Archiving the Future

Abstract

Archives have been a prominent feature in the artistic practices of contemporary artists from the Middle East. Perhaps most notably among artists of the post-Civil War generation in Lebanon, such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and Rabih Mroué, among others, an investment in intervening in existing archives and creating reparative alternative new archives has been seen in works by artists from across the region. Gathering scholarly texts and artist interventions together, Anthony Downey’s 2015 volume Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2015) brought together examples of these archival investments and interjections made by contemporary artists. As such, while a focus on the archive is not something new, Gil Hochberg, in Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future approaches the works of Palestinian artists who are engaging with archives and archival practices from a new perspective. Hochberg reads these practices as utilizing the archive in a way that turns toward the future rather than fixating on the past, even in a reparative sense. In Becoming Palestine, Hochberg looks at a selection of artistic practices that engage with archives not for what they can tell us about the past but for what they may hold for potential futures. It is this notion of possibility or potentiality that is encapsulated in the “becoming” of the title. As Hochberg states of the title in the introduction to the book, “I use the term becoming to account for such open-ended futures . . . Becoming requires a certain ‘leaving behind’ of historical preconditions ‘in order to become, that is, to create something new.’ It requires speculating beyond the narrative comfort zone of history’s ‘actuality,’ which is held in place by preexisting recognizable political terms: state, empire, nation, or people. This is where art comes in” (8). Hochberg sees art as a medium unbound by the restrictions and requirements of what is and therefore able to venture into the exploration of the possible: what could have been and what could still be. Comprised of five chapters, each investigates how a dišerent artist utilizes the archive to explore possible futures. As Hochberg outlines in the introduction, the first two chapters deal with “the poetics of