Your work and research revolve around the technologies and techniques of violence suffered by Palestinians within the colonial context imposed by Israel. How did Control Anatomy come about?
Control Anatomy is an extension of a long history of observing and directly experiencing daily violence in Gaza, especially under the siege and constant aerial surveillance. Simple yet fundamental questions began to form in my mind years ago: Who is watching? Who is being watched? Over time, these questions evolved into an attempt to understand the technological structure of domination and its impact on the body, space, and memory.
The film emerged from a broader artistic research project titled Violence 24/7, in which I traced how our relationship as subjects with the occupation system has changed over time. This journey led me to envision three stages or “generations” of violence:
The first generation is represented by the direct relationship between the military governor and the camp residents; the second generation is represented by the targeting of bodies through the scope of a rifle; and the third generation, which took shape after the withdrawal from Gaza, is represented by the continuous and invisible control through the lens of a drone equipped with a never-sleeping thermal camera. These generations also address the absence of archives documenting daily Palestinian life and tragedies, opening the way for questions about how disfigurement is shaped as a prolonged process used as a tool of violence. Control Anatomy is one of the outputs of this project, and I invested significant research and visual energy into it, utilizing most of the research findings I developed while working on Violence 24/7.
How do you approach the image as a technology of violence? Where do the images in your film come from? How do you select and work with them?
I don’t treat the image as an innocent representation or a mere tool for documenting an event, but rather as one of the pillars of the system of producing violence. The image can be an extension of the rifle or the drone, and is often saturated with the gaze of power and produced from within its structure.
The images I use in the film come from multiple sources. Some were collected from the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers, who posted photos of their missions inside the Gaza Strip before the 2005 withdrawal, as memories and recollections of past events. I explored and re-presented these images from my own perspective, as someone who lived through them from the other side. There are also photos I obtained from the Israeli military archives, usually published to document military operations in Gaza, or as propaganda to promote weapons field-tested in what is treated as a living testing ground: the Gaza Strip.
The selection of the images was not based on their technical quality or clarity, but rather on their ability to expose the violent structure that produced them. In my opinion, low-quality images best represent the reality of Palestinian rights, as the fragility of the image matches the fragility of these rights under a system of ongoing genocide.
You use these images to create visual montages. According to what principles? How did you reflect on the film’s movement towards “operative images” of destruction?
I don’t use montage solely as a technical tool; I treat it as a means of understanding how violence is constructed and repeated within the image. I arrange the images based on their collisions, on what they say when placed next to another, rather than in chronological order. I always look for moments when the image’s meaning is broken, when its fragility or contradiction is revealed.
In Anatomy of Control, images don’t merely document an event; they reveal how the war machine produces images not for the purpose of documentation, but for the purpose of execution. What we call the “operational image” is the kind of image that isn’t made to be seen, but rather as an instrument within a military operation: it decides who is targeted and when.
In the film, I tried to show these images as they are, without trying to beautify them, but rather to recontextualize them in a way that reconsiders their original function.
Why did you choose to write in the first person singular? How did you go about writing this text?
I chose to write in the first person because my experience and voice are the thread that connects the three generations of violence the film addresses. The first generation presented in the film is based on interviews I conducted with people who lived through those events, while the second and third generations contain events to which I was a direct witness.
This text began as a collection of notes and excerpts I wrote during the research period. I didn’t usually revisit them, but when I reached a point where I felt the research was stalled and not progressing, I decided to review what I had written over the months. I discovered that these notes had an internal sequence, not necessarily chronological, but one built on rhythm, repetition, and emotion.
I built on these excerpts and developed them linguistically until they became the text for the film. I then began audio-recording it several times, rewriting and editing it repeatedly, until I felt it was ready to appear in the film.
You open the film with a shift between the mythological figure of the griffin, present in many cultures, and a military-industrial project called griffin. Can you go back over this shift, and more specifically over this particular project? Did it exist, or is it an iconic bias?
After every aggression, Palestinians have traditionally called themselves “the phoenix,” the bird that rises from the ashes, a metaphor for renewal and resilience after annihilation.
In this film, I used the name “griffin” as a counterpoint to this image: a symbol of violent continuity, of the eye that never sleeps, and of a system that does not rise from the ashes but rather continues to produce them.
The Israeli military also frequently uses mythological and demigod names to name systems of violence and espionage, such as Hermes, the Greek god of protection and transportation, who became the name of a system of surveillance and persecution.
This manipulation of names is not random; rather, it is an extension of a colonial policy that views the control of symbols and language as part of the control of reality. Through this combination, I wanted to raise questions about how violence is normalized and cloaked in civilizational and cultural narratives.
You interweave several types of narrative (a personal and subjective narrative, a memorial one, an instructive historical one…) that distribute factual data and also figures (the colony, the military governor…), cultivating a certain imprecision more akin to narrative cinema. Why have you chosen to detach yourself from the documentary? What is at stake in this blurring between documentary and fiction?
Traditional documentary is often required to be accurate, documented, and clear in identifying its sources and locations. However, in the Palestinian context, especially in Gaza, archives are not easily trusted, as they are either lost, confiscated, or distorted. Therefore, my goal was not to present a ready-made “truth” or a complete historical narrative.
I use elements of personal narrative, memory, and history, deliberately interweaving them, because this interweaving closely resembles the way our experience of violence is not linear or orderly, but rather confused, intertwined, and emotional. The reality of violence cannot be understood solely through narrative discourse; it must also be experienced through imagination and through the deliberate breaking of documentary logic.
This interweaving is not an escape from the document, but rather an attempt to question it. What does it mean to create an archive of violence after every war? Who has the right to narrate the events? And what does the story look like when the narrator is themselves inside the event?
Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War comes to mind, right down to the tone of the voice over. Is it a reference for your work?
I watched Images of the World and The Inscription of War, as well as other works that deeply engage with the relationship between image and sound. Farocki’s films, albeit subconsciously, may have taught me how sound should work alongside image, and how an image can be narrated without being interpreted.
But this alone is not enough to make a film. There is something that cannot be learned from any cinematic reference: the specificity of experience, its uniqueness, and the sensitivity that comes only from living within the event.
My voice in the film is also an extension of my reality, of my body, which experienced the image not as a visual substance but as an existential state. Therefore, it cannot be said that any reference can contain or reduce this experience. Farocki may have helped me listen to the image, but the pain I carry cannot be borrowed.
Interview by Claire Lasolle
