Archiving the Future: Re-Collections of Syria in War and Peace

Arguably, no war has been as well-documented visually as the ongoing war in Syria. Photos, videos, and posts on social media have been an instrumental part of the war as well as its documentation. Images of people taking the streets, of slogans written on walls and banners, and later photos of destruction, killed and mutilated bodies, and refugees in great numbers escaping havoc have long established the Syrian civil war as a topos for global reflection and concern. However, this turbid flood of visual images needs unpacking if we are to understand what Syria was, is, and might become beyond the immediate sense of death and destruction. Despite the excess of visual documentation of the Syrian war, the actual processes whereby some images come to capture, embody, and produce what Syria was, is and is to become for Syrians themselves remain understudied.

This ethnographic research project makes up for this neglect by exploring how Syria is being re-collected by various Syrian actors across personal, collective, and institutional forms of visual representation. With this project, we explore how these images of Syria constitute what we designate archives of and for the future. Exploring the formation of these archives will enable us to understand not just how war, crisis, and conflict but also how peace, reconciliation, and coexistence are negotiated as future possibilities in a recreation and refiguring of a country moving beyond conflict.

The central contention of this research project is that Syria offers an exemplary case to reflect on the power of images and how processes of archiving enables a grip, not merely on the past, but also on the present and the future. The project is a critical contribution to rethinking unstable temporal orderings of past, present, and future as it engages the question of how to theorize futurity. Hence, our research questions are: How do archives come into being, and how do they shape, regulate, and change perceptions, memories, and potential futures? How is the image of Syria re-assembled, remade, and re-mediated by Syrian actors across personal, collective, and institutional contexts? And how do political changes in the present impact on the reading and use of the past in the creation of viable futures?

Cellphone use has been instrumental in how the Syrian uprising was organized and planned, and the cellphone continues to be a central device not merely for communication in families spread across continents but also for keeping track of day-to-day developments, for storing personal photos and videos, and for reconnecting with a lost homeland. This subproject therefore employs cellphone use as a pertinent lens through which to explore personal archiving and image use. In conversations and interviews with Syrians, cellphones are typically used to show images of past life and of current family.

Contrary to much theorization, which addresses distance as critical for the reading of photos and images (Chouliaraki 2013), this subproject takes its cue in the opposite, namely that such personal archiving revolves around intimacy and personal prehistory (Barthes 1982). Engaging with photos of dear ones and with places imbued with personal memories and longings opens up a space of pensiveness (Ranciére 2007, 2009). Accordingly, in making cellphone use the object of interrogation, this subproject explores how personal archives are shaped and how these enable different orderings of the past, present, and future. Empirically, this subproject focuses on five Syrian family networks in Lebanon and five Syrian family networks in Denmark and follow their reach across national borders.

Bandak has extensive networks among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, where he has worked since the onset of the civil war, and he also has solid networks among Syrians in Denmark. He will draw on these networks when soliciting the families that will inform this subproject. Methodologically, the subproject takes a point of departure in fieldwork in both countries to follow actual storage and circulation of images. By locating this study firmly in everyday settings within various Syrian family networks, we can explore the personal registers of image sharing and storage. This study thus explores the local hermeneutics of image interpretation and image construction.

Conducted by Andreas Bandak