Imaginary
property // Intervention #2 has been delivered by filmmaker Eyal Sivan.
He presents "Towards a common archives: Manipulating the enemies
images". Eyal Sivan is a London based filmmaker, producer, essayist and
research
professor in media production at the school of social sciences, media
and cultural studies at the University of East London (UEL). Sivan
directed more then 10 worldwide awarded feature-length political
documentaries and produced many others. He is the founder and Chief
Editor of ‘Cinema South Notebooks’ in Israel – a journal of cinema and
Political critic, editor at the Paris based publishing house ‘La Fabrique’ and member of the editorial board and columnist at the French social studies journal ‘De l’autre Côté’. Among Sivan’s films: Aqabat-Jaber (1987 & 1994); Izkor, Slaves of Memory (1991); The Specialist (1999); Route 181, fragments of a journey in Palestine-Israel (with Michel Khleifi 2003); Aus Liebe zum Volk / I Love You all (2004 with Audrey Murion). Currently he is finishing his film "Jaffa-story of a brand name".
Click here to watch the video documentation of this presentation.
As violence becomes more reasoned, as nationhood becomes more
"global", as the artifacts of memory become more manipulable, and as
their manufacture and dissemination becomes more ubiquitous –research
and theory in this field find themselves in constant lag of its
ever-changing objects.
As memory and trauma study literature and research grows in
acceleration, so grows the need for a robust theoretical paradigm for
social memory research. Such a paradigm does not exist today. Most
memory research does not extend comparatively beyond particular
geographies, historical periods and events. In the absence of a widely
agreed theoretical paradigm, most theoretical work done today on memory
and trauma falls within either one of two categories: either it is
highly event-specific, remaining too close to empirical ground level,
or it is highly philosophical and speculative, leaving actual research
far below its scope.
The wider task envisioned by the project is to theorize the
fundamental notion of Archive in such a manner as to provide a
historiographic paradigm both for the empirical recording of historical
narrative data and wide perspective theory building.
Building on notions such as Foucault’s Status de Verite, Derrida’s
Anarchive and Jean Piaget’s Constancy and Conservation, we wish to
forge the Common Archive – a new archive format dedicated to bridging
dissociated, conflictual, or historically dispersed or geographically
distant historical narratives.
The Common Archive concept also aims to challenge and transcend the
binary oppositions constraining the structure of the traditional
archive as such, e.g. victims/perpetrators, dominating/domineer,
male/female, manager/employee, colonizer/colonized in order to propose
ways of creating common narratives, acknowledging that such a
combination is the base for future narrative and therefore a condition
for a true understanding of any conflict and further of potentially
bridging conflicts.
Going further than a mere new theoretical concept, the wider context
of this project aims to create a suitable methodology for constructing
Common Archives, as well as specifying the technical requirements for
what we term a Common Archive Data Architecture.
