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Torn Cosmopolitanism: Eli Hamo’s Archive of a Mizrahi Utopia
Abstract
The late Mizrahi documentarian filmmaker Eli Hamo completed very few works but nevertheless was a dynamic documentarian, collecting an enormous amount of footage that he never edited into films. This unfinished, fragmentary condition of Hamo’s archive is one aspect of his utopianism. He persistently kept producing the future possibility of something—a film, or a radically different political order in Israel/Palestine—that hasn’t materialized. This paper is based on ethnographic and archival methods, including over 25 interviews with Hamo’s friends, collaborators, and fellow activists, many hours of his footage, his notebooks, scripts for two films which were never produced, and other documents. The paper will focus on critical transformation of borders in Hamo’s work. Hamo lived between Jerusalem, Tucson, Tel Aviv, and New York. He grew up in housing blocks that were built in south Jerusalem as part of the Zionist practice of marking the national territory by populating Mizrahi immigrants at its borders. In his last decade, Hamo documented drummers that were gathering at another border, this time an invisible one, between what is now south Tel Aviv and the area in which the Palestinian quarter of Manshiyyah was located in the past. I will suggest that the aesthetic and political perspective through which Hamo explores this area makes the border present again. Nevertheless, this recreation of the border also transforms the territorial and violent border of Hamo’s childhood into a relational border between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians. The evocation of memory—of the dimension of time—disrupts the spatial-territorial distinction and allows Mizrahi Jewish and Palestinian displacements to coexist at the margins of the national order. The paper will further describe Hamo’s connection to the media technologies that his archive consists of. Hamo made his living from his skills in video and audio technologies, that, moreover, mediated his utopian counter-Zionist politics. Nevertheless, the economic aspects and progressive development of media technology put Hamo’s living in jeopardy. I will analyze these conflicted temporalities and potentials of media technology at the tension between progressive technological development and the mediation of a utopian non-linear perception of time. This non-linear temporality of Hamo’s work, I will suggest, makes possible the combination of postcolonial structural criticism and traditional Jewish tropes of exile. I will conclude by a political diagnosis of Hamo’s premature death: Hamo died as a utopian border subject under the ever deepening national and global dichotomies.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries