Curator's Note
This video of two Syrian protesters being beaten up by pro-regime thugs in the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, on 18 March 2011 demands our attention, both as the document of a crime, and as an accidental aesthetic artefact. The reiteration of successive data compressions (in camera, and again following upload) has here produced a weirdly distinctive audio environment, that seems less a simple degradation of the original, than a parallel re-creation - a point of view in its own right.
The loss of audio information generates a wheeling, almost abstract soundscape, that often seems to have little or nothing to do with the images we see. What should have been an unremarkable (if intolerable) ambient field recording is unintentionally transformed into a narrow skein of keening, other-worldly harmonics, interrupted apparently at random by violent, inarticulate voicings of human fear and pain, or equally human hatred and contempt.
What does it mean for this brief, sun-filled nightmare, to circulate in this way as video? How does watching - and listening to - such videos form and frame a people's sense of themselves as agents of their own collective destiny? How is resistance and rebellion written into these images and sounds, not only in the decision by the video maker to film, at the risk of her or himself becoming in turn a target of violence, but also in the very texture of the video itself?
The identity of the thugs we see here is unclear. Since 2011, the Assad regime has increasingly delegated such dirty work to shabihah -- members of long-standing criminal gangs that rapidly metamorphosed into informal militias operating under the direction of the security services. They are called shabihah after the large silent Mercedes in which they used to patrol up and down the Mediterranean coast in their mafioso days, and which the people had nicknamed shabah -- ghosts.
This video documents a criminal act of violence. But in its arbitrary defacing of reality, it does not simply challenge us to try and imagine the real sounds, even the real suffering, that made up this moment of horror. Through one of those unpredictable allegories that precipitate when inadequate technology and imperfect human intention collide, it also invites us to ask: What does it mean to be "real", in a world in which "ghosts" have so much power?
With thanks to Saraa Saleh and Hervé Birolini.
Comments
Ghosts and Bodies
Peter, I love this, especially as a wrap-up to a week which has seen our curators call into question the ethics of viewing violence, the mythologizing of "reality" even when the object we are seeking may not exist, and the widespread circulation of violent images throughout the world and well outside their generative locale, thanks to the development of technologies of recording and sharing files digitally, cheaply, and through the internet on sites such as LiveLeak and many others, some even official, as with the MMA phantom cam videos. I am interested in the question of distortion you raise here as it relates to April's post from Monday, especially in the details of the Steubenville case, particularly the leaked video and the public's reaction to it, as well as the role it eventually played in the verdict from the court. I'm not necessarily asking you about that case, but one of the details the defendants were pushing was the distorted nature of that video - arguing that you couldn't tell who was saying what and when - even though if you watch it, that argument is quite absurd. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on the larger implications of calling into question the viability of information we are able to see and hear in amateur recordings like the one you have presented from Syria, which become more problematic the greater the offense is against an individual, or perhaps more adequately put, from a more powerful regime of offenders? And, what does the role of imagined suffering play in the viewer's reaction to a video's veracity? Have you come across any of this type of response in your work with this video or others?
Peter – this is very
Peter – this is very powerful. I found it difficult to watch – though obviously in a different way to the Steubenville clip. I was disoriented by it and was really straining to try to see what was going on, with the unsettling soundscape heightening its intensity. I like that turn of phrase the ‘arbitrary defacing of reality’ and I am interested in the form of the clip and how that relates to the idea of imagined suffering. I am also intrigued by this idea of resistance being written into the very 'texture of the video itself'. I'm currently reading Eugenie Brinkema's new book 'The Forms of Affect' and it has me thinking about the affect of form and the idea of 'treating affects as structures that work through formal means, as consisting in their formal dimensions (as line, light, color, rhythm, and so on)' (37).
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