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| | | | | Re-reading the Colonial Archives | | | Since the beginning of the millennium, I have been researching the Israeli colonial archives, seeking to crack their structure, foundations, and imagination. The purpose is to establish a "counter" postcolonial/decolonial archive, based on colonial sources, while taking into consideration the specific conditions of Israeli colonialism and settler colonialism, and mainly the repressive administration of colonial archives. While colonial bodies and archives erase indigenous history and past, the counter archive aims to return them to their original population and to the public sphere, calling for democratization processes. established on the ruins of the Israeli colonial archive. It aims to tell and return the knowledge about the history of the Palestinian villages where their population was uprooted and exiled (before and after exile), the story of the Palestinian population who remained in Palestine under a military regime, strangers in the house; the erasure and attempt to control Palestinian historiography and culture to support the official Israeli narrative. The decolonial archive gathers indigenous materials from colonial archives, highlighting the physical and interpretative forces exerted on them, cleanses them of their biased interpretation, and focuses on structuring a reading that differs from the original colonial designation. It restores them to indigenous history, enabling the construction of an alternative multilayered database, different from the one-sided characteristic of colonial archives. The proposal then is to turn the Israeli colonial archive–corrupt, oppressive and destructive, into a more autonomous site–not only the materials themselves but also the way they are contextualized, read and interpreted.
See selected research projects in the process of establishing the "counter" decolonial archive (in English, Arabic and Hebrew):
* Re-reading the Colonial Archives, A film directed by Dr. Rona Sela, Animation: Dana Durr, © 2022 (short version), directed for The Palestine Memorial Foundation (English)
* "Ghosts in the archive: The Palestinian Villages and the Decolonial Archives", Published: 07 May 2021, Volume 87, pages 3423–3442 (English)
* "The Hump of colonialism, or The Archive as a Site of Resistance" - L'internationale - Decolonsing Practices, 2016 (English)
* "Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict", Ibraaz, Platform 006, January 2014, also published in: Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, ed. Anthony Downey, IB Tauris, 2015, 79-91. (English)
* Reading a Visual Archive, Lifta as a Case Study, Bezalel, conference, 2013 (Hebrew)
* "Cracks - On the Possibility of Extracting and Establishing Alternative Archives from National Archives in Colonial Countries and Conflict Zones - The Israeli-Palestinian Case", in: Reality Trauma and the Inner Logic of Photography, Haim Deuel Lusky (ed.), Szpilman Institute of Photography and Avi Ganor, 2012 (Hebrew)
*Made Public -Palestinians in Military Archives in Israel (Hebrew, 2009; Arabic - published by Madar Center Ramallah, 2018 - an expended and updated version: - لمعاينة الجمهور - حكاية صور فلسطينية "معتقلة" في الأرشيفات العسكرية الإسرائيلية
(Hebrew - 2009; Arabic - 2018)
For further information please contact: ronasela@gmail.com
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| Cities in Conflict- A Visual Archive | | |
Cities in Conflict - A Visual Archive is a project-in-process that collects materials related to the visual history of “mixed cities” in Israel. It began with research for the exhibition Haifa 1948. The project seeks to build a visual database that reveals the demographic, geographic, urban, social and other changes that took place in these cities. One example is the large wave of migration of Jews and Arabs from neighboring Arab countries to west Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa in the 1920s and 1930s, which modified the fabric of the “mixed cities.” The fundamental change in the cities occurred in the 1948 war, which brought destruction to many Palestinian settlements and extreme demographic change.
The term “ mixed cities” refers to a few archetypal cities that their past and present rooted in the national conflict: Haifa, a “mixed” city with a large Jewish and Palestinian population, which after the 1948 war became a city where Jews were in the majority and Palestinians in the minority; cities that until the late 1920s (Acre) and the middle of the 1930s (Jaffa) were “mixed” and grew to be predominantly Palestinian, and which after the 1948 war became cities with a Jewish majority; cities that until 1948 were “mixed” and in the 1950s and 1960s became Jewish cities (Safed, Tiberius, West Jerusalem); cities that were Palestinian until 1948 and became “mixed” after the war of 1948 (Ramla, Ludd); Palestinian towns that became Jewish after the 1948 war and over the last decades have become “mixed” cities (e.g.Beer Sheva). Primarily the archive collects visual materials that describe this history – photographs, placards and the like as well as other important documents from public bodies, private collectors, families and individuals.
To contact or send materials
To the exhibition Fawaran - Effervescence (Unrest) - Housing, Language, History - A New Generation in Jewish-Arab Cities
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| Haifa | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Jaffa (Yaffa) | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Tiberius | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Acre (Akka) | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Ludd (Al-Lyd) | | | | | | | | | | |
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