Parse Journal (Dec 2022)
LEAKING ZouZou Group’s Radical Practice of Un/Framing the Syrian Uprising and Civil War
Abstract
The challenges and constraints to visibility are what underwrite and impel the content and form of – door open –, a three-channel video installation by ZouZou Group. The collective is formed of two anonymous female artists, one living in Syria, the other in England, who exchanged photo and video material that they recorded between 2014 and 2019 in Damascus and countries that impacted the course of the Syrian uprising and civil war, such as England, Germany and Russia. But instead of picturing direct visual evidence of violence, – door open – exposes the conditions of its creation by manifesting the effects of warfare on the formal processes of its production. In doing so, ZouZou Group developed a visual vocabulary and aesthetic language to transcend the binary victim-perpetrator narrative and to convey forms of quotidian, structural, and networked violence. Considering their practice as a radicalised form of framing and leaking, I take this article as an occasion to reflect on responsive research methods that might disrupt and realign structures of visibility from within.
