Shira Wachsmann
Landscape, War Trauma, Explosion: Re-membering The Moment Before

This practice-led PhD focuses on the role of war trauma. It argues that trauma takes shapes and forms, manifesting itself as a landscape which is both dynamic and emergent. War trauma can be seen, felt and expressed as a particular set of scars shaped by memory, fear, identity and politics (Herman: 2015). A re-positioning of these scars through a practice of corresponding moving-image not only reveals how their intensity operates in discourse but also sheds light on the mechanisms of power that help shape knowledge, identity and meaning (Yusoff: 2018, Foucault: 1989 [1972]).

The practice is composed of three moving-image-correspondences each with its own protagonist: the cactus (sabra), the human, and the tank; all of which are haunted by the explosion in some way or another. The research shows how the effect of trauma requires a different approach to linear time: of moving through different times, territories, and traumas that materialise in the moment of correspondence; whereby the past is projected into the future and comes back to create the present. This temporal redistribution establishes the role of correspondence as linkage, a feedback loop which perpetuates the feeling of fear of the moment before (the explosion). This moment before is understood as a collective trauma, responsible for the interwoven socio-political structures that allow for different shapes of trauma to emerge and circulate. Thus, the creation of repetition and patterning forms the ways in which a site/reality is both established and conceived (Lyotard: 1971, Sharpe: 2016, Golding: 2020).

The notion of correspondence is developed both as material method and theory in its broader sense: not only in words, but as video collages. These collages embody the collective materialisation of seemingly disparate elements: processes of rubbing matter, images, rhythm, colours, sounds and theory against each other; trying to understand their ability to create emergence, to re-member, re-materialise, re-reproduce and circulate (Macharia: 2019). This research therefore allows for a plurality of narratives to exist at any given moment – an affectual zone where memory, silence and trauma are embodied, preserved and circulated as landscape. The battle is always over the narrative that constantly reshapes the landscape and its history. The sabra (cactus), used to demarcate the borders of Palestinian villages, is transformed into a living testament of lives lived there before 1948. The war of 1948 and its aftermath, marked a dramatic change in the social and cultural role of the cacti, appropriated by Israel as a symbol of its people, and ultimately leading to the popularisation of the term “sabra” as referring to an Israeli-born Jew (Almog: 2004, Apel: 2012). In 2005, the term morphed once again, referring also to a tank, and continuing its transformation from border marker/symbol of defence towards attacker and occupier (Kimmerling: 1993). This thesis therefore thinks of the sabra as an event that unfolds in multiple directions, taking on different shapes, narratives, histories and time periods. Importantly, the circulation that emerges as landscape (the landscape's ability to shape shift) also allows for undecidability as a crucial part of the equation of the moment before, through which curiosity, hope and change could also emerge.

Key words: war trauma, correspondence, landscape, sabra/cactus, Israel-Palestine-Germany, circulation (as time, memory, as network), shape, encounter, sense, matter