we are not users - Open City Documentary Festival

PREFACE

In an essay titled “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs” published in 1923, one of the fathers of Zionism and war criminal, Vladimir Jabotinsky, formulates one of the core frameworks that structures the European colonization of Palestine.

“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is…our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”

Jabotinsky went on to become the founder and commander of the Irgun Zionist terror group that committed the infamous Deir Yassin massacre amongst many other massacres that led to the founding of modern day Israel, its Israeli Occupation Forces and the ruling party in Israel today: the Likud.

A 100 years after Jabotinksy’s essay was published, the Palestinian resistance on October 7th, 2023 tactically and creatively trespassed one of the most technologically sophisticated iron walls in the world which had kept them under siege and economic blockade for 17 years: breaking through the Iron Wall both as a material structure and a material imaginary.

In “The Dis/Appeared: 25 Notes on Colonial Regimes of Perception”, Ian Allan Paul argues that Israel’s apartheid walls that separate the indigenous Palestinian population from the colonizing Israeli population form “perceptual regimes that confine the colonized to the liminal thresholds of view, never allowing Palestinians to entirely appear or disappear but instead perpetually rendering them dis/appeared.”

If walls can function like images,
Can images become walls?

we are not users is a series of essays I wrote between 2021-2022 to reflect on image-making as a land-based practice, of trespass and return to Palestine.

November 20, 2023

June, 2022

I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967.

Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the bible. Imwas is erased and Emmaus marked a religious touristic site in the park, a self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy.

The park is located between what is commonly known as No Man’s Land and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine, people and land by reinserting the few images documenting the March of Return to Latroun that took place on June 16, 2007. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.

I wake up again, feet on the ground in so called Canada; another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. I walk on snow to fall unto the desert.

Israel has denied Palestinians and three generations of their descendants from returning to their ancestral homeland. The Right to Return is not only a UN Resolution, one of many Israel ignores; it is also an anti-colonial structure that threatens to end Israel as it stands today: a settler colonial state built on a genocidal separation of Palestinians from their lands, and the delineation and fortification of Jewish-only, Zionist strongholds that replace indigenous lifeworlds, land and people and all their relations.

For five years now, I have been making artworks inside Google Maps Streetview as the site of both my exile and return to Palestine. Within a photorealistic 360° capture of the land, I am able to both encounter Palestine as a landscape, and break with Streetview’s aesthetics of erasure and abstraction. What would an aesthetics of return to the land look like in virtual space?

Streetview not only remediates the erasure of indigenous narratives, bodies and places in the cityscape, as a virtual visual replica of the now occupied city, but it’s very material aesthetics structurally render this place, and how it is consumed, as a colonial space.

Streetview is the amalgamation of image and mapping technologies that both capture and flatten a space, an image world produced by a high tech Google Car trotting the cities of the Global North >>>>> mapping the blue borders of their high tech occupation, land captured as images and data >>>> retracing the urban plan, moving forward down paved roads and highways, in quantifiable increments>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the car * surveils * every * geolocation * by capturing it as a 360 facade * inaccessible to bodies, only to commanding eyes,

images become walls.

*

Where the Google Car cannot reach, in ‘public’ parks for example, settlers become agents for the colonial image apparatus. Capturing the land as user-generated content with a freedom of mobility, denied to its natives.

Every Streetview point of capture holds the insatiable desire of progressive movement forward to the ever-vanishing point at the never-end of the road. The camera all knowing, the image all encompassing, but always at a distance. The user is at once immersed and removed, god-like.

But we are not users.

FROM TURTLE ISLAND TO PALESTINE

A screenshot from the short film Canada Park. At the centre is an archival image with a purple color filter which overlays a golden-filtered image from Google Streetview of an arid landscape inside Ayalon-Canada Park. In the archival image, two youths carry a banner with Arabic text:

“we will not concede to the erasure of our villages
Imwas – Yalo – Beit Nouba.”

Today, as a Palestinian living on stolen Mohawk land, my practice has shifted to understanding colonization as a global economy of scale from Turtle Island to Palestine. The short film Canada Park oscillates between these two spaces as I begin an excavation at the site of Ayalon-Canada Park.

This is a park funded by settler Canadian Zionists with tax deductible dollars to raze, hide and redesign the Latroun area of occupied Palestine. This park is part of a larger Israeli National Park system which appears and disappears bodies, histories and places to narrativize ecologically, archeologically and architecturally, the Zionist myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

In Kanesatake, the Mohawks have been resisting Canadian and Quebecer colonialism and protecting their Pines for at least the past three centuries¹. But the same colonial logics reign

today; in December, 2021, the municipality of Oka passed a bylaw designating seven lots of forested land that are part of The Pines as a heritage site “in order to ensure its conservation and its development in the public interest.” The Oka National Park, a few kilometers away, is a city of trees built on indigenous burial grounds. Through the Indigenous Peoples Open Doors Program, indigenous people are supposed to enjoy free entry to National Parks across the nation state. They can cross country ski, hike, and bike – but they cannot build a home there or perform a ceremony. Somehow this would be designated as private use.

Both these parks belong to a larger colonial construct of National Parks which control and separate people from land. A public park – but which publics? These parks not only control access to land, but they change our relationship to the land.

Our demand is to Return to our villages – a whole life world, of land and creatures and all their relations.

THE MATERIAL AESTHETICS OF GREEN COLONIALISM

A screenshot from the short film Canada Park. An image of a planted pine forest within Ayalon-Canada Park, inside Google Streetview. The digital image is disintegrating in vertical lines, a form of digital noise called banding, usually caused by insufficient light in a digital photographic image.

Tax deductible donations are collected in Canada and around the world by a global Zionist organization called the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The fund is the largest landowner in Israel

and is a para-governmental organization that is fulfilling its mission to colonize the land by “greening the desert”, sharing equipment and infrastructure with the Israeli military.²

A forest of pines is a city of trees built on top of a massacre. In Latroun, like many other places in Palestine, the JNF planted pine forests for entirely material aesthetic reasons. Pine trees grow fast. By design, trees that grow fast can act as tool of erasure, swiftly growing over the villages buried underneath.. These tall trees also shadow the ground and kill any indigenous fauna ground cover that live there. Pine trees also consume way more than an arid and semi- arid climate can provide. JNF forest fires in recent years revealed what was hidden underneath. Namely, agricultural terraces, traces of Palestinian village life and a physical relationship to their land.

The desert is alive. The desert is a life world, many life worlds, our life world.

THE EYE OF A 360° GOD, IMAGE WALLS AND GRIDDED BORDERS

A screenshot from the short film Canada Park. An image stitched from two photos taken by two fisheye lenses of a 360° go pro camera, mounted on top of a cyclist’s helmet. We can see the cyclist, his backpack and helmet, distorted because of its proximity to the wide angle lenses. The image is also a screenshot from Streetview taken between two points of 360° capture: it pauses the stretch effect inside Streetview that is meant to enhance the user’s feeling of forward movement.

Through a commission by UK based artist collective VideoJam, I was paired with musician and producer Nabiha Iqbal who composed a film score for Canada Park. I sent Nabiha an old .عمي بو مسعود nursery rhyme I grew up with called A’ammi Bou Mas’oud

My uncle Bou Mas’oud, Has big black eyes,
With an insatiable hunger

The two black eyes of a camera operate with the insatiability of colonial hunger. At once completely immersed and completely removed, this totalizing digital spatial capture assumes a God-like control, it is all-seeing.

As such, every 360° capture point is a system of abstraction that strips place of its meaning. Place is reduced to a location, a visual facade, an image wall meant to block Palestinian histories from this site. Akin to the walls erected by Israel, these act not just to delineate and capture land, but also as a threshold of view that disappears Palestinian existence from the sightlines of the Zionist colonizer.

AESTHETICS OF LAND BACK IN THE VIRTUAL

A screenshot from the short film Canada Park. An image of a GoPro camera mounted on top of a cyclist’s helmet. At the core of the image, and every 360° image, is a prismatic point of breakage.

My eye has no iris for light to come through My eye is a glass prism
Excavating
Under the ruins

Under the city of trees

The film Canada Park is interested in the points where the image breaks: glitches, stretches, wipes; points which reveal the production process of the image as a system of abstraction. These points become my kino-eyes. My system of making meaning against a system of abstraction. High production images become poor images, with an aesthetic that emerges from a material need, a need to return to Palestine.

Cinematic space-time changes. The gamer settler-agent’s ‘freedom of mobility’ is now collective, stretched over time and space. Shared by history, stories, people exiled and bodies buried underneath, the 360° eye is no longer removed from the world. It no longer surveils and captures. The world itself is the eye.

On June 24, 2007, the people of Yalo, Imwas and Beit Nouba, marched to return to their villages. Ahead of the gated park that separates them from their land – and their land from

them – they were met with tear gas, sound bombs and rubber bullets from the Israeli occupying army.

7 images are archived from the March. You can download them here.
8678 user images of settlers and Zionist tourists flood the Google Maps platform. None include images from the March. You can upload them here.

AN ELSEWHERE HERE, AN UNDERCOMMONS

There is a precursor to all this. Before Streetview, Holy Land photography emptied the land from people by producing images for a European market with a biblical imaginary of Palestine. Photographers, often Christian missionaries, framed empty landscapes and captioned them with biblical locales.

Emmaus, for example, is biblically conflated with Imwas. There is no scientific or archeological proof of this, but like most Israeli national parks, a layer of biblical mythology is applied over the green zone.

In Ayalon-Canada Park, Emmaus Nicropolis is marked as a touristic biblical site, both IRL and URL, while Imwas is systematically disappeared. Israeli human rights organization B’tselem has built signs to mark the colonial history of the park that have been repetitively destroyed. These are the internal contradictions of an extremely violent settler colonial society fighting itself.

Indigenous artist-scholars Eric Ritskes and Jared Martineau theorize indigenous aesthetics as both rooted in the land and fugitive, compounding the anticolonial material politics of land and bread with black fugitive aesthetics3. It is indeed through this kind of intersectional solidarity that rejects the structures of the nation-state and its nationalisms, that we can resist the settler state and live together in dignity.

A structure of Return, then, emerges out of our own incessant trespassing of colonial borders from Turtle Island to Palestine, whether back home or in exile, on the ground or on the net. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.

^1.Alanis Obomsawin, dir., Kanehsatake: 270 years of Resistance (1991, Kanehsatake, National Film Board of Canada, https://www.nfb.ca/film/kanehsatake_270_years_of_resistance/ ). The film is free to stream and documents the history of Mohawk resistance against colonial encroachment in The Pines.
^2. JNF bulldozers were used to raze the villages of Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, long before the organization announced it will construct the park. This is well documented in Independent Jewish Voices, Canada’s formal complaint to the Canadian Revenue Agency demanding that it rescinds JNF’s tax-deductible charity status. The document argues JNF Canada violates Canadian and international law and contributes to the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian land. In March 2021, thanks to IJV Canada’s campaign, the CRA warned JNF Canada from developing projects in “disputed territories” which forced JNF Canada to distance itself from its parent organization in the occupied territories and change its written mission. See more here.
^3.Martineau, Jarrett and Ritskes, Eric. “Fugitive indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of decolonial struggle through Indigenous art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol 3 No 1, 2014. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/21320

Based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. Razan teaches film and media arts at Concordia University.