CHAIR:  Paul Lesch

Johanna Laub

Inhabiting the interval: Reincarnation and Reconstruction in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Once Removed

In the video installation Once Removed (2019) and subsequent works, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan considers the phenomenon of reincarnation within the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and its impact on the transmission of its history in the post-war wake of “an artificial rush towards amnesiac reconstruction” (Sadek 2016, 172). This paper considers the epistemic implications that arise when reincarnation troubles the Western binaries that are ingrained in the concept of the archive.
At the center of these works stands historian Bassel Abi Chahine, who has compiled one of the most extensive collections of photographs and objects related to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of Lebanon, a military wing of the Progressive Socialist Party that fought during the civil war. Chahine considers himself the reincarnation of the young soldier Youssef Fouad al-Jowhary, who died in military action in 1984. His belief is anchored in the Druze faith in the transmigration of the soul to another body after death (taqammus) and the phenomenon of notq, remembering and narrating the memories of a previous life. His research started from his need to understand flashbacks of a war that he had been too young to experience, and is thus as much a personal search for identity as it is a historical endeavor. His collection holds great value for future generations and their remembrance of a history that has been officially brought to closure with an amnesty law in 1991.
Taking cue from Abu Hamdan’s specific artistic engagement with Chahine’s story, my
presentation teases out how body, archive and media inter(in)animate (Schneider 2018) each other here, pushing us to rethink deadness and liveness, embodiment and externalization as multi- temporal co-constitutions.

Marco Meneghin

Damiana’s too many Histories: Archival Silences and the Breakdown of Documentary Epistemology in Damiana Kryygi

In his 2015 documentary, Damiana Kryygi, Argentinian filmmaker Alejandro Fernández Mouján tells the story of a young Indigenous woman belonging to the Aché people of Paraguay, named Damiana Kryygi. Captured by settlers in the late 1880s, Damiana was the focus of intensive and intrusive study by Argentinian and German anthropologists until she died in 1907. After her death, her body was dismembered for further studies, with most of it staying at the Museo de la Plata in Argentina, and the head being sent to the Charité hospital in Berlin. The film chronicles Damiana’s life through a wide variety of archival material, from anthropologist’s notes to private journals to oral histories of other Aché people, but it is particularly interested in gauging Damiana’s personality and feelings from a series of anthropometric photographs taken shortly before her death. Damiana’s gaze and demeanor in these photographs, though, proves too emotionally charged and enigmatic and stops the filmmaker in his pursuit of a more complete knowledge about her.
Starting from the director’s impasse in front of Damiana’s photographs, I will explore the breakdown of documentary epistemology that takes place when the charged silences of colonial archival visual materials are confronted rather than avoided. Following Elizabeth Edward’s interpretation of anthropological photography as performing a history with “too many meanings” (2008), I argue that Damiana Kryygi allows the unknowable in the archive to subvert the logics of Western knowledge production inscribed in the documentary film form, thus allowing the possibility for the establishment of other kinds of storytelling to emerge.

Lola Rémy

An Archive of Ash and Rubble: Memory and the Performance of Home
The presentation reflects on the question: What happens to personal archives once they turn into ruins or disappear? How can the act of remembering and naming one’s lost possessions transcend loss and produce a form of haunting, immaterial presence? In her 2021 documentary Contents Inventory, Irene Lusztig interviews people who lost their homes in the 2020 California wildfires,asking them to draw a personal and intimate contents inventory of their lost belongings. The film shows how ruined archives, homes, and objects leave traces both physical—found in the landscape of the fires’ aftermath—and emotional—requiring a form of performance and embodiment of memory to be rescued. Archives, then, resist annihilation through collective engagements with their remains.
In Lusztig’s films, archives are fragmented, performed, and embodied into subversive narratives both personal and collective (as in The Motherhood Archives, 2013 and Yours in Sisterhood, 2018). I argue that they are living repositories of evolving, historically grounded knowledge. In her commitment to approaching archives as both situated and escaping fixity, Lusztig engages in a feminist practice in the line of Wendy Brown’s genealogical politics (2001). If her films approach and curate a selection of historical materials (even when personal), they crucially offer to “understan[d] and imagin[e] other ways to live in the present” (Eichhorn 2013, 9). Contents Inventory stages this archival play between past, present, and future, while reflecting on the impacts of the climate and insurance crises on domestic space and memory.