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Over the years, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen have assembled a meticulous body of works that intervene in and poetically short-circuit existing planetary networks: from industrial assembly lines and global supply chains to bioengineering labs and gambling halls. Whether reverse-engineering the manufacture of electronic devices back to their raw components, introducing glitches in global trade routes or breeding their own species of sterile goldfish, the artist duo seeks to interrupt and reroute these abstract and impersonal systems while shining a light onto their complex bio and geopolitical entanglements. The pair’s current exhibition, ‘Daughter of Dog’, comprises ciphers and motifs familiar from their previous work, yet pushes them into new territory. Here it’s not impersonal systems that are taken apart and reassembled, but personal experiences of loss and grief, particularly the aggressive responses triggered by the severance of affective bonds with humans and non-humans alike.

Created by artist Walid Raad, The Atlas Group (1989–2004) is an imaginary organization and archive of fabricated documents concerning Lebanon’s recent history and, specifically, the Lebanese Civil Wars. Attributed to a motley cast of fictional characters, the documents in The Atlas Group archive manipulate real records, either drawn from Raad’s personal collection (street photography, family albums) or public sources, especially newspaper archives. Bearing lengthy, poetic, and often cryptic titles, they are introduced through whimsical stories that we can read in extended captions in installations or on the foundation’s website, and listen to in scholarly-like “lecture-performances.” These “lecture-performances” tell us something about how we might tell a truth, how we might perform it, and how we might teach it.

Translation by Elisa Adami for Politics Inc. written by Vladimir Safatle in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Volume 54 (2156-4914).

A seminal figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Baudouin Bikoko remains relatively little-known outside of his home country. This presentation introduced Bikoko and his work to an African and international English-speaking audience and critically engaged with the various strands of his practice, through a presentation by Bikoko himself and by Warren Crichlow, Elisa Adami and Adeena Mey. Baudouin Bikoko is considered the guardian of Congolese photographic heritage. A photographer, writer, archivist and lecturer, he founded the Maison de la Photographie en Devenir. Elisa Adami is Research Fellow and Editor at Afterall Research Centre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Warren Crichlow is Professor Emeritus at York University Toronto. He has published and taught widely about cultural studies, education, moving-images and global photographic archives. Adeena Mey is Managing Editor of Afterall Journal and a Research Fellow at the Afterall Research Centre, Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.

The articles gathered in the present issue of Afterall interrogate and challenge the imposition of normative or dominant modes of being, perception and expression. The artists, art practices and ideas investigated work, in various ways, to enable forms of communication and living that have been historically and often violently disabled by society. An important thread running through the issue concerns the reconfiguration of voice, language and sound in art practices that centre the perspective of D/deaf and/or non-verbal communicators. In moving away from a purely logocentric and sonic conception of these three interrelated terms, their multimodal, plural and unbounded articulations are revealed.

In this text, Afterall Research Fellow and Editor Elisa Adami and Project Coordinator Arianna Mercado reflect on the exhibition ‘The Accursed Share’ on display at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh.

Stephen Dwoskin’s 1986 film Ballet Black is an experimental documentary about the Ballet Nègres, the first black dance troupe founded in London in 1946 by Jamaican born dancer Berto Pasuka (1917–1963). Dwoskin came across this little-known story thanks to his close friend, the actor Astley Harvey, who was one the company’s original members and who became a consultant on the film. With Harvey’s help, Dwoskin contacted the other members of the company in Britain and Jamaica and organised a reunion party that also features in the film. This position of ‘insider’ was clearly important for Dwoskin. In a 2006 interview, he explains how it was this ‘personal connection’ with the former Ballet Nègres’s members that gave him insight into their creative and political intentions. ‘Without this connection’, he says, ‘it would be virtually impossible to recreate the kind of dance, and dance narratives that were so important to their thinking.’

In this paper Adami adopts film director Thorold Dickinson’s rhetorical device of dovetailing – the suturing or juxtaposition of images taken from different reels – in order to apply it to the director’s own archive at the UAL’s Archives and Special Collection Centre. In dovetailing, the paper aims to expand on what is not in the archive and to deconstruct what is there. --- Warplanes brushing the sky / strewn with corpses the land Skirt white clouds / exhales billows of mustard gas In December 1937, at the London Film Society, Thorold Dickinson and Ivor Montagu presented a programme that dovetailed alternate reels from Italian and Russian propaganda films showing the Fascist invasion of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called).1 The Path of the Heroes, 1936, the bombastic official account commissioned by the Fascist regime, was juxtaposed with Abyssinia, 1936, a Soviet counter-propaganda film documenting the war from the opposite side. The crass glorification of Italian military and technological prowess was placed side by side with its murderous consequences on the ground; the use of poison gas, atrocities and mass murder that were conveniently removed in the sanitised Fascist version. The horror undercut the pomp. SHOT/COUNTER-SHOT The programme was titled ‘Record of War’. Although the accompanying notes shied away from any compromising political reference, its intention was clear. Fascinated by the aesthetic and political principle of montage, Dickinson and Montagu applied a spatialised version of cinematic montage by bringing together the reels of two documentary films. In doing so, the propaganda of Mussolini’s regime was turned against itself and the brutality of the Italian imperial aggression was put on display.

A slew of new words and expressions has entered our vocabulary in the past few months. Some come with clear-cut angles and marked spatial-temporal boundaries: lockdown, red-zone, quarantine, self-isolation, iso-pod. Others stretch into a hazy limbo – furlough – or combine into oxymoronic pairs – social distancing. Vital supplies nestle in unimposing acronyms like PPE, yet the word’s handy brevity does not make their shortages any less conspicuous. Meanwhile those who were previously deemed low-skilled are overnight upgraded to the status of key workers – but do not expect any improvement in pay or working conditions in return!

Elisa Adami discusses the work of the New Yorkbased Canadian artist who employs the informality of notes, spoken diary entries and jottings to unpick categories of history, memory and experience.

Article translated by Elisa Adami.

In this interview, artist Akram Zaatari reflects on his longstanding work with photographic heritage in the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora, and considers the different ways in which he has used photographs to illuminate and unfold historical truths. Charting divergencies and disagreements around issues of preservation that have arisen over the years within the Arab Image Foundation (of which he is one of the founders), Zaatari points out radical gestures of preservation that return photographs to the ‘living tissue’, the ‘larger ecosystem’ and a set of affective relations from which they had become detached. The far-ranging metaphor of archaeology that the artist employs to illuminate his practice also lends itself to describe the destructive nature of certain acts of collecting premised on ‘excessive accumulation’, of which the pillage of the archaeological heritage in the Middle East and North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is an emblematic example. Collecting, however, is also a tool for writing history and the displacement of photographs serves as a crucial step to reconfigure them within new narratives. Attentive to the changing nature of photographic archives, Zaatari frees photographs from fixed and prescribed readings, bringing new perspectives to bear on them without necessarily denying those former interpretations. Additional layers of historical information can be found nestling in details accidentally captured by the camera's lens, in signs of material damage or ‘worthy’ defects. In Zaatari’s hands, digital technologies are used to emphasize, not to occlude the traces of these material histories. In the folds of the archives, hidden narratives wait to be revealed and unfolded under the loving gaze of the artist, collector and historian.

The article looks at the narrative and performative strategies employed by Lebanese artists of the so-called postwar generation to produce and put-forward non-sectarian and post-identitarian tales of the civil wars (1975–1989) in a situation characterized by “state-sponsored amnesia” on one side, and the pursuing of a divisive, partisan politics of memory on the other. Focusing on two works in particular—Walid Raad’s expansive and trans-medial project The Atlas Group (1999–2008) and Akram Zaatari’s video-essay Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013)—I examine how practices of fictionalization and abstraction of real events permit to side-step entrenched and partisan accounts, while, at the same time, maintaining a stringent referential relation with the historical reality via the documentary form and the use of actual archival materials. The artists construct internally disrupted and disjunctive narratives out of the rubble of individual experience so to open up the possibility for a speculative post-identitarian collectivity.

Drawing on theories of social reproduction, this article explores how Jean-Luc Godard’s metaphor, to ‘think the home in terms of the factory’, plays itself out within his and Anne-Marie Miéville's 1975 film Numéro deux (Number Two), as well as their film-making practice more broadly. In particular, we focus on how their use of video and their foregrounding of the space of film postproduction serves to challenge traditional notions of film production, editing and authorship, briefly examining the editing room as a historically gendered place of work. We conclude by reading Godard and Miéville's television works, particularly their strategy of amateurisation and their investment in the domestic, in relation to the category of the ‘home movie’. The place of the home and their practice of small-scale film production, it is argued, represents an attempt to test an alternative mode of production to the one that the metaphor of the factory typically designates.

Focusing on the events of the Arab Spring, this article considers the visual language of the protest within geopolitical contexts characterized by violent repression and state monopoly on information media. The author looks at the ways new technologies – namely mobile phones and social media – are used to produce and disseminate counter-documentation that actively challenges states of invisibility and conditions of deformation. The regime of visibility and visuality of the protestors’ statements are analysed in their relation to existing systems of power and to the channels of distribution of information through an examination of the material conditions of their production and reception, and through an attempt at retracing their erratic and multiple trajectories – from YouTube’s unsanctioned and unchecked collections, to international news broadcasts, to their re-presentation in public screenings and in works of art.