found out later, while looking at aerial photographs of the area taken by English archeologists that these formations were part of relatively recently discovered disappearing archeological sites in Jordan. This discovery, along with Al-Ani’s interest in disembodied depictions of warfare through news media, especially after the Iraq war in 2003, led the artist to start working on a project she titled, “The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People”. The title comes from French philosopher Paul Virilio’s notion of the “trickery and magic of cinema”, referring to how, from certain perspectives, the body disappears into the landscape, which Al-Ani connects to the representation of war. She considered this idea in relation to the Middle East’s history, where people have disappeared in large numbers during political conflict, from the civil war in Lebanon to the Syrian uprising of the 1980s, the Armenian genocide, or Palestine, “a land without people for a people without land” (as it was described in early Zionist dictum), where entire villages were razed to the ground. Thinking about the idea of the desert, of distance, and of being able to show the micro as well as the macro level, Al-Ani started researching the archeological history of the region through photographs. She came across the work of a German archeologist Ernst Herzfeld, whose panoramic photographs were a source of inspiration. She says they look almost extraterrestrial; the desolation of the landscape reminded her of images taken on Mars.3 She was also interested in the reading of marks, and how some marks require a certain distance in order to be read. She looked at the Nazca lines in Peru, which are images depicting animals and symbols that are hundreds of feet wide. The lines in these ancient drawings are formed by removing the stones from the ground and exposing the sand of the desert landscape. Her research also involved looking at aerial photos of World War 1 trench systems on the Western Front, taken by a unit of the American Air Force as reconnaissance images in 1918. She noted that the distance inherent in these photographs of heavily shelled grounds makes a site of destruction into an aesthetic experience. Al-Ani also found out that when air forces became much bigger players in warfare during World War II, the pilots who flew from Britain to mainland Europe reported seeing archeological sites that nobody had seen before. After the War was over, a number of these pilots were used by archeologists to locate these sites. Al-Ani was interested in the idea that something revelatory, or maybe even redemptive could come out of conflict. After what the artist calls “a painful process of fundraising”, Al-Ani was able to go to the south of Jordan, the Wadi Rum area to film. She chose a location with a small airport where there was a flying school and filmed for ten days. She shot with super-16mm film, which she had started using with Muse, as well as taking photographs. She and her crew attached a camera to a strut on the wing of a small plane; they had a maximum of seven-to-eight minutes per film before they had to land and change the film. Filming and taking still images from a few hundred feet high, Al-Ani recorded archeological as well as contemporary marks. They came across crop circles—a form of industrial farming imported from the USA— as well as intensively farmed ancient village settlements. The dry and sparsely populated land in South Jordan allowed for the preservation of marks from even thousands of years ago. Al-Ani recorded signs of prehistoric settlements, Roman forts, Ottoman trenches from World War I, as well as the contemporary marks of mining, sheep farms, an unauthorised American military zone used for landing and fuel change, the Hijaz railway line (now used to transport phosphate), foundations for a housing estate, or signs of infrastructure. Pages 108-09: Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II (video still, detail), 2011 Above and below: Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II (video stills), 2011 Photos courtesy the artist and Rose Issa Projects, London
The footage resulted in two works. Shadow Sites I (2010) is made exclusively from footage on 16mm film. Its focus on extreme vertical perspective does not allow for seeing anything expansive in the landscape. Compared to Shadow Sites II (2011), Shadow Sites I is gentler; its soundtrack is composed of ambient sounds recorded in the landscape and mechanical sounds at the airport. Shadow Sites II is made of aerial photographs. These high-resolution digital stills are more violent, the language of photography allows for an exact replication of the sense of “locking onto target”. The zooming effect of the camera permits the isolation of certain forms or locations in the landscape. The soundtrack of this piece is also more manipulative, more ominous. Similar to Shadow Sites I, Al-Ani uses ambient sounds collected during the trip to Jordan, including sounds of animals and birds, but in Shadow Sites II, she combines these sounds with those appropriated from military recordings; they are indecipherable but certainly reference the idea of modern warfare. Another work, shot in the same location, and part of the larger body of work The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People (2010) is a film called Excavators, in which ants are moving swiftly, building a nest. Shown on a very small monitor in contrast to Shadow Sites, it serves as a reminder of the micro level in tandem with the macro level. In Shadow Sites I and II, Jananne Al-Ani’s camera replicates the point of view of fighter planes, and as in the news broadcasts, there are no people in these works. The landscape is abstracted and buildings are flattened into drawings. However, unlike mediated representations of war, Al-Ani’s work hints at human presence; she depicts life through marks on the ground, made by those who are no longer there. She employs the representational language that she is critical of, but does it in such a way that the idea of the unpopulated desert land is completely subverted. Here, the desert bears the traces of human life—not only of the present time, but also of a distant past. The “drawings” on the ground testify to the presence of “disappeared people” from thousands of years or just a few days ago. This abstracted survey of land becomes a plate for associations, heavily implicated by the history of the region. The title of the work Shadow Sites is a term used in archeology; shadow sites are sites that only appear very early in the morning or late in the evening, because the degree of the sun is only then able to cast a shadow long enough to make them visible to the eye from a plane. During a talk at SALT in Istanbul, Jananne Al-Ani told a striking story that she came across during her research for this project. She found an article on a forensic anthropologist who was commissioned to investigate how people were killed in Kosova during the war. The anthropologist and her team started looking for a precise species of blue butterflies in the area. These butterflies were attracted to a particular wildflower, and this flower only grew in areas where the soil was recently disrupted. The team would follow the butterflies, find the flowers that grow on rich soil, and start digging and would find mass graves. The butterflies and the flowers, the small signs on the surface of these beautiful landscapes, which had to be read in the right way, were in fact signs of mass destruction. The beauty of the form pulled you in, but you knew that it was the indicator of past violence. Shadow Sites I-II are very similar to these blue butterflies in the way they operate; hinting at stories of disappearance, these beautifully composed videos are as alluring as they are menacing. Notes 1 Jananne Al-Ani, A Loving Man (1996-99), 5 channel video installation, 15 minutes 2
From Jananne Al-Ani’s artist talk at SALT, Istanbul, February 2012
3
ibid.