In her The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance, the Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and artist Azza El Hassan provides compelling terms of reference by which to engage the fate of Palestinian artefacts as “remains,” or “remnants of plunder.”

Concentrating mainly on film and photography, El Hassan focuses primarily on the “afterlife” of artefacts subject to Israeli violence and theft. Leftovers of plunder may be a film reel or part of a film reel, a film canister, a diary record, a photograph or photographic caption, a camera or lens, a letter — artefacts that had not only been made, exchanged, and put to use in a process of production, but that embody social, cultural, personal attributes and motivational impulses. Through eleven concise and engaging chapters, she demonstrates how the work of “salvaging” (a key term) such remains breathes new life into their capacities to bear witness to Palestinian memory and history.

This “bearing witness” is not restricted to the past, but underpins Palestinian efforts to revive remnants of plunder by giving them a renewed lease of life. With an affirmative, ethically responsible approach to her subject matter, El Hassan illustrates how the remains of plunder can inform ongoing Palestinian cultural practices, and not be restricted to their symbolic associations. The book strives to affirm the transformative capacities of artefacts, and not merely their redemptive qualities. The distinction between history and the all-too academic term historicity can be employed to note this important difference. Both terms/practices are valuable but — whereas the former refers to a retelling of the past — the latter signifies the capacity of people to work towards the production of resources for the viability, the very livelihood, of their history and memory.

The ethical register informing El Hassan’s relationship to the mostly visual artefacts she salvages can be found, for example, in her 2004 film Kings and Extras. In the book, she reflects on her work on the film — more specifically on her use of a film reel that had survived Israel’s plunder and demolition of the Palestine Cinema Institute during its siege of Beirut in 1982. The reel was rescued, she recounts, by the Palestinian cameraman Mosa Mosa, who took it with him to Damascus. His act of salvage made it possible for her later act of salvage, breathing a renewed sense of Palestinian livelihood into its remains: “I was able,” she says, “to create a fictionalized narrative about a possible future.” She continues:

In this work, years after my encounter with the film reel in Damascus, I trace, find, and put to use visual remains of plunder, that is, photos, films, and recording equipment that continue to dwell in Palestinian spaces after looting and destruction.

In respect to the Nakba of 1948, 1967, and on to 2023/24 — the decades-long Zionist settler colonial project — Israel’s ethnocidal, now genocidal practices emerge as strategic efforts to destroy and/or appropriate Palestinian archives. This plunder, El Hassan convincingly argues, brings about a transformation of the historical value and significance of artifactual remains. This refreshing discussion involves a phenomenological twist, to take into account the livelihood of a Palestinian community taking shape by working on artefactual remains. As I suggested above, for El Hassan the Palestinian archive is neither limited to the history or memory of its loss, nor to a system and fixed place of storage and retrieval. It rather comes into being through recursive practices of production, in the process breathing life into an artefact’s remains, as well as Palestinian modalities of identification.

Against Israeli strategies of destruction and appropriation, once they are salvaged the Palestinian artefacts become “visual remains of plunder.” While the archive can thus not be thought or practically treated apart from the history of its violent plunder, its fragmentation, it cannot be thought or practically worked on apart from the historicity, the taking place, the eventuating livelihood of its recovery. The emphasis here is on Palestinian efforts to activate memory by rehistoricising remnants and remains, not on the initial act of Israeli plunder: “This is the moment,” El Hassan writes, “of the creation of visual remains and the beginning of an afterlife for a photo or a film that is different or separate from what it was in its previous life.”

The book outlines a specific methodology whose application renders the remains of plunder a site of affirmation and social/cultural production. This, which El Hassan refers to as “Hands on Visual Remains”, focusses on the artefact as a fractured remnant of violence, rather than simply a remnant of technological developments. The term “remnant” itself is compelling, as it suggests the way in which an artefact embodies traces of its initial circumstances of production, though comes to be transformed once it is found and worked on in the present. It can be thought of as something like a message in a bottle, a leftover of a disaster, seeking an appropriate addressee able to breathe life into its capacity to engage history and memory in the present. “I confront,” writes El Hassan, “not the absence of visual archives, but the presence of their remains.”

The Hands on Visual Remains methodology cannot be defined apart from its practical application, its livelihood. While emerging from violent colonial plunder, it only makes sense by addressing the circumstances of dispossession. Canvassing the fate of Palestinian archival resources — such as the Israeli theft of film and photographic collections in Beirut in 1982 — El Hassan draws an argument similar to John Berger’s distinction in About Looking between what he called the “private photograph” and the “public photograph.” As Berger outlines, where the livelihood of the “private photograph” takes place in respect to an intimate context (such as members of a family gathered together to view family photos), by contrast the livelihood of the public photograph thrives through discontinuous applications of historicity.

Hence, the photographic image, alongside its material properties, makes sense in terms of its public circulation, its public exposure, its responsiveness to varying modalities of address. A primary mode of address concerns the ability of a people to maintain the resources by which they identify as a people — an all-too pressing concern for Palestinians and indigenous peoples more generally. “Reacquiring a living context,” Berger observes in a compelling turn of phrase, the photograph “becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history.”

While I feel that the distinction Berger draws between “private” and “public” is overly wrought (the family photo album, for example, also falls in and out of temporal rhythms and related orientations to the passing of time), his emphasis on historicity complements El Hassan’s notion of the afterlife of visual artefacts. In her work — such as her multimedia Void Project, begun in 2019 — El Hassan strives to render the act of salvage itself a form of activated memory, whereby the value of the artefact is not restricted to the past, to the history of its violent plunder, but to its eventuating significance as a site of retrieval. In doing so she salvages not only the remains of plunder, but directs attention to the Israeli theft of Palestinian artefacts. This includes El Hassan’s own resources being sacked and appropriated when the IOF ransacked her Ramallah home in the Winter of 2003, stealing her videotapes, audiotapes and photographic collections.

The point, to be sure, concerns the difference, the struggle, between a colonial archive and practices challenging the predominating, violent force by which the colonial archive is produced and maintained. On one side, the colonial archive, the Israeli archive, constitutes a formal, institutional site of storage and retrieval, affording state protection. On the other side, Palestinian archives striving to maintain their viability in the context of Israeli occupation and plunder, such as the genocide currently taking place in Gaza and no doubt planned in the coming years for the West Bank. Like the monotheistic story of Noah’s Ark (arche, archive), for Palestinians living under occupation, what Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme call the “living archive” comes into being through disaster, as a practice of salvaging the possibility of livelihood in/for the present/future.

As a remnant of plunder, the colonial archive — El Hassan observes — is built upon an erasure of Palestinian history and historicity. She further notes how Palestinian documents, records, and artefacts lie in Israeli archives, well beyond the reach of most Palestinians. This inaccessibility is a major theme in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (first published in Arabic in 2017), as the narrator/protagonist of the second half of the novel sets out to track documented records of a murdered Palestinian girl — records she has to seek out in Israeli institutions and settlements. These institutions include the Israel Defence Force History Museum, which the protagonist visits only to find that its records are limited to grand, glorious schemes of conquest:

Official museums like this really have no valuable information to offer me, not even small details that could help me retell the girl’s story.

Like all books, The Afterlife of Palestinian Images can itself be regarded as an archive — a resource containing a number of references that can be cited and traced, recirculated by further applications of production. However, El Hassan’s fine study is marked by what we can call a recursive momentum, whereby the artefacts she herself salvages are not merely described according to a history of plunder, but resuscitated back into life. El Hassan breathes life into the artefacts she works with. In this respect, especially poignant is her account of working with the remains of the work of the Palestinian cinematographer Hani Jawherieh in Kings and Extras.

In her work with remnants, El Hassan strives to engage the “multiple histories” woven into their modalities of production. Ethically sensitive, her approach maintains a self-reflective sense in which her own mode of address adds another layer to the remnant’s history, its ever developing capacity for hermeneutic practices. This sensitivity is expressed both in the writing and in the formatting/exposure of the rich set of photographs in the book — as exemplified by the image of Hani Jawherieh’s photo album, which includes her own hands in the act of turning over the pages. There are a number of “narratives” in the book, including El Hassan’s own. This is “the narrative of a Palestinian filmmaker who is attempting to transcend the recurring theme of loss that has dominated Palestinian narratives. It is an attempt,” she continues, “to liberate both herself and her films’ protagonists from the absence of visual images and of a past that has been plundered.”

The after of El Hassan’s afterlife is never merely an after, but rather is always becoming after. In her hands, the remains of plunder assert themselves as mobile “sites of memory” — to borrow a compelling term from the late Toni Morrison — activated  by a people, Palestinians, striving not to be erased from history.

Image: a detail from the cover of the book

This is the third in a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.