Digital Archives: Memory Banks of Revolution
illustrations by Nima Rahimiha
Eight years after the 2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, youth-led movements continue giving birth to new forms of communication, data circulation and knowledge production. Today there are thousands (perhaps millions) of citizen journalists, photographers and local media activists who utilize Whatsapp, Youtube channels, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and other online spaces to broadcast, almost live, the ongoing processes of revolution and counter-revolution across the region. This has led to a substantial outflow of digital data, and as a result, unprecedented practices of open-sourced digital archiving are emerging. More and more volunteer-based digital archiving projects are taking on the monumental task of gathering, verifying, preserving and making accessible this vast supply of audiovisual material available on the internet. In this article, I will present some of these open-sourced public platforms and write about the vital role they are playing in the battle against the counter-revolutionary assault on memory, truth and evidence.
Having been born and raised in Tehran in the late 80’s, my memory and perception of the 1979 revolution has always been limited to what the Islamic Republic wanted me to know. The revolution that my parents’ generation had participated in has been, for the most part, a distant and even alien event in my imagination. One can say that my generation was raised in a controlled space of memory vacuum, a form of forced collective amnesia. Today I am aware that even this “forced distance from the truth” is a luxury in Iran unavailable to many. Specifically to those from communities who were the first and steady victims of the counter-revolution.
As a newly established counter-revolutionary state, the Islamic Republic (which considers itself the sole legitimate representative of the 79 revolution) mobilised the nation’s artistic, educational and media apparatus against our collective memory. The people were force-fed false narratives of the 79 revolution through school books, TV channels, films, cinemas, street murals. We were told highly selective and censored narratives that either did not include moments of mass atrocity and violence, or if they did, they were framed as “a natural consequence of the revolution”, a “national necessity.” In time, the intensity of the counter-revolutionary trauma, as well as the fear of oppression, led to silence and denial becoming the norm. Society slowly stopped talking about what had happened. Those who remembered, and dared to break the silence, either disappeared or were killed and imprisoned. The selected stories that the counter-revolutionary state told us were designed around fetishized and false binaries of “East vs West”, “Islam vs secularism”, “us vs them”, “tradition vs modernity”, the very binaries that the revolution had tried to break through. Indeed stereotypical and orientalist narratives of “a Middle Eastern revolution” seem to have worked as the best weapon against it.
It took me years of learning, unlearning, research and memory excavation to understand what had actually happened in Iran during those years. How do you search for something that has been systematically erased and kept away from you? Determined youth from my generation had to excavate this memory by putting together pieces of information from different sources. Secretly look for banned books and articles, find interviews with survivors of 1980’s massacres, sometimes western historians knew more about this history than we did. It was only in my late 20’s that I came to realize that the truth of the 79 revolution has in fact been buried under a mountain of manufactured lies and conspiracies. A mountain that is created and maintained not only by the Islamic Republic but also by Western imperialist media. It was then that I realized the importance of accessible, truthful and uncensored collective memory as a vital component of one’s journey towards self-realization, for the recognition of one’s agency to face and change present situations based on lessons gained from previous generations. This is why today I find the emerging open-sourced digital archives in the context of North African and Middle Eastern struggles so important, liberating and empowering. When I look at these archives I know how vital and necessary they will be for those who are born during post-2011 years. Thanks to the effort of archivers, the truth of these struggles is now being preserved and protected for future generations, and for accountability and justice for the victims and their families.
When the counter-revolution begins
Our region is indeed a laboratory of counter-revolution. We have counter-revolutions of all kinds. We have religious as well as secular counter-revolutions, imperialist and “anti-imperialist” counter-revolutions, we have counter-revolutions from above and from below, from outside as well as the inside. Yet they all share certain characteristics. When the counter-revolution begins, the state and other forces of status quo begin utilizing anything and everything against the truth of the revolution. The state begins representing everything and everyone as its opposite. They begin framing the people as the “traitors”, our brave youth as “terrorists”, our friends and families as “foreigners”, our writers and poets as “extremists”, our freedom fighters as “agents of western imperialism”. And at the same time, they portray the fascists mass murderers and military men as “heroes” and the “protectors of the nation”. This is how they blur the image, sow division among the rising population and deploy the colonial-style “divide and conquer” tactics against the people.
But we always knew that totalitarian and sectarian systems are capable of deploying the dirtiest and most dehumanizing tactics to discredit revolutionary uprisings and justify atrocity. We knew that they are capable of framing the people as “evil”, and themselves as the nation’s defenders. What we did not know, and what continues to catch us off guard, is how vast segments of the Western left would help them in this process. We did not know that those who we always considered our “natural allies” in the west would become our fiercest enemies, stabbing us in the back and the front, crushing us and our revolutions in the name of “anti-imperialism” or “anti-war”. We did not know that the very people who spent decades writing books about revolutions and radical change, attempt to crush our voice. We thought that when uprisings and revolts break out, our revolutionary allies in the west would play their role and come to our support, stand next to us and fight the global system of exploitation. After all, they introduced themselves to us as “radicals”, “anti-imperialists”, “revolutionaries”. But we took their words and slogans for granted. We were thoroughly deceived by their words, we were too naive. Thankfully, revolutions shatter these political masks, reveal true allies of the revolution and expose hidden enemies.
In many ways the ongoing revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are more than a challenge to local authoritarian police states, they also pose a fundamental challenge to eurocentric and orientalist discourses that define global politics. These revolutions have once again brought to surface the global hierarchies of knowledge production and are posing some very urgent questions: Who’s voice has credibility? Who has the right to witness and narrate? Who defines how a revolution should look like? Do non-western revolutionaries have the right to their own image? and their own voice? Mainstream Western left not only refused to offer any effective form of solidarity from their safe and protected spaces, but they have also failed at fulfilling their basic duty of international solidarity. They have in fact been active supporters of counter-revolutionary terror against revolting masses in places like Syria. The western so-called left has been extremely successful at silencing non-European revolutionary voices in intellectual spaces. This has given rise to a clear form of nationalist internationalism that represents itself as “anti-imperialist”, “socialist” or even “anarchist” yet it is almost identical to right-wing fascist ideologies of power and mass annihilation.
Reflecting on the fact that the Syrian war and revolution have been the most documented revolution and war in history, one assumes that old school war propaganda and disinformation would be less influential in defining the course of events in Syria. Yet Syrians have found themselves dealing with shocking levels of deliberately dehumanizing news coverage, denialism, defamation and disinformation in the mainstream, as well as “alternative”, western media.
But how can this be? Why is it that Western intellectuals, so-called “radicals” and “progressives” who always represent themselves as the “natural allies” of revolutionary change everywhere, became yet another enemy of the Syrian revolution? Why is it that the uninformed opinions and conspiracy theories of opinion leaders in the West like Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Roger Waters and Robert Fisk (a diverse collection of old white men) automatically carry more weight than the narratives and testimonies of those who have directly experienced the war and the revolution with their own bodies?
Open source archives are important because they are the memory of revolution and counter-revolution. They allow future generations to recollect fragments of resistance so they can stand up tall against regime propagandists and snooty Western intellectuals. These tenacious memories might just be what it takes to prevent the world from sinking into fatalistic notions of futility. Below I’m going to introduce three of these projects which deal with different aspects of the region’s ongoing struggle for collective freedom, dignity and justice.
858 Archive
858 is an interactive open-sourced archive created by the Cairo based anonymous activist group Mosiereen. The project title refers to the 858 hours of indexed and time-stamped video material which is made accessible (and editable!) through the platform. Upon entering the website, there is a feeling that one is virtually travelling back in time and space and re-entering the 2011 spaces of revolt in the streets and squares of Egypt. The long and unedited format of the videos allows the user to go beyond the surface and engage with the events with in-depth detail. You can follow protestor’s conversation on and off the frame, you can hear their dark jokes, their dilemmas, hopes and fears. In the archive’s statement the Mosiereen collective explain how they see this project as part of what they call “the digital memory of the moment”:
“In the first days of the uprising a Media Tent was established in Tahrir Square. Hundreds of videos were collected from dozens of people, men and women, young and old, who had filmed key events on their cameras and cell phones and wanted to contribute to the digital memory of the moment, in particular, to document police abuses and killing of protesters…. We weren’t neutral observers, but actors within a wider struggle. We participated and documented at the same time.”
Insisting that this archive is only one piece of a bigger story, they write:
“While the regime is using every resource to clamp down on public space and public memory the time has come to excavate and remember and re-present our histories. The uprisings that began in 2011 changed the world forever and their visual memory can serve purposes as yet unknown within struggles both local and international….858 is, of course, just one archive of the revolution. It is not, and can never be, the archive. It is one collection of memories, one set of tools we can all use to fight the narratives of the counter-revolution, to pry loose the state’s grip on history, to keep building new histories for the future.”
Syria Creative Memory:
The second project is The Creative Memory of The Syrian Revolution. This website aims to collect, map and archive all acts of creative resistance in Syria since 2011. With a particular emphasis on the relationship between collective memory and transformative justice, the platform has so far archived more than 10,000 drawings, videos, songs, graffiti, wall poems, protest banners and other forms of creative resistance. As they write in their statement:
”Although most of the Syrian revolution’s output is available on the internet soon after its production, this output is dense and brief, and quickly becomes difficult to find, hence the importance of developing this website to gather it all in one specific place...Work on the website aims to build an archive of national intangible heritage; to protect it is essential, as it belongs to the collective memory...It is our duty to protect this archive and to carry this memory in order to give back to the Syrian people its history and all its historical wealth, and to make it proud of this present history.”
The platform was envisioned and founded in 2013 by Sana Yazigi, a graphic designer who graduated from the Damascus University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. In the introduction text to an event about the project, Yazigi uses the following quote from Jacques Derrida in order to describe the nature of the project:
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”
One can see forms and styles of creative political expression unique to localities. Kafranbel, for example, developed a unique artistic style of banner-making which combined humour, sarcasm and cartoons as a commentary on some of the darkest aspects of global politics. All this is explorable through the archive. What also makes the archive a fascinating source is that it incorporates a variety of tools for rummaging through the creative output of revolutionaries. You can search for public art and murals through an interactive map. Alternatively, you can run through a timeline to browse caricatures, artworks and photography according to the events they refer to. What makes this effort even more heroic is that images are not only translated but also captioned and tagged to place them in context. This is not only an immensely valuable archive for journalists and researchers who want to understand the spirit of the Syrian revolution, but also for artists who want to study the visual imagery of this historic event.
The Syrian Archive
The Syrian Archive deals with a very different aspect of the counter-revolution in Syria. Established in 2014, the Syrian Archive.org is a Syrian-led open-source platform that collects, verifies, and preserves visual documentation of war crimes and human rights violations by all armed actors in Syria. The platform's goal is to create what they call “an evidence-based tool for reporting, advocacy and accountability.” As they write in their statement:
“visual documentation allows the Syrian Archive to tell untold stories through amplifying the voices of witnesses, victims and others who risked their lives to capture and document human rights violations in Syria. Not every incident in the Syrian conflict has been reported by journalists. The very challenging conditions have made it extremely difficult for local and especially international media to work in Syria, meaning the many incidents have been missed or under-reported.”
The platform carries independent investigations based on archived data and even develops new digital tools, to analyse and survey the vast amount of visual documentation available online. For example, they have developed what they call “an artificial intelligence feature” which scans and analyzes footage of different cluster bomb ammunitions used in Syria.
The Syrian Archive’s efforts are centred around the restoration of credibility to reports, testimonies and evidence provided by local activists and witnesses. They define this as "eyewitness media" and in their collaboration with WITNESS Media Lab, they developed a training package which would help local activists and witnesses to gather effective audiovisual documentation of human rights violations and war crimes.
Debunking the myth of “Facebook revolutions”
The wake of the 2011 uprisings witnessed the birth of a new western saviour discourse. Terms like "facebook revolutions" or "WhatsApp and Twitter revolutions" (or even “roundabout revolutions”) were being used by the mainstream media. These tropes effectively erase the collective agency of activists and attribute it to internet apps and other non-human actors.
Today with the rise of radically open and accessible archiving projects, such dehumanizing narratives are also becoming more and more difficult to sustain. Such projects remind us that data, technology and information alone will never lead to social change. It is popular agency, creativity and determination that gives meaning to modern digital technologies and transforms them from mere consumerist products into ad-hoc tools of revolt and resistance. Equally important is the labour that activists and archivists put into collection, translation and contextualisation of digital data coming from peripheral geographies of revolt, geographies that have historically been robbed of mechanisms of direct self-representation. It is through the effort of citizen journalists, archivists and documentarians that complex information and evidence is being captured and turned into multi-dimensional, intergenerational, accessible virtual spaces of memory preservation. Together these emerging open-sourced archives are putting up a battle of images and narratives against the global elite’s counter-revolutionary assault on revolutionary truth, evidence and memory.