Grounding the Grid: On Saba Innab’s Tread Lightly – Leave No Trace

As Walter Benjamin famously wrote in the sixth of his theses on the concept of history, ‘the only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious’.1 Rather than simply relaying how the past is thought to have transpired, in the historicist vein, Benjamin proposes an emphatically constructive – and materialist – approach to history, one that refuses and indeed shatters the concept of empty, homogenous time, as well as the universal history of humankind’s progress that it subtends. The artistic practice of Saba Innab is strenuously historical in a way that Benjamin might have appreciated; rather than a disinterested and scholarly retrieval of history as just so many facts and figures, it contends with the past in a rigorously polemical manner, all while remaining resolutely in and of the present. Mobilising and assembling various historical scenes, moments, and indeed artefacts and images, Innab’s work speaks to how the past might speak back to us today – fanning a spark of much-needed hope in the face of that accumulation of catastrophes that is still being cast as progress.