The figure of Home: Exilic Optics and Archival Intervention

Abstract

This thesis focuses on how archiving has been assumed as a practice and responsibly in the SWANA region, as a process that enables the possibility of cross-cultural encounters and the emergence of an "exilic" optics. Focusing on how these audio- visual archival remediations are presented, shared and "encountered" by a recipient, this thesis focused on the practice of recycling, and reusing archival resources to discuss how representation is understood, highlighting, in ethnographic fashion; how archival works tend to discuss and deal with the language of representation by highlighting the role of archival documents in shaping cultural identity politics in the region. This field of social participation can have a number of positive impacts on the way visual legacies and heritage is understood in Arab countries and their communities both from the homeland and abroad. While the geographical spaces covered in this thesis vary, it draws on the experience of the Lebanese cultural diaspora to discuss the overlapping, diverse, and over signified reality of cultural identity politics in the SWANA region, as mediated through and from Western art- systems. In this sense, Lebanon acts as the interlocutor from which broader cultural, regional and political issues can be raised.