Agnotological Investigation & Cartography of Darkness from the Lands of Liberation

During a more-than-critical age marked by genocidal automatism, institutionally and algorithmically produced ignorance, and a global necropolitics of indifference, we present a colloquium with three media practitioners and theorists from Palestine and Lebanon: Dr. Sherena Rakez, Dr. Nisrine Chaer and Noor Sleiman. Organized and facilitated by Eazuka Khazrik, she will introduce the colloquium through examining the operations of تجهيل tajhīl (the deliberate production of ignorance), تجاهل tajāhul (wilful disregard, feigned ignorance, or strategic avoidance), and تعتيم taʿtīm (systemic obscuration or suppression) as interlocking regimes of colonial erasure, separation and disempowerment. Eazuka will present from the Cartography of Darkness platform techno-political analyses of emerging “bombware” technologies, kleptocratic AI governance schemes and empowering strategies by the people of the land that render the systems of trained colonial expectations defunct, in order to arrive to how these situated practices teach us how liberating land, media and testimony is a prerequisite for liberating and demilitarizing the production of knowledge and our global economy.

Sherena Razek studies seed archiving, soil smuggling, hunger strikes, prison breaks, subterranean imaginaries, and sinkhole eruptions as life sustaining practices of Indigenous Palestinian refusal to capitulate to empire. Through counter mapping archival photographs, filmic interventions, close readings of personal encounters and disruptive gestures, she rearticulates these practices as different expressions of human and more-than-human elemental intifada, or uprising that chart pathways towards unmaking the Anthropocene.

Nisrine Chaer will trace the global supply chain of genocide as experienced in Lebanon by discussing three case-studies: The Pager Massacre of 2024, the discourse and political economy of the independent media sector, and burgeoning AI governance schemes. Looking at this triad side by side exposes the global economy, and hence internationalist responsibility, that produces these emerging forms of Zionist technocolonialism.

Drawing on her situated experience and practice, Lebanese journalist and writer Noor Sleiman examines the ethical responsibilities of journalism and the politics of witnessing and documentation amidst an ongoing genocidal assault. She considers how journalistic and contra-visual practices (that refuse image-making) can resist domineering regimes of erasure, disinformation and dispossession while providing counter-narratives in manners that honour the dignity of the people of the land and oppose the instrumentalization of suffering.

Workshop

Thursday, 8 October, 09:30–12:30 & 14:00–17:00

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On day two, we’ll dive deeper in a workshop setting with Eazuka Khazrik, drawing on the field of agnotology (the study of the production of ignorance and uncertainty) and the philosophies of its much older Arabic counterparts تجهيل (manufactured ignorance) and تجاهل (the bedrock of avoidance politics) to arrive to investigative techniques and strategies of documentation that can resist the necropolitical obscurations our time. Probing a multiplicity of techniques from cognitive mapping to geolocated research and multi-modal respositories, we will explore together setting up and maintaining platforms for collective investigation and movement building.