Abstract
Imagining Liberation is an artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins by asking a simple question: what kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine? Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD research stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are rooted in posing the question “What if?” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multi-temporal nonfiction. Dalia AlKury approaches documentary filmmaking not as a way of documenting reality, but as a way of constructing an alternative one. Her final artistic results are informed by a long legacy of politically poetic Palestinian aesthetics and by her personal grief over the historical and present day witnessing of the violent ethnic cleansing of her people.
By committing to framing her vignettes in a fictional liberated Palestine, an emancipatory art making process starts to take shape. The process excavates an often-oppressed critical rage and pushes it up to the surface through different narrative tools. Imagining Liberation traces the filmmaker's confrontational journey while experimenting with staging, subverting, futuring, abstracting, and decolonizing to reach a type of catharsis in the face of a continuously fragmented diasporic existence.
By staging her own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia AlKury runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the elusive role of cinematic catharsis. This book encompasses her critical reflection on the short films , narrative experiments and video diaries created throughout her research. The video components can be watched by clicking on the video diaries and films section on this website.The three main audio-visual works that will be analyzed are Congratulations on Your Return, Levitations, and What if a Tree, What if a Crow?
Copyright Dalia AlKury (2024)
Thus material is protected by copyright law. Without explicit authorisation, reproduction is only allowed in so far as permitted by law.
This exposition shares part of the material submitted as the artistic doctoral outcome in the PhD Programme in Artistic Research in Film and Related Audio-Visual Arts at The Norwegian Film School, Inland Norway University, 2024.