November Chronicle by Ayris Taban, Liam Warren and Ginevra Collini

(notes from a first confluence)

We met for a first confluence.
Not as an opening, not as a foundation, but as a gathering inside something already underway.

The group came together from different places, carrying different languages, histories, and attachments. What seemed to be shared was not a position, but a concern: that publishing, archiving, and circulation are not neutral practices, and that their implication in violence needed to be approached slowly, without resolution.

The days were oriented toward diagnosis rather than projection.

Certain terms circulated - the colonial library, the textual enterprise, the archive as a technology of power - not as stable concepts, but as ways of naming an environment we were already inside. Publishing appeared less as a cultural form than as an infrastructure: one that has historically accompanied empire through classification, narration, extraction, and the management of memory. The archive was not treated as a repository, but as an active system that produces legibility while organizing erasure.

Much of the work consisted of staying with materials. Images, texts, fragments, archives of uneven status. A practice described as striking the archive functioned as a way of slowing down and working from inside what already exists. The task was not to eliminate problematic documents, but to attend to how they operate: how images train the eye, how captions narrow interpretation, how repetition across time produces common sense.

Images did not resolve anything. They accumulated. They circulated. They were approached as plural, temporal, and relational. The question not only what an image shows, but what conditions make it intelligible, or what remains systematically outside its frame. Genocide appeared not as a discrete event captured by images, but as a condition unfolding over time - sustained by racialization, legal regimes, humanitarian narratives, and epistemic separations.

Language itself felt unstable. Words such as horror or unspeakable were approached cautiously. There was an awareness that such language can relocate violence into the affect of the viewer, producing silence rather than accountability. The difficulty was not naming violence, but noticing how language can foreclose relation by sealing the event too quickly.

Publishing was discussed as a practice implicated in these closures, but also as a possible site of counter-erasure. Not as repair, not as solution, but as an insistence on remaining with what has been fragmented, suppressed, or rendered illegible. This insistence extended beyond the written page. Talking drums, braided hair, textile symbols, carved objects, oral traditions, and muscle memory entered the conversation as forms of transmission that have long carried knowledge outside institutional archives.

There was also attention to fugitive practices… unauthorized archives, fragments, modes of study that do not seek recognition or legitimacy. These practices did not appear as alternatives or solutions, but as existing ways of staying in relation beneath and beside institutional capture. Movement, opacity, and partiality mattered more than coherence.

Muscle memory, in particular, was understood as an embodied archive: gestures, know-how, pain, and prohibition sedimented in the body through histories of displacement and colonial violence. Craft, repetition, and gesture were approached as ways memory persists when language, images, and official records fail. The archive, in this sense, was not only something to be accessed, but something rehearsed, reactivated, and carried.

Several exercises made these tensions palpable. In one, we were asked to fabricate a narrative of what preceded a photograph - its circumstances, its before - and to notice how narration participates in the humanization or dehumanization of those depicted. In another, we were tasked with producing a publication from multiple archives. The process was taxing. None of us were satisfied with the result. But the difficulty forced a coming-together, and afterwards, conversations about process, exhaustion, and care. The object failed; something else became visible.

What makes a text dangerous to empire?

This first confluence did not produce conclusions or a unified direction. It produced a shared condition of attention, a provisional lexicon, and a willingness to stay with uncertainty.

Two brothers, little one is 4-5 years old, and the older brother is around 8 years old. The woman coming behind them is a neighbour and a friend of their mother, yet they are not necessarily walking together. Maybe they left the street together, but they aim for different directions, maybe the woman is going to bazaar, or to have a çay getover in others’ neighbours’ house, since she in small high heels, and she has a beautiful dress underneath her cover. 

It is a quite warm day, little boys are in shorts and short sleeves and the woman’s veil is white. We can see from their face expressions that the sun is disturbingly warm.

Their focus is not on the wall, it’s as if this is the 100th time they’re passing in front of it anyways, it looks like a habitual path for them. The person who is behind the camera might have found this moment interesting or historical, but I’d say there is not much interesting things going on for the 3 people in the photo, just going on with life, and that moment of history continues to live with them. It reminds me of how revolution itself, pain, struggle, moments of joy, relief, no matter how high you live them, after a moment of time, humans get used to everything.

Grief, community, collective memory

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 01

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: Vietnam, 1987
Date: 1987
Place: Vietnam
Source / Author: Unknown
Notes: Post-war Vietnam, period of reconstruction. Exact provenance unknown.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 02

Medium: Archive material / publication
Title: Stone Library of Palestine
Source: Genocide Times
Author: Collective / unspecified
Notes: Archival-artistic project assembling fragments related to Palestinian history, dispossession, and genocide.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 03

Medium: Photograph
Title: Bedouins Dancing in South Baghdad
Photographer: Inge Morath
Agency: Magnum Photos
Place: South Baghdad, Iraq
Notes: Documentary photograph of cultural ritual and movement.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 04

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: Windrush Boat Arrived in Waterloo
Date: c. post-1948
Place: United Kingdom
Source / Author: Unknown
Notes: Image connected to the history of Caribbean migration to Britain (Windrush generation).

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 05

Medium: Archive material / book
Title: The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish–Muslim World
Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Notes: Counter-historical project reconstructing shared Jewish–Muslim histories.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 06

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: American soldiers in Santo Domingo
Date: 1965
Place: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Source / Author: Unknown
Notes: Likely taken during the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Civil War.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 07

Medium: Archive material / newsletter
Title: Africa Newsletter
Publisher: Africa Committee of the Communist Party (USA)
Date: mid–late 20th century
Notes: Anti-imperialist solidarity publication supporting African liberation movements.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 08

Medium: Archive material / newspaper article
Title: Article from Al Fatah
Republished in: Black Panther Party Newspaper
Date: Unknown
Notes: Reflects transnational revolutionary solidarity between Palestinian and Black liberation movements.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 09

Medium: Image
Title / Description: Unknown
Source / Author: Unknown
Notes: Image associated with Al Fatah / Black Panther archival material. Unidentified.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 10

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: Revolt in Santo Domingo
Date: 1965
Place: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Context: Dominican Civil War
Source / Author: Unknown

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 11

Medium: Text (excerpts)
Title: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Notes: Used as a critical framework for reading archives and images.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 12

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: Colonial recruits enforcing control
Date: c. 1885
Place: Congo (Congo Free State)
Source / Author: Unknown
Notes: Image tied to Belgian colonial administration and forced labor systems.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 13

Medium: Book
Title: Architecture lesbiennes
Author: Milena Charbit
Publisher: Shed Publishing
Notes: Spatial and political critique from lesbian and queer perspectives.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 14

Medium: Journal
Title: The African Communist
Publisher: Various (linked to African liberation movements)
Notes: Political and theoretical journal addressing communism and decolonization.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 15

Medium: Photograph
Title: Algerian Soldiers Weeping
Date: 1962
Place: Algeria
Original Caption: Algerian soldiers weeping with joy after Algeria attains independence, ending 132 years of French rule.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 16

Medium: Book
Title: Abdelkader et l’indépendance algérienne
Author: Kateb Yacine
Notes: Literary and political text on Algerian anti-colonial history.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 17

Medium: Photograph
Title / Description: Algerian Revolution
Associated phrase: Le seul héros c’est le peuple
Notes: Phrase also used as the title of a documentary by Mathieu Rigouste.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 18

Medium: Book
Title: Le musée mal rangé
Text: Houyem Rebai
Illustrations: Amina Bouajila
Notes: Reflection on museums, representation, and racialized absence.

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 19

Medium: Text (excerpt)
Source: Le musée mal rangé
Excerpt:

« De ces personnalités, il n'y en a pas de toutes les couleurs comme les enfants… »

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 20

Medium: Text fragment
Content: “an organized flux”
Source: Unknown

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 21

Medium: Photograph
Description: Image from Algeria
Photographer: French photographer
Source: Unknown

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 22

Medium: Text fragment
Source: Unknown
Content:

« It is my two hands… (…)
… it is my two hands (…)
… that will start the revolution »

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 23

Medium: Text
Title: SEEING GENOCIDE: WEAPONIZATION OF IMAGES
Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Editors: NO-PHOTO and Double Dummy
Original publication: Boston Review, December 2023
Context: Produced for Rencontres d’Arles

ARCHIVAL ENTRY 24

Medium: Photograph
Photographer: Motaz Azaiza
Date: 22 December 2023
Place: Gaza
Publisher: No-Photo, 2024
Notes: Image circulated in debates on witnessing, violence, and the ethics of images during genocide.