PhD in Practice by JJ

The PhD-in-Practice is a doctoral program for research in artistic practice, set up by the Institute of Fine Arts and the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies. The program provides participants with the opportunity to pursue their individual research projects in a collective environment with a strongly trans-disciplinary and international focus. It provides a concept of arts-based research built upon critical epistemologies, as developed in the context of feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory projects.

HUDA TAKRITI

Hybrid Archives? On the Possibilities of Surviving Archival Erasure Practices

‘Hybrid Archives? On the Possibilities of Surviving Archival Erasure Practices (working title)’ explores the availability and non-availability of archives relating to female freedom fighters from the Middle East in times of armed anti-colonial struggle. Starting with, first, the women who joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence 1954–1962 and, second, the female guerrilla fighters who joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the late 1960s. My research aims at questioning the construction and production of historical narratives and the possibilities of re-constructing hidden and neglected (hi)stories might have on our understanding of historiography and the processes of archival ‘truth-making’.

The key questions for this research are: Why the (hi)stories of these women were left undocumented and have not always been worthy of an official remembrance? Why are so histories left behind, while others are carried forward? How do we think about what is missing from the archive? What creative possibilities are offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in archives and historical records? Could we use these missing documents as a tool to revive buried historical evidences and to re-consider our flawed knowledge production systems? What is the best way to response to absent images in archives? And how can we survive the constant erasure practices of our (hi)stories?

I plan to approach these archives as places of ‘permanent lack’—as referred to by Didi-Huberman after Arlette Farge. I intend to deal with archival materials (documents, photographs and films) a fluid, living objects; performative documents in a constant state of flux. My approach for this research will concentrate on the possibility of creating a hybrid form of an archive; shifting between the factual and the fictional, digital and analogue, the past and the future. A space of ‘truth-making’ where documents can act as mediums of resistance, shedding light into neglected corners of the (hi)stories of the women of my two case studies.

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Hybrid Archives? On the Possibilities of Surviving Archival Erasure Practices