Autonomous Archiving in the Middle East

As an institutional practice archival practices often tend to serve the colonized, surveillance and discipline society of the modern world. Online archives bring discussions surrounding the production of images, open source databases, collectivity, and forensics. The term archiving in digital video production and dissemination designates not only a process of open source memory-making that reveals hidden disobedient practices but also an autonomous structure that leads to tactics in montage, uploading and leaking of images to rebuild a collective memory of political disobedience. https://bak.ma/ my practice of video archiving focused on social and political movements in the Middle East. In the process of building this archive, I aim to discuss digital data collection, videograms of civil disobedience and the possible montage of revolution in a metaphoric sense.

Archives and archiving practices relate to many issues including the categorization of knowledge and images by legal register, practices of communing and the layering of complex social representations. While discussing 1) the roles of open digital archives and the contemporary meaning of archiving through experiences from the Middle East 2) a methodology of participatory assemblage 3) the new role of an artist, researcher, activist; I believe in producing collective assamblages in digitized world and potentials of recreating political collective memory by decolonized digital archiving practices.