A Conversation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Art, Archives and Resistance in Palestine

Flora Fettah: Hello Ruanne, thank you for accepting my invitation to inaugurate this new format for Tide Magazine. Tide is deeply attuned to the notion of the everyday — a sensibility I also find resonating throughout your work, where elements from everyday life, such as sounds, landscapes, screenshots and movements, take centre stage. Your installations, as well as your films, bring together references to research-like-objects, conversations, daily poetic writing or choreography and surveillance cameras. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on familiarity and banality, how would you define these notions, and why do you consider them crucial to explore in your work?

Ruanne Abou-Rahme: The everyday is very important for us as our work is informed by our engagement toward our community. It is anchored in people’s everyday practice of resistance against a repressive system and different forms of erasure. We are channeling the often overlooked, small details and gestures that are not only made to survive but also to resist and generate other possibilities than the colonial violence. There is a certain kind of intimacy in the way we spend time with all this material, how we live with them, and then create an afterlife for them.

FF: Indeed, your work feels very intimate, which is quite surprising considering its scale: the installations are quite massive, way bigger than our own bodies. They could make us feel overwhelmed, but on the contrary, they provoke a feeling of intimacy. It may be connected to the fact that each of your pieces is gathering images of different statuses, origins and uses, that are layered but not hierarchised; some are found footage and some are originals. These images are full of presence, both bodies and voices. As artists, how do you reflect on the responsibility of making images appear or disappear — be they old or new? The erasure of images is directly linked to the erasure of certain people's life. Is this connexion something you are tackling through your work? 

RAR: Our work is grounded in Palestine and, therefore, is an attempt to read the world from there: how the kind of dispossession system that is occurring in Palestine is also echoed in other places, such as in the United States. There is a concerted effort to attack, destroy and erase archives that come from people in Palestine. Both the people who experience history, and the archives themselves, are targeted; in Gaza, for instance, journalists have been targeted systematically because they are producing counter-images and narratives. The preservation of everyday people's visual archives is important in the fight against the material and infrastructural erasure of Palestine. The genocide extends not only to the destruction of thousands of people, but also to their memories and images. This systematic attempt to erase and silence happens on many different levels — and thereforearchives are a huge site of struggle, a site of oppression as well as of resistance. As artists, we must consider our image-making practice as a part of that struggle. The archives we gather are not old and historical ones, they form a living record of what is unfolding in the present. Subterranean and fugitive in nature, they have become central to protect, preserve and honour.For May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, we have gathered online recordings of ordinary persons — mostly from Palestine, Iraq and Syria — who are singing and dancing. We put all these footages in the negative so people’s features cannot be identified anymore. This material has to be central but also needs to be protected, because of the context we are showing the installation in: even though all these videos already exist online and have been circulating for many years, when put in an exhibition space, it is important to add another layer of protection.

FF: You are collecting this living archive but also creating or recreating it. In And yet my mask is powerful, you are using 3D printed masks that reproduced Neolithic masks taken from the West Bank and stored in private collections. These objects exist but are not accessible anymore as they have been looted and captured. So you recreated them directly as an archive: they are not what they were — materially or symbolically — but you offer pathways for their reappropriation and recirculation. In parallel, voices emerge as a recurring presence in your work, haunting or contaminating the images through sound and text. How do you understand the relation between sound and image?

RAR: Our relation to sound has been partly shaped by the experience of being in Palestine and driving down a road and then reaching a wall. This is a military wall, so your visual horizon is blocked and captured: you cannot see beyond that point. But sound is a living matter that can penetrate that wall, move beyond it and mutate. If you think about that as a starting point, it says a lot about what sound can do that images can’t.

When we create a new work, we often start with text, then we create the sound in conversation with it, and then we add the images. The sound exists as its own entity, and differs from how films are traditionally made: first the images, then the soundtrack, which always make the sound kind of secondary. Instead, we often try to make it a sound and text-based work, but actually that’s never the case, as images inevitably make their way in the end. However, it is very important to us for sound to exist as a conceptually independent entity, not dominated by its relation to the image. The sound dictates the rhythm so the images respond very often to the sound and text. Sonically, we have been working a lot with echo and resonances, and the idea that sound is a matter that, though buried, is never truly gone: it has the potential to reemerge. Echo is not a repetition but a constant living matter that changes as it goes, that continues the call, amplifies it. Images have a certain rigidity, it refers to this experience of being in Palestine and reaching dead ends.

FF: Can we discuss the importance of writing in your practice? Text is very present in the images and video, but also in the exhibitions with conversations and reading materials.

RAR: Poetry is my first love: I have been writing from a very young age as I come from a family of poets and writers. It has been a big part of my life. Poetry gives you the ability to undo language in a way, it offers a space to rethink language: you can break open linguistic structures and reimagine the form itself.
But working with poetry implies a certain refusal of didacticism. As a person coming from a community that has been colonised and subjected — and therefore doesn’t own its own representations — with all the level of violence that comes with that, what’s constantly expected of you is to produce evidence of your own oppression. And this burden of evidence is incredibly violent and racist because Palestinians have been producing evidence for 76 years now, and it doesn’t really matter. What has been made very clear is that the issue is not the evidence, the issue is structural racism and white supremacy that come with colonialism. So for me, poetry rejects all of that, as it operates in a completely different language: it is not providing evidence but speaking to what is evident. In our work, the purpose of the text is to be evocative, to reach out to people that may have similar experiences, but without it being didactic.

FF: In this discussion, we’re exploring how your work and its language can be both seductive and unsettling. Is it a conscious strategy?

RAR: We indeed had many conversations about the relationship between the conceptual framework and the formal language we create. First, we are people that are very interested in the form. From the beginning, we have tried to create different aesthetics, as well as a sonic language, which are connected to a certain political imaginary. We are not invested in the trajectory of Western art history, and we are looking to other artistic traditions such as music and oral storytelling. Therefore, our work is multidisciplinary and aims to remain uncontained. Also, our work has a certain relation to love and longing, themes that anyone who has gone through a racialised system of oppression would be able to recognise. To resist it, you need to come from a place of love, and within love, there is always seduction; whether we are thinking about people, or thinking about the land. The relation to land in Palestine is a story of love, of longing, of haunting, of immense beauty and pain. And we really wanted our work to contain all of that. But at the same time, we are very much concerned with making a work that cannot be easily consumed and fetishised. For that, we also include sonic noise, disruptive edits and cuts, glitches, that can be destabilising for the viewers. It is our intention to create a work that can be difficult, to create this tension and to disrupt the gaze.


FF: I will now go on to my last question, the same with everyone I interview. We had several ideas, so here’s a tryout: what are you watching when you are on the internet, scrolling social media?

RAR: Well, everything that is going on in Palestine! When I am online, I am watching accounts by Palestinians on what is happening in Palestine, and also content on the rise of fascism in the United States. I have been saving and downloading a lot of videos of people singing in Gaza. In this moment everyone has a responsibility to fight white supremacy and destruction, to do what you can within your capability and the position you are in. So we have developed a multidisciplinary publishing platform to share other people’s work. It is called Bilna’es, which means “in the negative”, and gathers Palestinian authors, artists and musicians.

FF: Thank you Ruanne, it was a great pleasure to delve into your important work, and hopefully we meet in Marseille or New York sometime soon.