"The archive is vast and its teaching endless" between the Egyptian revolution and the perforrmativity of law 3600-KM-AVTE-OG

In Egypt, in the aftermath of the revolution, the political event with its visual documentation
gets lost in the midst of an overwhelming archive. Evidentiary by default, ‘protester made in
the moment’ video testimonies, that were once produced out of a political urgency, have
now become historical. In the attempt to capture and better understand these moments, I
search the footage for blurs, cut-outs, fragments that seem unrepresentative enough or
perhaps useless to the event at the time of the making. What did we learn from the political
event? What was performed and captured? How was it turned into a spectacle? How do we
speak the law? The enactment of the legal is a social construct brought about before law
and after its fictions. As socialised ghosts, our collective minds register each others codes,
through methodical patterns of self elevating humans. And through these, on-repeat
renditions of memorised codes, we collectively share, a law-like behaviour.
In the first section of the workshop I would like to look at how documentations were made. How, from the position of an onlooker/participant, the resulting stories dictate form in which they are made.
In the second section I will read and share images from a collective research on the theatricality of law. I would like to think with you of examples of other participatory works where the outcome (evidence) shapes new trajectories for storytelling, where the line between fiction and fact is blurred and the role of the filmmaker is not clear.