DNA

The Israeli settler colonialization has long sought to erase any trace of Palestinian existence from this land. When extreme brutality fails to eradicate and obliterate that existence completely, it has pushes Palestinians to the margins — by imprisoning, concealing, and suffocating them; by displacing, isolating, and besieging them; or by expelling and pushing them far from their own land. Yet these margins, fragile as they may appear, remain visible and present whenever we look closely at their details. And it is precisely this fragility that resists the colonizer’s mission, making it even more difficult, because the effect of the margin is like the butterfly effect, or like roots in the soil.

In the context of a long-standing cultural annihilation over the course of the ongoing Nakba, the cultural manifestations of Palestinian existence have consistently been exposed to erasure, sabotage, or theft. This makes it an intractable, if not impossible, task to quantify the extent of these cultural losses. How could it not be, when we are currently unable to fully assess the scale of the loss inflicted upon artworks destroyed by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, or those buried under the rubble when thousands of homes and buildings collapsed— and often upon their inhabitants as well — transforming the ruins into graves for people, their belongings, and their memories.

It is also difficult to know if Israeli soldiers looted artworks from homes they raided — that is, assuming any of them even place value on Palestinian art. The very notion of going to fight “human animals” contradicts the notion of seizing artworks created by these “animals,” as that would remove from the victim the inhuman label that justifies the executioner’s unspeakable savagery witnessed by the world.

All that remains of those many works destroyed or erased by the war machine at its most recent and most brutal are images saved by their owners on mobile phones or laptops. DNA is not just a demonstration of images of artworks that can simply be viewed and passed by; it represents layered, invisible stories and questions.

The aim of this demonstration does not only lie in archiving and preserving images of these obliterated artworks, preventing them from a final death! It seeks to generate intellectual and ethical discourse under the weight of cultural annihilation. It raises questions about the status of copies recreated from the surviving digital images, which represent the artwork’s DNA. When that image or copy remains while the original is deliberately erased, does the copy call to the original? Or does it reflect it as in a mirror? Or does it become a code that cannot end or be erased, hidden in a secluded corner of the artist’s memory, within the visual language that chose to dry up on another surface that stayed alive despite the wars? DNA is meant to interrogate mechanisms to revolutionize the unique spirit of an artwork, which carries within it a rebellion, allowing readers to find answers to unresolved questions in our efforts to reclaim the lost. As we reflect on identity through art, literature, and national narratives, this demonstration also aims to expand our vision to consider suggestions that arise from new questions about our concept of the copy and the original amid cultural annihilation, which may drive us to revisit Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” once more, to see if there is more to say or add to the subject.

Benjamin, in his renowned essay, Walter Benjamin asserts that the unreproducible characteristic in the process of reproducing the original work of art lies in the inability of the copy to replicate what he calls the aura, the uniqueness inherent in the original place, existence, and time of the work of art. Yet the process of reproduction works to democratize the artistic work, and make it reach a wide range of people, and give it a broad public presence in multiple contexts, which strips it of the authority of its individuality and uniqueness and thus freeing it from the constraints of traditions and rituals. Here lies the revolutionary or subversive energy inherent in reproduction, as it takes the artistic work from the ritual   space, which reinforces the cultural hegemony of capital, to the political space, which attempts to disrupt and dismantle this hegemony. Capitalism attempts to strip art that is not based on rituals of its destructive ability, by commodifying it and taking it into the realm of spectacle and consumption.

Many of the notions Benjamin refers to do not apply to Palestinian art, which inherently possesses a revolutionary and subversive power that resists the dominant structure—a structure that rarely acknowledges art outside its European center and, when it does, often pushes it to the margins. Furthermore, the context of artistic production in Palestine, especially in the besieged, isolated and currently devastated Gaza, adds unique qualities that are difficult to erase. The artwork itself carries the story of its place, and this narrative becomes an inseparable part of its identity. Even so, this essay could serve as a foundation for a deep discussion that might foster new insights into many concepts disrupted by cultural annihilation in its various forms.

DNA also aims to mobilize action in response to cultural annihilation within the broader and more brutal framework of genocidal war. Contemplating images of these artworks could allow us to think of ways to support their artists. Simply reproducing, printing, or recreating an original artwork destroyed or erased from its surviving digital image is a form of revival, a confrontation with the annihilation that befell it, and an assertion of part of the testimony to its layered narratives.

We will let these images stir waters that have been stagnant for too long, allowing us to access that light and reclaim these works by discussing, displaying, and engaging with them, perhaps even through methods suggested by the works themselves in their questions about their real existence, about their creators, places, and times.

These images are remnants from the wounds of the artist or the place, but the wound itself outlines the geography of the place in all its details and layers. It is as if they reveal, in the depth of their existence, secrets from the realms of annihilation. Thus, this DNA is not merely a code for lost art, but also a color map in which we can read another narrative of erasure and a narrative attempting to reclaim the memory and identity of the place.

DNA is meant to be a cumulative demonstration that will remain open to adding more images of works lost by other artists in the context of the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, hoping that this cumulative act, along with the dialogues and initiatives that may accompany it, will result in mutations in vision, positions, and actions.