In recent months, Palestinian practitioner Dana Dawud produced a work that arguably fits into the broader spectrum of (post-)corecore or corecore-adjacent works, and so it was picked up as a part of 0nty & OMC’s curation of Becoming’s latest book, Dialogues on CoreCore and the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, yet the film stood out for reasons that are obvious yet nonetheless striking. To borrow the phrase from Louis Morelle, we see here images from Palestine, mostly Gaza, “concatenated against one another”, arranged not by chronology, neither as a narrative sequence. It is an assembly of various scenes that carry a certain ambiguity or ambivalence that elevates the film above rhetoric — at its heart, the film works to humanise people, to present an image of the communities living in Gaza that, without undermining the genocide in any way, works against the images that we see on our smartphones, of dehumanized people.
The film presents a concentration of troubling contradictions without leaning heavily into the violence in such a way that reduces Palestinians to victims — we see break dancing, parkour, rapping, kite-flying, all set to a back drop of shellings, detonations and ruins. Without wandering into a fetishisation of resistance, the film does pay homage to resilience against dehumanisation, a refusal to be reduced to what we see in videos and images. The image of Palestine we see here is as joyous as it is abysmal, a monstrous, calamitous injustice from all directions, against people, who even in the face of elimination, sing, dance, and shout.
- akira palais, 11th May 2024
Read Dana Dawud’s commentary