Jihan El-Tahri: renaissance woman

The works of producer, director, writer, visual artist and teacher Jihan El-Tahri explore her experiences of being both African and Arab. Currently general director of the Berlin-based documentary support institution DOX BOX, she is principally known for her documentaries, including Cuba: An African Odyssey (2007), House of Saud (2005) and The Tragedy of the Great Lakes (2000) – all of which deconstruct key moments and personalities critical to the construction of the complex identity of the modern African and Arab worlds.

‘People’s Stories – Past & Present: Bridging the Silenced and Liminal Spaces of African Imagery’ is El-Tahri’s latest endeavour. Below, she explains how this multi-disciplinary project linked to the campaign for restitution of expropriated artworks, which brings together the work of artists, filmmakers and archive researchers, continues her underlying excavation of the African past and its narratives.

Onyekachi Wambu: What inspired your participation in the ‘People’s Stories’ project?

Jihan El-Tahri: ‘People’s Stories’ is a two-year project exploring archive: how we use and access it; how we use these images of past eras in narratives; and the need to train local Africans on finding alternative archives, while also questioning who owns the archive. The whole problematic aspect of the archive is at the heart of the work I’ve been doing for the past 25 years. Over the past 10 or 15 years archives have become so trendy, and with that comes a real issue of how and why are we using them? So it was around these questions that I tried to put together a project that would address them.

The desire is also to connect the north and the south of the African continent, to get local researchers to begin shifting their mindset, sourcing images locally and battling to access our imagery trapped in colonial archives. With these elements comes the big question: is that our archive? Are these the fragments that we actually build our memory on? For me, archive isn’t just this nostalgic look into the past, it’s trying to piece together what happened, as a way to think of alternative futures. This distinction between official history and memory is a very important one in my books.

Of course, we all got very excited about restitution with the Sarr-Savoy report [commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron in 2017 to assess the French collections of African artworks originating from illicit or disputed acquisitions]. However, eventually, the idea of restitution itself became quite problematic. Firstly, what do we mean by restitution? Secondly, ‘restitution’ is being emptied of its content in the same way as the word ‘decolonisation’. I also think it’s that complexity that we tend to shy away from.

The recognition of what was actually filmed is already problematic: when we get to restitution, who decides? What is restituted? When you go to the colonial archives, half of the material you actually want is not digitised, so how do you find out what they have – and even when it is offered, who decides which of these tapes actually has content of interest for us? So, the layers, the responsibility of our own governments and ourselves, are multiple.

When I started my own practice with archive in the late 80s, they thought I was crazy and asked why I didn’t shoot my own material. In my opinion, archive felt a bit like archaeology: finding this one image I’d never seen before, or a new tape, was like resurrecting a whole moment of history… Until this one moment where I had some footage and I thought: “Actually, what is that?” Suddenly, it occurred to me that the context of the image was the real issue, rather than the image itself. Who filmed it? When and why was it filmed? Why was it kept? Then you realise that what is left behind is a determined narrative – that what remains is the only narrative that you can go with to the future. That’s where my film Cuba: An African Odyssey comes from, because I insisted that there is an alternative narrative, and to find it you have to leave the images and find the orality, the memory of the people who were actually around this image, but not in the image.

Growing up, what did you make of Egypt’s pharaonic monuments and the narratives explaining them?

I did not grow up in Egypt. My father was a diplomat so we went from country to country. We knew nothing about Egypt, but there was a narrative sold to us by our parents. It was around the time of the Gulf War [1990-91], when suddenly the Egyptian army was the second-largest army going in to destroy Iraq, that all of the narratives of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism that I had grown up with clashed. I think that’s when I really started questioning: what is Egypt, exactly? Is it the southern Nubians, who are mainly Black, or the elite that you [might] find in Paris or New York?

So I began to view the monuments as an archive. In Egypt [the monuments] are mainly considered for tourism: a money-making machine that uses our archive as a pretext. No one questions what is written on the wall. I thought: here is an element of diasporic desire – thinking, and the ability to remove oneself and look; that’s something I became more and more aware of. I’m always Egyptian outside of Egypt. When I arrive in Egypt, they’ll ask me where I’m from: “ You look different”; “You carry yourself differently.” I am somehow robbed of my Egyptianness, but eventually I made peace with that. I think the recognition that diasporic thinking is very important is that distance.

What about stories, films that you haven’t made or forms you haven’t deployed? Why is it you’ve never made drama films?

People think documentary is a stepping stone to the glamour of fiction. I think documentary, the real world, is so much more glamorous. I’ve written three books, [so] writing a script and dealing with actors is not the issue; it’s how do we deal with this real world that generates so much fiction? That’s why I went from observational to talking heads, because we need that space where people who are there tell us what they’ve been through.

I’ve been doing installations since 2010, but only in the past two or three years have people realised I do installations and sound work. None of these layers are contradictory. I use them to address different aspects of things I’m trying to wrap my head around. There’s a certain materiality that is important: texture, textile and objects are part of a narrative that doesn’t quite fit into film and sound, and the origins and progression of sound are different layers, so I use all these different aspects simultaneously.

These [are] things I’m trying to sort out in my own head. In many ways it’s a very individualistic endeavour. I make films because I need to understand. I need to place myself in something, because I don’t accept that the world is going to continue being like this.