A Trialogue on Nervus Rerum

Abstract

Irmgard Emmelhainz: Nervus Rerum focuses upon the non-space that has become the urban condition for Palestinians: the non-space of the refugee camp. This might be understood in relation to my work on Jean Luc Godard and the Palestine Question as the conundrum of representing Palestine that is predicated upon territorial absence. Your new work moves away from current documentary representations of the Palestinian ordeal, which I think are ineffective, so much so that some of the representation and media coverage has been termed Pallywood. The term was coined after the controversy surrounding the video recording of the death of Mohammad al Durah, a twelve-year-old Gazan caught between crossfire and shot by Israeli Defense Forces in 2000, an event that some people thought was staged. Kodwo Eshun: One idea that informed Nervus Rerum was the proposition that the Steadicam moves through the space of the camp but does not render it legible. Simultaneously, people turn their backs on the camera; they turn away from the inspection of the camera in order to produce an opacity that seeks to prevent the viewer from producing knowledge from images. The film does not offer an ethnographic shortcut to empathy. Anjalika Sagar: The idea is to explore the condition of non-empathy. There is a wariness of the idea of the Other speaking for themselves either from a state of victimhood or a state of defiance.