Witnessing the Worldly within the Imperial Commons: Yazan Khalili’s Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind
Roundtable response to Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, for World Records Journal Vol. 4, Fall 2020
Yazan Khalili, still from Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind (2016)
Excerpt
A distinction is often made between the natural and the cultural commons: water, air, and earth on one side, and images, texts, artworks, artifacts—everything that can be digitized and museumified—on the other. Like any proposition to cleave nature from culture, this division is untenable, all the more so in this late stage of what Françoise Vergès has labeled the Racial Capitalocene.{1} I would like to suggest that a more salient distinction be introduced, in parallel to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recalibration of major concepts in political theory—including sovereignty, citizenship, rights, and reparations—between an imperial and a worldly commons.{2} Building from Azoulay’s argument that our actually existing commons—whether they are water systems or cultural archives—are constituted by imperial violence, we should ask how to transform imperial public spheres and institutions into worldly spaces of care and interdependence.
Photography has been a key tool for the imperial enclosure and control of worldly life, but it also holds the potential to challenge imperial principles. Azoulay describes the camera as a technology that has legitimized the violent transformation of shared worlds into imperial territories, of people into refugees or infiltrators, and of the past “into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.”{3} She warns of “(t)he violence of forcing everything to be shown and exhibited to the gaze.”{4} Nonetheless, photography, which Azoulay has long theorized as an event and a relational practice rather than merely a tool for producing documents, also carries a “potential of reversibility.”{5} Interactions with photography can enable the reversal of the camera shutter and the refusal of the imperial classificatory regime, inviting returns to a worldly commons in which forms of life are not extracted and exposed as images but in which images are intrinsic elements of shared worlds.
Uncovering this worldly potential involves reversing what Azoulay calls “the imperial shutter.” For Azoulay, the camera’s shutter is not a mere metaphor for power, but a key element of an apparatus for colonial ordering: the shutter cleaves time, space, and social relations. To reverse this logic would imply dismantling, or simply refusing, the visual orders of empire.{6} I want to anchor this project of refusal in my current thinking around Palestinian visual culture and digital media projects that reject colonial mechanisms of visibility and posit opaque, relational forms of bearing witness.