Even the Sea is Broken: Return and Loss in Razan AlSalah’s Video Works

Abstract

This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation treaties, the article treats loss as central to the manifold rehearsals of return. In AlSalah’s work, loss is understood not as becoming less, but rather as a proposition for becoming otherwise. Here, the practice of loss is explored through the glitch as both a conceptual framework espousing opacity and a pragmatic tool engaging pixel breaks. Rather than reducing the glitch to a mere erroneous aesthetic, the article underscores the active capacity in encountering a glitch or deliberately engendering it by exploring the tensions between colonial imageries reproduced in digital maps, and, in contrast, montage as AlSalah’s tool for intervention. Finally, the article serves as a theoretical experimentation with what I call “dialectical poethics,” which reads the filmic return through loss as an attempt to go against linearity, intelligibility, and finality, yet insists on a materialist grounding of the glitch as a method that is historically situated rather than always-already emancipatory.