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Unlearning Imperial Plunder I
Un-Documented is a film essay on the strong connection between the plundered objects in European museums and the calls of asylum seekers trying to enter the countries of their former European colonizers. The film treats these two subjects as ones of twinned migrations. The rights of the “undocumented” are inscribed in the plundered objects themselves: colonizers stole not just statues, but rights inscribed in objects. Yet, the statues still live—and can be reclaimed with the rights inscribed in them renewed.
Unlearning Imperial Plunder II
The world like a jewel in the hand travels over open books, looted objects, and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Instead of accepting the verdict and treating these documents as sealed or objects as pieces of art and relics of “history,” the film presents them as invitations to resistance, reinterpretation, and reclamation of a world deemed “lost.” Narrated in the first person, the film refuses to succumb to imperial histories while focusing on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is the author of The Jewelers of the Ummah – Algerian Letters (Verso 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019); she teaches at Brown University political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture to study onto-epistemological violence in institutions and technologies like museums and archives. She is also an independent curator and a film essayist.
Unlearning Imperial Plunder I
Un-Documented is a film essay on the strong connection between the plundered objects in European museums and the calls of asylum seekers trying to enter the countries of their former European colonizers. The film treats these two subjects as ones of twinned migrations. The rights of the “undocumented” are inscribed in the plundered objects themselves: colonizers stole not just statues, but rights inscribed in objects. Yet, the statues still live—and can be reclaimed with the rights inscribed in them renewed.
Unlearning Imperial Plunder II
The world like a jewel in the hand travels over open books, looted objects, and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Instead of accepting the verdict and treating these documents as sealed or objects as pieces of art and relics of “history,” the film presents them as invitations to resistance, reinterpretation, and reclamation of a world deemed “lost.” Narrated in the first person, the film refuses to succumb to imperial histories while focusing on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa.