Résumé: Cultiver la mobilité : au premier regard, la combinaison de ces deux mots paraît paradoxale. Comment peut-on cultiver, entretenir et nourrir une notion comme la mobilité ? La mobilité devrait peut-être être envisagée comme un état qui, dans une ère de paranoïa généralisée, devient de plus en plus ambigu. D’une part, la mobilité légitime devient un privilège. Ce qui est un voyage volontaire pour un – le touriste – est déplacement forcé et dépossession pour l’autre – le réfugié. Ou pire, la mobilité devient un acte de défiance pour ceux à qui elle n’est pas permise : ceux qui franchissent des zones interdites dérangant l’ordre des choses et l’hégémonie établie. La mobilité devient une stratégie de survie pour ceux qui vivent dans les circonstances suffocantes engendrées par la guerre et les conflits. Il n’y a probablement pas de meilleur exemple que la situation critique des palestiniens qui, sous un régime d’occupation, subissent quotidiennement des entraves à leur liberté de déplacements. Ou un autre exemple : la violence latente qui peut surgir à tout moment au Liban, causant de facto une impasse politique et psychologique. Dans les deux cas, la stagnation devient une stratégie pour préserver le statut quo particulier du maintien de la paix. Par analogie, les artistes ont toujours franchi les frontières et outrepassé des zones contestées. Cet article se penche sur les artistes travaillant dans un contexte de mobilité restreinte (particulièrement au Moyen-Orient) – comment ils négocient avec les questions de déplacements, de cadences et de stagnations : au niveau thématique, aussi bien qu’au niveau esthétique et formel.

Abstract: “Cultivating mobility” : the very combination of these 2 words appears to be paradoxical at first glance. How can one cultivate – grow and nurture – a notion like mobility. Mobility should perhaps best be viewed as a state; one that in an era of global paranoia is becoming increasingly ambiguous. On the one hand legitimate mobility becomes a privilege. What is voluntary travel for one – the tourist – is flight and dispossession for the other– the refugee. Or worse, mobility becomes an act of defiance, for those who go where they are not allowed : those who trespass, and might disrupt the order and hegemony of things, crossing over into zones where they are not permitted. The latter becomes a strategy of survival for those living in suffocating circumstances of war and conflict. If anything, mobility – or rather the freedom of mobility – is about having ownership of one’s own time. In an era where “time” is precious and a scarce economic good, the time “invested” in a task often attributes to it its value. We feel we are in control of things if we can manage our own time. Time and movement are always interlinked, whether viewed in the more literal sense as the pace of one’s step and the time spent getting from A to B, or whether viewed as a control mechanism and power strategy, as for example an employer taking up an employee’s time, or administrative bureaucracies exerting power by the needless squandering of our hours and minutes.

There is probably no better example of the relationship between mobility, time and power than the plight of the Palestinian people, who on a daily basis have their freedom of movement, and time resources curbed under occupation. The disruption of everyday life manifests itself exactly within the realm of the temporal and of movement. We have become so used to the images of endless queues in front of checkpoints, of taxis and mini vans waiting for their passengers ; we know about the system of “settler only roads”, which deprive the Palestinians from land contiguity; we know about walls, curfews, and the impossibility of obtaining permits and passes to travel, live, and work freely. Palestinians are forced – since 1948 – in a perpetual transit without final destination. As much as occupation is about colonising and grabbing land, it is also about subjugating a people to the temporal regime of the occupier, where it is the occupier who dictates where, when and how the occupier spends time.

Palestinian artists reflect the above issues in their work by various strategies, a.o. insisting on the abrasiveness of a particular pace in relation to the medium utilised. For example, the photographs of Taysir Batniji and Tarek Al-Ghoussein. The former frames his images in such a way that the paralysis of time suspended becomes prevalent in the aesthetics of his subject matter (transit zones, waiting rooms). Al-Ghoussain in his _Self Portrait Series _(2002 – 2003) highlights the impossibility of movement, by depicting himself as a lone figure wrapped in the emblematic keffiyeh (traditional Palestinian headdress) who seems out of place in the non-descriptive locations he finds himself in ; whether he walks down a sand hill that’s demarcated by red tape, stands in front of a tunnel blocked by heaps of sand, or walks briskly past a truck, a boat, a plane, a house in ruins. The suggestion of potential mobility, or of flight is always present yet never comes to pass. The static medium of photography is perfect to capture these snapshots of inertia.

The work of Jerusalem-born Larissa Sansour is a case in point when it comes to stretching pace and temporality, in lieu of the content, and its mediation. Working predominantly with video, Larissa has the past years focused her work on the Palestinian situation – more specifically on her hometown of Bethlehem – often trying “to set the viewer off balance, breaking stereotypes of ethnicity as well as clichés in the frame work of art display.”[1] I would add that the setting “off balance of the viewer” is specifically enhanced by her tactical usage of visual rhythm and time. In other words, the “scopic pace” of her work trespasses on conventional scopic time regimes, either by condensing or accelerating time through editing techniques and nods to popular culture, or by stretching time and keeping the visual experience in a suspended limbo. Here her short videos, such as “Bethlehem Bandolero” (2005) and “Happy Days” (2006), differ significantly in strategy and feel from her more documentary work, such as “Mloukhieh” (2006) and “Severed Routes” (2006).

Larissa Sansour, Bethlehem Bandolero, 2005, video still.

In “Bethlehem Bandolero” the opening sequence shows the separation wall, surrounding all of Bethlehem ; the wind blows eerily and what follows is footage taking us through the streets of Bethlehem, while the bells tool menacingly. The stage is being set for action and confrontation. Sansour walks the streets of her hometown sporting a big red sombrero and wielding 2 guns like a generic spaghetti western gunslinger. Her pace is accelerated, which – accompanied by a classic cowboy film soundtrack – gives her character a caricature-like and cartoonesque quality. By walking and moving she appropriates her city as hers with very step ; she asserts confidently that she has a right to mobility, even when confronted by her enemy : the segregation wall. The cheesy effects, reminiscent of 1970’s westerns and music clips, and the alteration between stills and accelerated image, highlight the absurdity that the artist is fighting a duel with a wall. Moreover, the exaggerated visual editing, captures a conflict, where the equilibrium of power is so disproportionate, it becomes grotesque. Hence the act of drawing her guns on an enemy that is so much vaster and bigger than herself, yet with a determination that suggests she will not give up, and that the sheer scale of the wall will not deter her, is yet another articulation of Palestinian resistance. In “Happy Days” similar editing strategies are adopted. To the theme of the popular 1970’s sitcom, which portrayed an idealized version of life in late 1950s and early 1960s America, Sansour portrays life in Palestine… far from idyllic, of course. By fast forwarding the image, and introducing us in a playful way to the protagonists (Larissa as the generic Palestinian, the Israeli army, the watchtowers, roadblocks and checkpoints, and historical landmarks in Jerusalem and Bethlehem), she creates a world that appears happy and cute. The irony of reality couldn’t have been crueler. “Happy Days” offers us a worldview that is completely distorted from what’s really happening, sugar-coating every trace of ugliness, guilt and violence. This is not to say it is not present : on the contrary, it makes up the stuff of the film. In that respect it is quite reminiscent of how Israel, and its ally the US, portray the Israeli occupation : as a distorted reality, where only a uni-lateral interpretation is wished for… yet never achieved.

Larissa Sansour, Happy Days, 2006, video still.

Larissa Sansour’s video art pieces rely on a mechanism of saturating the viewer with a hyperreality. As Hamid Dabashi points out in relation to Palestinian filmmaking : “What happens when reality becomes too fictive to be fictionalized, too unreal to accommodate any metaphor?”[2] The only way of affecting the viewer comes by way of hyperbole. Her documentary work functions differently. In order to convey a particular reality, she focuses on detail in personal narrative, and literally keeps the subject matter “close to home”: her family and her hometown of Bethlehem. Such is the case for “Mloukhieh” (2006) and “Severed Routes”. “Mloukhieh” the traditional Palestinian dish, a stew made from the leaves of jew’s mellow (!), served with rice and lemon, functions as a vehicle to narrate life under occupation. We see Sansour and her family members enjoying mloukhieh on a Bethlehem rooftop as the table talk about the origin and qualities of mloukhieh soon turn into a conversation about politics. By zooming in and out on the dishes, and the diners, we get a slight feeling of being voyeuristic witnesses to a private family meeting. By hardly averting the camera from the table, a micro-cosmos is created with as its citizens the diners. Though drenched in a specific locality: the picturesque setting, the traditional food, the Arabic, we are also always reminded of the hybridity and dispersed diasporic character of many Palestinian families. Sansour herself is the daughter of Russian mother and Palestinian father, and has lived in the UK, US, and currently in Denmark. The Arabic spoken at the table is interlaced with English, and family members have British and American passports, which appear easier for them to use than their Palestinian ones. The diasporic globalised and urban metropolitan gets mixed with tradition and national identity. Mloukhieh becomes something that is scarce and authentic, and embodies the essence of “Palestinianess”, not to be appropriated or colonized. The choice of using black and white film, with a few specks of colour (the lemons, rice and dish of mloukhieh) only adds weight to the solemn promise that some things will not be confiscated.

The relation between time and mobility is most overtly articulated in the 30’ documentary “Severed Routes”. The film starts with an image of an airport, a quintessential non-place for mobility. The normal travel time from Copenhagen to Bethlehem : 6 hours, yet for a Palestinian it’s more than 24 hours. Also here Sansour interviews her brother and sister, who recently moved back to Bethlehem after years of living abroad. What becomes apparent in their and other personal accounts is that those privileged enough to have a foreign passport, can travel easier within Palestine, those who are less lucky, or even don’t have any papers, are imprisoned to a world that becomes increasingly smaller, and more suffocated because of the Israeli occupation and its asphyxiating policies of (en)closure. It is as if freedom of mobility is only possible when one’s Palestinian identity is effaced, invisible and non-existent. Yet Larissa Sansour reaffirms her Palestinian identity through exile, through return, and through her work.

Larissa Sansour, /Severed Routes/, 2006, video still.

Footnotes

[1] Quote from artist statement: www.sakakini.org/visualarts/sansour.htm

[2] Dabashi, Hamid. “Introduction”. Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. London : Verso, 2006. p. 7 – 22.

Biography

Nat Muller is an independent curator and critic based in Rotterdam. Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, technology and politics; (new) media and art in Middle East. She has published articles in off- and online media, and has given presentations on the subject of media technology and art (inter)nationally. Her latest projects in 2004 include The Trans_European Picnic – The Art and Media of Accession (Novi Sad), DEAF_04: Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems (Rotterdam); INFRA_ctures (Rotterdam), Xeno_Sonic: a series of experimental sound performances from the Middle East (Amsterdam), and many international video screenings. She is co-initiator of the Upgrade! Amsterdam, and has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy (NL) and at the Lebanese American University in Beirut (LB).