Christina Varvia presents A Day’s Worth of Pixels: ‘Rafah: Black Friday’ and related projects.

The Hasselblad Foundation, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden

This event is arranged in conjunction with the exhibition Kent Klich: Gaza Works

As contemporary warfare becomes increasingly urbanzed, the conception of modern cities, especially of the Middle East, becomes saturated with exported images of war. In recent years these conflicts are documented not only by professional journalists but also by civilians fleeing their own cities under attack. These people turn into activists as they recognize the power of the image and use it as a currency in real-time storytelling. The media that envelops cities such as Rafah in Gaza, becomes a site of conflict itself, where the historical outcome of events is argued over between citizen journalists, activists, press and government officials.

This presentation will introduce a series of works in this context and will focus on an architectural reading of one day of the war in Gaza 2014. In addition to testimonies, the historical footprint of the conflict of the 1st August in Rafah left behind a cloud of data; a disorderly collection of images, videos, tweets, and metadata, seemingly unrelated to one another. In collaboration with Amnesty International, Forensic Architecture undertook a close examination of this day when close to 150 people were killed. The resulting report, Rafah: Black Friday, illustrates the efforts to depart from a disparate cloud of images and to formulate an image complex: a set of spatial and temporal relationships between footage that can be used to unlock a sequence of events, through the means of architecture.

This event is free and open to all.