Deforming Colonial Archives, Performing Palestinian Counternarratives

Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed introduced the term “orientation” as an approach to understand Orientalism and subsequently the Orientalist gaze, not just as a critical and academic analysis but as a phenomenological and embodied reality. For Ahmed, the Orient distills the idea of being ‘orientated’ towards a specific location and thus it’s an intentional form of facing something that is ‘other than me’ and at the same time reasserts one’s own location as it ‘always reflects back or shows where one is located’ (2006, 115). Few decades earlier, French philosopher Georges Bataille, developed his own theorisations of “breaking” austere categorisations, this time connected to art, through the notion of “l’informe". Its core idea explores the deconstruction of form down to waste level ‘that serves to bring things down in the world’, to affirm that ‘the universe resembles nothing’ (Bataille 1985, 31). While the term ‘formless’ signifies a lack of form, which is a concept that can only refute itself, the term ‘informe’ presents a nuanced exploration of the relationship between what is already formed and what isn’t. Bataille’s philosophy is seen in parallel with Sara Ahmed’s exploration of phenomenological power dynamics through the Orientalist gaze as I explore the power that archives carry over the erasure of bodies and communities as well as its fluid nature in reclaiming what is considered erased. How can Sara Ahmed’s “orientation” and Bataille’s “informe” be re-conceptualised when applied to colonial film archives? How can they be understood as processes of re-orientation through which participatory performances turn into collective decolonial counternarratives? This article uses as a case study never-before-seen film archives presenting Palestine in the 1930s filmed by a Scottish missionary, at a time when Palestine was under British occupation. I argue that participatory performance and specifically its ability to be used as a deeply embodied and collective praxis of countering colonial ways of looking, can be explored as a two-step methodological approach; firstly by “re-orienting” the colonial “biblical” gaze seen through the footage and secondly by creating what I call “counternarratives” through l’informe, the nuanced interplay between the formed and the formless. I draw on workshops I conducted as part of my practice-as-research during which Palestinian diasporic communities in Scotland and Greece took part in a 2-day process of developing their own participatory performance as a response to the archives. By grounding this analysis of Palestinian diasporic work within decolonial and participatory praxis, this paper contributes to current discourse around performance philosophy related to non-Western decolonial epistemology, phenomenology and the body as archive re-appropriation and memory work.