Samar Al Summary

Curated by Jesse Darling for The One Minutes program at Oberhausen Film Festival 2020.

Muffled Snapshots

Color HD Video, exhibition time 1 minute, longer version in progress.

I stare at a pixelated scholar who is surrounded by archive boxes. I photographed the screen while working as a guard; I loved watching the scholars. It seemed like they came from a more stable, celestial world. In transit, we were lucky to inherit even poor images. Most often, we lost our archive between the knuckles of continents. Archives were too heavy to carry, so they were abandoned. Poverty is abandoned boxes. Immigration is muffled snapshots. So the archival space, when I discovered it, seemed beyond all my prior experiences, since it preserved life beyond last month's bills. This video poem may seem quiet, but it's a breach of my role of guard, a break-in and break-up of the hermetically sealed world of the beige on beige archive.