Mediating Uncertainties #2 : Lecture by Pelin Tan: De-Archiving of Necropower as Residual Infrastructures

Residual images of violence in territories of conflict may appear as decolonial imaginaries that provide and support collective action. How may the collective of residual images create an archival practice that continuously de-archive the power of necropolitics? How may such methodologies of research and artistic maneuvers function as strategies? Mbembe is describing necropolitics as a “life to the power of death”. Necropolitics is about the reconfiguration between resistance, sacrifice, and terror, and as he claims, all conditions are more blurred under necropolitics. The videos in archives such as bak.ma provide the residuals of each of the subjectivities that create everyday assemblages. These assemblages are videograms of residual waste, as in Mbembe’s words: ”…something distorted, clumsy, debased and unworthy” and a surplus of the image of resistance, future revolution, and attempt of decolonization of the image regime. (Ref.: Mbembe, Achille (2003) “Necropolitics”, Trans.L.Meintjes, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11-40, Duke University Press. P.12 - 40). Pelin Tan is invited in relation to the academy course Screened Visions, led by PhD fellow Sara Eliassen. Pelin´s lecture is also the second lecture in the series Mediating Uncertainties, part of Eliassen´s PhD project. The session will be hosted by MFA student Hamid Waheed and Sara Eliassen. In Mediating Uncertainties Eliassen invites writers and practitioners to respond through their own practices to the questions and themes at the core of her ongoing PhD project in artistic research. Thinking around how ideology is normalized through contemporary images, technologies and moving image culture, the project aims to explore how image- and screen materials can be used to question and counter dominant versions of recent histories. If following on from Marshall McLuhan’s observations that form became content in the twentieth century, what modes of aesthetic resistance could be mobilised today, bearing in mind the many different contexts and urgencies we now face? How might we subvert documents of the past and archival materials with the explicit aim of undoing certain subjectivities, to build new political imaginaries? This might require strategies that operate beyond a conception of simply producing an alternate narrative or making a counter move. How might we multiply narratives, connections, methods and techniques in order to rethink how knowledges and histories are being produced? In attempting this, we also need to explore the apparatuses of circulation we use, and the possibilities of developing new channels of distribution.