The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is not what the crowd of artists and researchers meeting at the Speak, Memory conference in Cairo in late October promised us. They promised more.
They came from Latin and North America, from Europe and Asia and various parts of the Middle East, with a main grievance to air: Academia, the market, and the government - our conventional arbiters of the truth - have provided a narrow vision of the world. And we need plurality.
In four or five continents, artists and researchers with an activist streak have found a mission. They have taken to the streets and private homes, sifting through mouldy boxes and rummaging in dusty attics, looking for the things the world has forgotten all about.
The material they find gets sorted out, scanned and catalogued before being offered back to us, in books and exhibitions, online archives and offline events, in a fresh view. Soon, if everything goes to plan, we'll have a brand-new narrative of history, a revisited interpretation of the truth.
So what fragments of truth have they found?
One of the pioneers of this new trend is the award-winning American photographer Susan Meiselas. She went to two troublespots, Nicaragua in 1978 and Iraqi Kurdistan in 1998, to examine the aftermath of insurgency. In both cases, families had been torn apart, lives destroyed, and memories shredded. She painstakingly collected photographs and reconstructed memories, collating them into a near-cohesive narrative, and bringing them to public attention through exhibitions and publications.
Another self-made curator, Kristine Khouri, was dissatisfied with the Arab art history she had studied at the University of Chicago. So in 2008, Khouri teamed up with another artist, Rasha Salti, to collect art memories from the region.
History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts Study Group, the project they started, is now going from country to country in the Middle East, scanning private collections, conducting video interviews, and reconstructing lost memory. It has funding for two years, but may last longer.
The Arab Image Foundation, FAI, is 10 years older. Founded by three artists in Beirut in 1998, the FAI has collected 300,000 photos, some from as early as the mid-19th century. Currently, its digital archive includes photos from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, and Iran. Photos of the Arab diaspora in Mexico, Argentina, and Senegal have also been collected.
So far, the FAI has held 14 exhibitions, published seven books, and set up a website on which the group proudly announces that its work "differs from that of more conventional historians, conservators, or curators in that it is artist-driven".
The FAI has partially sponsored the work of Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, a Paris-educated photographer-researcher who worked in Burj Al Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, for nearly five years. While living in the camp, Sabbagh was the guest of a Palestinian family, sharing their small space and intimacies, and befriending their friends. The trust she gained helped her collect a large number of photos and stories, the fragments of a neglected truth that the outside world may or may not be interested in.
It gets confusing sometimes, even for the providers of hidden knowledge. A man once came to Sabbagh with a photograph of a beautiful Palestinian woman with long hair falling down to her shoulders. It was an old picture of his wife, who had subsequently been disfigured, her face burnt by Israeli incendiary bombs in 1982. He wanted the photo to come out, for the world to see it. Only one little thing: he didn't want the picture to be published in Lebanon. Men were not supposed to see his wife without a head cover, a taboo in the conservative camp. But beyond the borders of the country, far out in the world, the taboo was waived.
Personal is tricky. This much the artists and researchers gathered for the "Speak, Memory" conference in Cairo admitted. But while some wanted everything published, intimate or otherwise, others argued that caution was needed, that even in this alternative world of unbridled truth, where no holds were barred, intimacy deserved a modicum of respect.
Hosna, a Palestinian grandmother who died two years ago at 75, had taken Sabbagh into her confidence. Every night, the two would sit together, cross-legged on a threadbare carpet, looking at photos. Hosna would take the photos one by one from an old leather bag and lay them on the carpet, while telling stories of family and friends, stories that she held on to for dear life. Now Sabbagh is left with digital copies of the pictures but is not sure what to do with them.
Hosna would have wanted the whole world to see the photographs and hear the stories, but other people in the camp, some of whom are still alive and appear in the photos, have reservations. Before releasing the pictures to the public, Sabbagh will need to talk the matter through with camp inhabitants.
There is also the small matter of copyright. Unless you have an army of lawyers, how can you secure the copyright to thousands of personal photos and documents? The simple solution is to post everything on the internet and wait for people to object, then comply with their request, or not.
This was more or less what Sean Dockray, a Los Angeles-based artist, did. On the online library he started in 2007, he posted PDF (portable document format) files of books that his readers wished to contribute to the site. He says that he liked the PDFs because they're more "real", complete with margin notes, underlined words and even coffee stains.
When anybody objected, Dockray would offer to remove the item from the site. Over time, however, he discovered something interesting. Some writers were not really that interested in copyright. What mattered for them most was for their work to be accessible. Dockray tells the story of an author who kept calling to protest that his work had been posted on the site illegally. Dockray said he would remove it. Then the same author called back. He had thought about it and decided that it was best to leave his work online.
However, when a publisher eventually threatened to sue, Dockray took down the website.
The new breed of researchers claims to be independent. But how independent are they really? Their work is supposed to fill in the gaps that the establishment has supposedly neglected. But almost every one of these new research and archiving outfits accepts, indeed solicits, funding from official institutions. They try to keep their work cheap, they hold artist auctions to support their work, and they donate some of their own time. But in the end, collecting and archiving cost money.
The Ford Foundation is a big benefactor of independent art archiving, so is the Dutch Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia of Spain.
Currently, the Museo of Reina Sofia is backing one of the most radical outfits of art archivists in Latin America, the curiously labelled Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network). In 2007, the Conceptualismos began defending local art collections against international collectors trying to remove them from the continent. To protect Latin heritage against what was perceived as the ravages of a predatory market, the Conceptualismos sought help from abroad. And they got it, from the once-colonialist Spaniards.
For all its badmouthing of the establishment, this new genre of truth gatherer is happy to get money from the establishment. But they still vow that so long as their intentions are pure and their agenda "independent", things will work out.
Now to the core question. What to do with these rising mountains of alternative truth? Once the messy information, the unwanted truth, the scrambled reality has been sorted out, what are we going to do with with it? Wouldn't it have been better to leave the papers in the attic, where they once belonged? Wouldn't it have been wiser to let some memories die, just as people do?
Negar Azizmi, a New York-based author, says that memories can mutate. Once they are held in an archive or processed in a research project, they become something else, something different from the elusive truth we're constantly chasing. Are the gatherers of the truth looking for the right stuff? Are they looking in the right places?
For now, the jury is out. For now, the urge to compile subsumes the power to pause. We're too busy looking around to look back. Once you start, there is no knowing what comes next. It might be a set of glass negatives, a few shattered. It might be a truckload of documents, dusty and torn.
Or it might just be a note written in fountain pen on yellowing stationery from a city that has gone missing.
Celine Condorelli, who runs an artist-driven exhibition space in Birmingham, England, came upon such a note, written by a woman who grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. The woman wrote it after her friends left in the exodus of foreigners that took place the 1960s. "Il n'ya plus rien" - nothing is left in Alexandria, she says.
But something was left. A lot of things were left. A veritable jigsaw puzzle, broken, tantalising, and waiting.