w_BetweenRevolutions

Between Revolutions

What do we ask of images?

Through video and collaged installations that feature her mother’s and grandmother’s photographs, stories, and prized things, Huda Takriti meditates on the nature of familial memory and knowledge production as women’s practice. She narrates the memories of her mother and grandmother, as generational knowledge still unfolding.
Both her mother’s and her grandmother’s hands appear again and again in the video On Another Note (2024), holding scissors that cut fabric, turning the pages of photo albums, and gesturing as they explain. Her mother’s hands, captured by her daughter, link generations, bodies thousands of miles apart, and the knowledge
they carry.

Ana de Almeida, in turn, examines family photographs—pictures from her father’s youth, taken alternately in his home country of Portugal and as a student in communist Czechoslovakia, between the years after the Carnation Revolution (1974) and just before the Velvet Revolution (1989). The images are filled with revolutionary
fervor and empty of fixed archival documentation, leaving them open to the artist’s extra-historical and open-ended interpretations. They become hosts to the artist’s conceptions. De Almeida amplifies the presence of the family “shoebox of images,” so to speak.

As both practices are collage-like in their address of memory and history in times of social unrest, I will move back and forth, to meditate on memory and migration. Huda Takriti and Ana de Almeida think about what we ask of images, and what we ask of the things our family leaves behind in the long journey of migration or displacement.
Particularly given the ubiquity of vernacular imagery in our lives, wallpapering our social media and web-based visual landscapes, their questions bring to relief the slippery political borders of things we take for granted as oppositions, the institutional and the familial history in the narration of social life and its upheavals.

Takriti draws from theorizations by the cultural theorist Edward Said, who poignantly argued for the criticality of undermining state narratives—particularly those of the colonizing state—through counter-archives. While Takriti takes up this charge, her project also tacitly acknowledges that “big stories”—the monumental counterarchive—
cannot account for histories yet unfolding. As her family remains displaced and far from their home of Palestine, and as the Nakba remains an ongoing condition rather than a concluded proposition, what monumental story holds the weight of a family’s look to an unrecoverable home? Perhaps the hands of her mother carry
such weight.

De Almeida’s father was one of many young idealists who made their way toCzechoslovakia in the 1970s, as part of a larger East Bloc program during the Cold War era to recruit students from the “developing world” to communist nations. He was a member of a generation that participated in massive sociopolitical change, that witnessed military and civil resistance to Portugal’s authoritarian regime. Erupting into a popular resistance movement for a time, the Carnation Revolution bolstered a euphoric optimism in greater shared governance. Her father’s experience led him to look for different manifestations of resistance in his home and host countries, which he photographed. These photographs offer a connected iconography of revolutionary fervor that is readily accessible even to the contemporary viewer— of tanks, of youthful crowds, and of peace signs and raised hands. Yet, the particulars of their varied histories are left opaque in her father’s personal archive. The images in Ana de Almeida’s works do not index moments, as the photographic document is expected to do in institutional histories. Rather, they harken to her father’s life, to her life as a member of a postrevolutionary generation, and to the uncertain futures contained in these decades-old images. The pictures carry the promise of change and its attendant fervor, not the foreclosure of historical events. There is a desire we can have for images, which both artists variously describe as a kind of hosting or a place of longing and projection. The theorist Pierre Nora described this function as lieu de memoire, which exemplifies the heightened symbolic meaning a thing
can take on in familial and cultural memory. But such a symbolic meaning is only “hosted,” when the past is acknowledged as unrecoverable. In Nora’s words: “Our interest in lieux de mémoire... has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the
sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.”1

For de Almeida, that nostalgia is for revolutionary fervor itself, a nostalgia still alive long after such dreams propelled young people to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, she unearths the resonance of the photographs by starting with and honoring her artistic intuition and familial affective knowledge, then proceeding to external inquiry and corroborative research. Her works take a retrospective look at what it meant to belong to a revolutionary generation, and at the young man who would become her father, but also at the participants and onlookers whose collective force meant potential. Through such retrospection, her works also invite the contemporary viewer to scrutinize the self-evidence of our political moment.

Émile Durkheim, who theorized on collectivity and revolution, argued that “collective investments have the character of a categorical imperative”2 —a self-evidence that confirms the logic of (the right) revolution. In 68: Prague in Lisbon (2024), de Almeida superimposes her voice on missing audio tracks belonging to street interviews
conducted in Lisbon by the Portuguese national TV broadcaster RTP in 1968; the content involves the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union–led Warsaw Pact troops, which had unintended consequences for the unity of the communist projects worldwide. Guided by research on the Portuguese press coverage of the time, and even lipreading, de Almeida lets her own subconscious desires flow through the cracks of the revolutionary promise. Together with two other videos, April Words (2024) and November Words (2024), in which the artist invites Portuguese and Czech sign language interpreters to translate historical terms directly related to the Carnation and Velvet Revolutions, she seems to ask, instead: Are the semiotics of revolution fungible, fixable, malleable, or other? Social order and revolutionary faith are cleansed of consequences and interrogated in their
representations. However, this maneuver is not cynical.

Theories and abstractions aside, fierce nationalisms gather power and monopolize truth and patriotism now, through and against the photographic image and its claims to evidence. The populist demagogue claims greater immediacy (read: less mediation) of presence and meaning, made flesh in the throng of crowds in the thrall of nationalism. The photograph is impoverished. De Almeida’s invocation of the photograph as pure potential is a denial of the repressive state. To the contrary, she summons Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s conception of the photograph as a civil contract — as a means of enfranchisement and manifestation of participation and consent, despite the political condition.
(...)

Both Huda Takriti and Ana de Almeida honor the vernacular archive, but they resist instrumentalizing it. Playing with family photographs’ cadences of gaps and fullnesses, they hold moments of crisis accountable, without judgment and without resolution. Neither claims an exhaustive grasp of the events and moments pictured in their family albums. To the contrary, their eyes are trained on the things that the pictures cannot definitively provide. Their artwork opens the ostensibly “self-evident” imagery of the photograph to the promises of potential, possibility, and hope.

Excerpt from What do We Ask from Images by Rashmi Viswanathan

1 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in “Memory
and Counter-Memory,” special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24,
esp. p. 7.

Between Revolutions 2024
Ana de Almeida & Huda Takriti: (In)verso. Between the Lens and the Archive. Installation at Camera Austria, Graz. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer.

FROM FAT AND THE CITY

LARP

AL WAHDA

INHABITED PROJECTIONS

TRINOMIAL

NEMHC

THE FOX DEN

BLOCK TV

UNIFORMA

VER NAVIOS PASSAR

GUIDED TOUR

THE COLLECTIVE ARCHIVE

ARCHITECTURE

HAUS WITTGENSTEIN

ARCHIPELAGO MOUNTAIN

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