Workshop | The Conflict in Montage

Alaa Mansour

Mar 15 – Mar 25, 2022

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays 4:30 PM-7:00 PM (Beirut time/GMT+2)

This workshop will be held online

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED

This workshop will examine theories and techniques of conflict in montage and its subversive potentialities. By conflict, we’re not only referring to the collision of image and narrative sequences, but also as a set of tools and interventions that produce transversal knowledges out of the self-contained meaning of an image.

In doing so, we will engage with visuality and technology by closely looking at different vision machines and their various fields of application and modes of production. More specifically, we will focus on different instances in which colonial-military powers and entertainment industries have cooperated to their mutual benefit, therefore producing hegemonic ways of seeing. We will also imagine how to put to use various tools of surveillance and control (archives, data, fiction) and think through strategies one can develop using montage in order to counter dominant visual regimes.

This workshop is intended for researchers, artists, and filmmakers interested in the history of aesthetics, film and vision, as well as in the intersection between visuality, technology, and militarism.

Alaa Mansour  is an artist, filmmaker, and archivist based between Marseille and Beirut. Her work focuses on the history of violence and the power of images in the age of necropolitics. Using a multidisciplinary approach she explores concepts of the sacred and the sublime and their potential of horror. She graduated from Université Paris 8 with a Masters in Arts & Creation – Filmmaking (2013) and was assistant to the filmmaker Jocelyne Saab for several years. Her debut documentary film Aïnata (2018), shot in the south of Lebanon, is a seminal work embodying her interest in archives. She is currently head of visual research for Bidayat, an intellectual and cultural quarterly magazine published in Beirut.