Walid Ra'ad / Jalal Toufic

What is the future of the archive?

In summer 2006, just as the search for movement experts was beginning, a small exhibition of Walid Ra’ad’s work went on view in a Hamburg gallery. Its main feature was a series of photos bearing the title We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.

According to the accompanying texts, these are pictures that Walid Ra’ad, or at least the ‘I’ mentioned in the texts, took as a 15-year-old in 1982 of the Israeli assault on West Beirut. They came into his possession again in 2005 while sorting through his archive. And indeed the pictures bear material traces of ageing – some of them showing nothing at all – and are witness to the attempt to photograph something, itself something very difficult to portray: perhaps a night sky lit up by explosions in black and white, under- and overdeveloped at the same time.

Traces of disappearance

In summer 2006, the Israeli Defence Forces once again invaded Lebanon. Hence the ‘artist’s declaration’ in the gallery that postulates that the work is in no way to be construed as a comment on the latest fighting, but the previous campaign. That said, “the memories of 1982 among Lebanese artists, writers and filmmakers has been, so to speak, in the air recently”.

As with all archive works of Walid Ra’ad, in particular the Atlas Group Archives, the photo series in the gallery do not function as documentation that defines the documented as historic events. The works in the Atlas Group Archives present no traces of bearing testimony to an actual event as such, but traces of disappearance.

These traces follow the logic of trauma: instead of that that remains incommensurable and unrecordable, curious details on the brink remain in mind. The Atlas Group Archives testify to these details, giving rise to archive stories in the interstice between ‘document’ and inscription, which has less to do with disappearance than the strange paths of re-emergence.

While criticism of historiography in past decades has elaborated on the subtle use of fiction and construction in the emergence of historic narrations, Walid Ra’ad employs fiction and construction no less subtly to actually thwart this genre of narration.

Ficticious archives as heralds?

The new photo series also produces a story between document and caption. It might well be as fictitious as in other Ra’ad works, but also comprises another kind of re-emergence, one only too real.

This begs the question that if these are archives that bear witness to what has not happened, are they then heralds of what will recur?

This would also concur with the logic of trauma. So has this way of working with archives the character of a prediction in a certain sense – an impossible prediction that can only augur both what it predicts in equal measure as that which (does not) occur?

In a nutshell: Does the link between memory and invention, emergence and disappearance in Walid Ra’ad’s work at certain points correspond to a prognosis?

Untimely collaboration

We put this to Walid Ra’ad. He answers that he has a friend who supports the theory that we are dependent on ‘untimely collaborators’ (partners from the past and above all from the future) for every intellectual work, including prediction. Based on this, it is therefore impossible to predict a disaster because the disaster itself negatively affects the cooperation of these future partners.

The criticism of historiography has concluded that it is always the future that decides whether something will have happened in the historic sense. “It will have happened” – this is the figure of the second future in which it is not entirely unreasonable to research T. S. Elliot’s influence on Shakespeare. The theory of ‘untimely collaboration’ radicalises this figure by insisting on the present effect of the second future and, therefore, ultimately placing historic linearity in question.

Its author is Jalal Toufic, one of the three Lebanese artists, writers and filmmakers mentioned above with premonitions; in fact he is all three rolled into one. In this way, his writings on ‘untimely collaboration’ strangely corresponds with the over- and underexposure of photographic documents that recur in Walid Ra’ad’s works:

Maxwell’s wave equation for light has a retarded solution and an advanced solution. Retarded light waves travel forward in time, while advanced waves travel backward in time. […] in the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory of radiation in order for light to be emitted, a back-and forth movement has to happen: a half-sized retarded wave must travel from the atom to the future absorber, and a half-sized advanced wave must travel from the absorber back to the atom. If there are no absorbers in a particular region, light will not shine in that direction. Every time I create something, I know that there is a stranger somewhere who has received it. Many a time I stopped writing, and went out with boring people, who have money and time to waste: I did this most probably because there was no stranger to receive the new I might have created if he or she existed. […] Intuition is but respect for the future creation of others. An ethical imperative: to be available so that what has the possibility of being created can be forwarded to us rather than blocked.

Searching for untimely collaborators

We ask Walid Ra’ad and Jalal Toufic to deliver a prognosis on the future of the archive and the movements of emergence and disappearance.

Their answer is a workshop on ‘untimely collaboration’. How will this workshop find its own ‘untimely collaborators’ to itself become prediction?