Scenes of Erasure – Part I: Ruins

Scenes of Erasure brings together six contemporary shorts in which archaeological ruins and relics figure as dense sites for excavating histories and processes of political violence, imperial domination, and cultural erasure. This programme coincides with the exhibition of Hrair Sarkissian’s Stolen Past at Ibraaz London, in which the artist employs an adapted lithophane printing technique to create 3D renderings of mobile phone images of looted artefacts from the Raqqa Museum in Northen Syria. As with Stolen Past, the films featured in this programme use archaeological artefacts to explore the contested geopolitical landscapes in which they are embedded, attending to the systems, technologies, practices, and individuals that enable the destruction, appropriation, trafficking, recovery, and safeguarding of material heritage. 

In UNDR, we see aerial helicopter footage of archaeological and historical sites located across historic and occupied Palestine, including the Al-Aqsa compound, Herodium, Masada, and the Qumran Caves. Originally created by Israeli filmmakers for educational purposes, these images are emblematic of the way in which archaeology has been weaponised by the Israeli regime in support of its settler colonial project and attempted erasure of Palestinian presence. This footage is intercut with images of detonations, Israeli settlements, Israel’s Afforestation Project, tourists visiting archaeological sites, peasants working the land, and girls playing hide-and-seek among the ruins. The film’s images, music, and title – which is taken from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges and resembles an acronym for a fictitious United Nations organisation – evoke the unsettling idea and feeling of a people ‘under’ permanent surveillance and occupation, as well as a landscape continuously remade by a subcutaneous process of ruination. 

In Strange Object, an album containing black-and-white aerial photographs of a desert landscape populated by ‘strange’ stone structures serves as the starting point for a meditation on the intimate imbrication of imperial image production, territorial conquest, and historical erasure. The film, which comprises images captured by the Royal Air Force’s Z Unit in 1920, interrogates the operations through which the ‘living worlds’ documented and destroyed by the British Empire are transformed into ‘dead facts’. ‘This machine makes a double of the world while it simultaneously erases the original forever’, the voice-over comments, observing how these flattened photographic replicas are transported back to the imperial capital to be stored away in a basement archive so that years later historians will make from them ‘History’.

Shadow sites are archaeological features detected from the air when low-angle sunlight highlights subtle topographical variations on the ground, revealing details that would otherwise remain invisible. In Shadow Sites II (2011), Jananne Al-Ani employs this aerial reconnaissance method, using a large-format digital camera and light aircraft to photograph archaeological ruins and other signs of human settlement across different desert landscapes located in West Asia. The film was developed as part of a body of work titled The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without People, which explores ‘the disappearance of the body in the contested and highly charged landscapes of the Middle East’. In contrast to Orientalist visions of the desert as an empty, unoccupied place, in Shadow Sites II the camera seemingly burrows into the landscape to expose material traces of human presence.