of the fighters who was working with Yassif Saadi that was released, describing the important role that they played actually in even planning. In many cases, she describes how the men didn't know what was going on and how the women were behind it. And after her autobiography was out, I read somewhere in an online article that Yasef Saadi invited journalists to his flat just to tell them that her autobiography is a lie. So that was really important. And then I found out later that the script of the film that Ponte Corfo had, the script writer had a lot of... The script writer had a lot of scenes that were written for dialogue between the women, especially the famous scene when they were in a room changing their clothes and carrying out a mission. And they were talking, an online source says that they were talking about colonialism and discussing it. And instead, Bonte-Golffo thought that it's a weak um dialogue so he took it out and he put the music instead so now i'm also considering to work with the original script if i find something with uh these These, I'll go back. Yeah. This work I did last year, it's called Notes on slash for a film, which kind of, what to say? That's the thing with not reading. Which kind of confronts these different pages of the text that I was reading. The one from the Right to Look of Nikolaus Mertzhoff, and then the autobiography of Zohra Drief, and the different scenes of the film and actual archival images, which we can see here. So the scenes from the film are more opaque and transparent and you can read through. And then the archival images are used in this way of collaging that they are not see-through. So, yeah. And while I was reading the autobiography of Zuhra, I found or I came across an incident that she describes when she had a confrontation of one of the leaders. And it was one of the first moments where she felt unequal, even though that always they were brothers and sisters, and they were always equal to each other, and she didn't feel a difference, is that when he was exposed, and he had to fled Algeria, or the capital Algiers, she just suggested to him that her father is a judge, and he can transport him, if he takes the ID of her mother into the mountains and then he dresses as her mom and the French will never catch him but he refused because he will not be dressed as a woman. So she goes on with the whole dialogue how it's actually here oh yeah I cannot zoom in I can do it on my laptop, that the people did not condemn them, meaning the woman who joined the Liberation Front. Because there was a lot of propaganda also from France circling that these women were mistresses of the FLN members, so they wanted to kind of encourage this patriarchal way of like, that the men think that they cannot let anyone in the family, any female in the family to join the liberation front or the revolution, so they were really working on that. And then she kind of says that this is not the mentality that the people carry. It's more now she's realizing that it's the mentality of the leadership. And to stop herself from crying, she says a line from a poem from René Char. And the collection of the poem is called Hypnos. and she says clarity is the closest wound to the sun, or at least that's what she writes in the autobiography. So for the video that I will show later, clarity is the closest wound to the sun, I took the poem and I took the last scene of the film where Bonte Gorfo was saying that he wanted the first people to come out from behind the smoke to be women. It's his way to represent the role of the women played. But again, they always were silent, so it was kind of contradictory for me. And so the whole video of Clarity is the closest one to the sun happens between this moment where they are in the last scene when they are behind the smoke and it ends when they are appearing from from behind the smoke uh and everything that happens in between is kind of this i based it on the poem of uh rene char on hypnos the god of sleep so it's we we get hypnotized we go to sleep and during our sleep or our dream we can't we are kind of confronted with the what is the future, what are the memories and what did we see in the film. So why I cannot breathe. So now I will show the... how do I play? Can we turn off the lights are they off and the sound needs to be up. Gå inn på min kanal. In this deep state, the person is completely free from the blockages of the body, the mind, the body and the mind. The person is completely free from the blockages of the body, the mind, the body and the mind. Unique techniques Écoutez-moi! Retournez chez vous! Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? L'institut de l'Etat! L'institut de l'Etat! اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف اهلا بكم في قناة الهاتف Go, go, go! Go, go, go!... Succes! O... So if anyone would like to see the full thing, it's 15 minutes. So either write me or ask me later and I will send you the link. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any questions already from the audience? Audience? Yeah, Lena, then. I think it's on, yeah. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it very much. And I would like to ask a question about the video, actually, which I also think is amazing and I would love to see the whole thing. And I really liked how this light turns, and then you see the images in the moment where the light hits the camera, so to say. And yeah, I would just like to hear your thoughts on that. And I really enjoyed how your presentation picks up the green from the light. All calculated. No, it's not. It was a coincidence. Yeah. Yeah. So in the video, when I was also producing or working on the video, I was in a residency with the Camargo Foundation in Cassis in France. And there was exactly a lighthouse in the with the Camargo Camargo Foundation in Cassie in France and there was exactly a lighthouse in front of me and it became stuck with me and for another project I was trying to film inside the lighthouse but then never got the permission and then they asked for rent and it was 3 000 euros and I was like I'll just do it in 3D um so for that, I was really thinking of the clarity of vision, something also in the lucidity or in the hypnosis comes out a lot in the poem. And I was thinking of the connection between the lighthouses. So this is the light of the lighthouse. When it's green, it means it's clear vision for the for the ships to know so I was thinking of that and I was thinking of the way that there was always this confrontations with the eyes in the film most of the scenes when there's like main characters you get this really zoom on the eye and they're rarely blinking. So there's this moment of always confrontation, of always looking and trying to see something or maybe like you don't see what they are looking at. So then that's why I started to use or I thought of using the lighthouse and the rotating light. And then the pictures come, but you actually don't have enough time to see them. So they are like really rushing through. Thank you. There was I think already another question here. No? Okay, Marcelo. Thank you very much for your presentation um and i found very interesting the image you use at the very beginning not this this um yeah quite you know this archive i think this a representation of the archive and maybe you can explain a little bit more what you wanted to represent uh with this image exactly Exactly, yeah. Thank you. Because I totally forgot to write about it. It doesn't represent the archive. So the surface, this flat thing, and then the line that goes through, it's a reflection either on the document. It's more about leaving a trace. So when things, and that's like the word through, when it comes out with all the actions or the gestures that I said, it's not circling around, it's circling through, inspiring through. So it's also a violent thing. It leaves, so when you do, when you have a paper and you circle through it, it leaves a trace, a trace that cannot be erased. And that's what I'm working with, with this concept of contamination, or leaving a trace behind that cannot be erased, but still is not a factual document in the archive that we think it is. So I did this kind of representation, the visual thing really last minute, and I wanted to do the spiral through and circling through and then, uh yeah i didn't do it but that was the point uh yeah Yes, thank you for your presentation. I really enjoyed it. And I have, I don't think it's a question, maybe something like a comment with a question, because you with this question of striking and you quote Ariela Azulay with the striking historians and archivists and you have this mentioned the figure of the historian yourself a lot but then the document that you use as your in your research and your artwork, it's a film so the one who should be striking is the filmmaker, and you are an artist and a filmmaker yourself. So I don't know exactly which thoughts, but maybe you could develop further on this, because there is usually also this comparison, there's the figure of authority in history in the archive and the figure and the disruptive figure of the artist of the filmmaker but but there is also documents being produced and narratives being crystallized through through filmmaking you know that's really interesting because when I was really working with the film and thinking of it is because of this idea or like the notion that I received from a lot of Algerian friends I know and also from readings about the films and how the certain film and how it is perceived in Algeria that a lot of people think it's a documentary, that it's not a fictional work. So that was like why I was working with the film. But I had never thought of the filmmaker going on strike. And I think that's like really interesting now that you said it and I will definitely think of it more. Yeah, so for me, I was also thinking like, what is my position of working with the film? I only saw it in 2020. I saw parts of it before, but I knew a lot of the histories and the stories through my mom and through my father, because they were also engaged in the pan-Arabist movement. And they were talking always about it. And also through the way that Syria and Egypt where they had the unity for a couple of years maybe maybe only one year the Arab dream so so all of this left traces while I was growing up also the names of the streets has a lot of, and the schools, one of the schools that I went to was called Adi Labayham Al-Jazairi, who was also Algerian, but living in Damascus, and who actually fought the French in Damascus. So all of that carries the name, they all carry the names and the histories, which not a lot of people know right now, because it's just a street name, or it's just a school name, and so on. So I was also thinking, why is it for me that I'm working with the film that, from working with certain institutions, and so on. So it's also like, for me, I'm thinking of, where am I showing the film? Where am I showing my work? How is it perceived? And working against the always orientalist or Western way of thinking of Arab women. So it's certainly not to kind of convince anyone. But it's mostly to confront, yeah, to confront the ideology that already exists. I don't know. Thank you for your presentation. I also really enjoyed it. And I thought also that it's, I don't know if it's a coincidence or like these kind of things that happen just in the elaboration of something, but this connection between strike and strike through as an anti-archival gesture. I thought it was very, well, it is very evocative, very interesting how to translate these gestures, like both gestures, in the procedures of your research. time the way we are thinking the archive and all this even this condition like fictional and factual condition of the archive and all these things that you mentioned so I was I wanted you to maybe elaborate a bit more of what you like the statement a very strong statement you made anti-archival anti-archival statement. Like I'm not doing a counter archive. I'm not, no. So maybe to understand a bit more the difference and where it comes from. I mean from your practice. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean definitely for me, well saying that what I'm not doing is not an archive or it's not, it's part of it. It's because of a problem I have in my work that I'm doing. The issue of the archives that I'm interested in that are inaccessible for me, either for visa or other things, or that they are like colonial archives that are put away or looted or destroyed, like the Palestinians one. So for me, it was thinking through that I'm not working with an actual archive. And then during the workshop we had with Avery Gordon, she mentioned something that your problem becomes the shape, it takes its own shape. And that's when striking through because I was going through the my proposal for the program, and I started to strike through the archive, and then it became like, ah, it's taking its own shape. But also, while I was reading the same book from Ariela, Aisha Azoulay, I was reading the same book from Ariela Aisha Azoulay. She always, or she, I'm not going to make it like, I don't know how to make it short, but she kind of describes that the way we kind of deal with or like the way we understand history and archives. And so it's always through the imperial way of making history, of making archive, of working with history and working with archive. So any way that uses the same structure of categorizing, labeling, of a timeline that has a beginning and an end, that we need to unlearn it. So that's what I'm trying to also do. That's I'm trying to make it clear that I'm not categorizing. I'm not labeling. I'm not working with actual documents. Uh, I don't care if it's a fact or if it's a fiction. Uh, if I read it somewhere and I find it and I cannot take it out of my head, I'm going to work with it. And so, uh, and that history is not, or like things that we perceive that they were like, for example, the French Revolution happened and it was finished. And then something became after it. The Syrian Revolution happened and it finished and something is coming. So this way of structuring, it doesn't work. And it's not how actual things are. But we keep using the same terms uh even when we are like making a counter thing and that's what i didn't want to to do or use like i'm trying to find another term another thing that it's not an archive that it's not history and i just don't know what what's going to be that's fun yeah so i'm sorry i think um there's one comment from the chat that very much plays into what you just said it's from Katharina Rosenbichler and they write a comment not a question contrary to your aim not to become an archivist I think approaches and deductions like yours are key to archives managing to open up to more diverse material and perspectives. Lately in conferences I have felt that awareness has risen and archives are willing to open up, but often lack the diversity. Yeah. Also, thank you for your lecture. And I wanted to come back to Ariella Azoulay because I remember I just read this one book by her, The Civic Contract of Photography, which points to the fact that photography can, I mean, it has this violent history, this colonial history, but it can also serve as a means of claiming citizenship in the face of non-citizenship. And she was referring very much to the Palestinian question, but I think she has a background also in Morocco. And yeah, and I was wondering if this thought is also important in your work yeah yes yeah I don't know if there was another question there, otherwise I would have a question. Yeah, thank you again for the great presentation. I would really like to listen more about your idea of contamination, Alejandra, thinking about how your starting point is women and non-Western societies and how this concept has also been very much constructed around – or women and non-Western has been always constructed as carriers of contamination and how you came to work with this and like different, I don't know, approaches you have to contamination. I think it's, yeah, would love to listen more about that. Yeah. I mean, it came, it really, I really started to think of it when I was in the first stage, like I was in my research and I was thinking of how can you create a document that it's fake, but you present it as a fact and then it becomes like, and you put it in an archive and then it plays that. But I was also thinking of visual contamination of when you see something or when you hear something and it leaves a trace and then it takes its own shape. People believe it, some people say that it's true and so it kind of spreads and I was thinking of this spread and the idea of surviving through contamination comes from the mushroom that kind of is considered contamination but it's also a form of survival, it's a form of life and it spreads around and this idea came through a video that I've done before this video which was very much connected to photography. So the question of Anna about photographs, where, so the story of the video is really long. I'm not gonna try to say it, but there was an event where a photographer was sent to take a video, a photo to be put in an archive archive so an archival photo, but he was so excited and then he forgot the cap of the lens And they had a black photo So that was when I started to think of contamination because the first idea that I thought of well, okay I can actually create in a 3d model the same Photo that was supposed to happen and I did like I made a an exact replica of the place an exact replica of the of the plane and everything and then kind of I imagined the angle where the photographer would be to have the best photo and I made this photo and in the presentation of the video work there was also a collection of actual photos from the year where the event happened, the hijacking. And so I'm showing all the other photos and I've put this photo in, but I didn't say anything about it. So people might see a photo of the thing that of the explosion that should have been. And they think it's either a different event, because there is nothing that kind of says which event is what. And then the whole video kind of elaborates on the material of the image and the material of the photo, and how the photos that don't exist can carry within them the ones that the photos that exist, sorry, then that can carry within them the photos that don't exist. So all the photos from the year of 1969, where the event happens, carry this image within it at the end, or that's what I'm proposing. So yeah, that's when I thought, I started to think of contamination, which with a very didactic way of like leaving something, not saying anything, and then people will maybe refer to it later as a true thing yeah was there other comment here no