Rematerialisation

Abstract

Abstract The essay takes up Eve Kososky Sedgwick’s influential call for a reparative reading or practice, understood primarily as a performative and literary reading practice, in an attempt to inform what I call a reparative critical image practice. Montaging my own experiences learning from filmmaker Harun Farocki during the Labour in a Single Shot workshop (Cairo 2012) together with reflections from my work with the video-installation Leap into Colour (Cairo, Beirut, Copenhagen 2012-2015), the essay speculates how the reparative critical image undergoes a process of rematerialisation. The essay explores how the image migrates between different contexts, compressions, codecs and formats, and how this route, or line of flight, is enfolded into the image’s texture. I argue that montaging these layers of intensities can create a collaborative, historically dense, fabulous image, held together by affect.