Blue like the Mediterranean: the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive

Abstract

In the prologue to Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), the speaker asks that his words appear against a grey background. Or, he continues after a pause, ‘use a blue background . . . blue just like the Mediterranean’. Beginning with this colourful riddle, this article investigates the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive. With this attention to the monochrome as a format, the author’s goal is to move away from the categories of documentary and fiction that dominate discussions of Raad and parafictional work more generally, towards the formal infrastructure through which such works command belief and emotion. This attention to the aesthetic form of the archive not only brings into focus the constituent role of design in the construction of knowledge, but it also reveals the transformation of the monochrome in its encounters with the archive, technical media, and the chromatics of affective capitalism.