Witness

The midday light heightens the relief on the walls, startled incisions that could only be cross sections cut into a living thing. 

There are spaces cloistered from the heat around a courtyard. Some are rooms, some only the narrow depth of a cell. 

It has been an encounter over half a lifetime. The coded social grain, the intimated depth of despair, the mocking inversion of power. All these drew me to the photographs as a student.  

Many of the strategies are familiar. The close cropped intimacy of the framing. The pathos of a discarded plaything, its heavy lidded dissociated stare. 

One wall remains a surprise though. A warning against complacency, against the platitudes of aesthetic contemplation. 

A wall stuck with A4 printouts of social media posts from a discussion group. Short, desperate.  

I was working daily with Palestinian testimony. Videos.  

There is a style guide that outlines how to place text, how to create aesthetic unity, how to engage saturated attention spans. A guide to crafting these testimonies into a format recognisable as well produced news media.  

They sit alongside social media posts from Palestinians bearing evidence of the violence of genocide. 

I get tired of the familiar tones of stock music and decide to overlay the footage in one story with a recording of oud. I’m taken aback by how it now reads as fetishistic, as racist. 

I find some edification in the process of editing. The fusion of momentum and the shaping of a narrative is wondrous and deceptive and essentially human to me, while everything seems so amorphous otherwise.  

I learn to notice the difference a frame can make, to register how keenly the eye detects an aberration.  

Close cropped inspection of a frame blows up a detail of carnage to a pixelated chromatic flux between grey, blue and oxidised red. 

We have a lot of footage of police brutality that supports the version of events of black witnesses. And yet black witnesses are still not believed.  

This video was the last thing I worked on before leaving Istanbul. The sound is composed of various loops, built the same way the visuals are.  

I write from Beirut at a time when it seems very possible that Israel will soon bring outright war to Lebanon.