Constellating Eastern Europe and the Middle East

I look for seemingly impossible parallels between Eastern Europe and the Middle East, once knotted together by Soviet internationalist solidarity campaigns. During the Cold War, these campaigns seemed to be little more than performative gestures. But, upon closer inspection and with the benefit of hindsight, their complexities come into sharp relief. Where did this history go? With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, histories bonded to it dissolved too. This bond is not univocal and, when speaking from the former Eastern Bloc, is highly contested too. But how could this bond be restored in a way that can hold both the memory of collective trauma and the restoration of interconnected pasts? Might they be reconnected in ways that can hold multiple truths together?

Shifting between the geographies of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, I have witnessed the remnants of shared histories seeping into people’s memories and their environments—from Lithuania to Lebanon, Palestine to Poland—but never reaching official state historiographies. With only the echoes left, I work with them to salvage fragments of international solidarity and to reawaken the plurality of ties that date from the mid-to-late twentieth century onwards. I look at images from Eastern Europe and the Middle East that are open to speculative interpretation regarding these regions’ pasts, presents, and futures.

A specific set of images comes to mind. The first one is by Lithuanian artist Monika Janulevičiūtė. Published in her 2022 artist book BENCH, VOL. 1, it documents “a variety of small wooden benches, without removing them from their usual spots nor forcing them into strict typologies.” The images, in Janulevičiūtė’s words:

“capture life and the state of the house, the layers of refurbishments and updates, and the occasional cosmetic touches for their sale. In most cases, as you will see, it seems like life was removed quite recently, or not at all – the soup is still warm. Life is retained as it is and with benches in the margins.”^[1]

The book documents small wooden benches not in isolation but rather as inextricable from the environments in which they exist. This way of representing an object entwined with its environment is what I would like to refer to as an ‘extended being’—an accumulation of location-specific histories and events seeping into a landscape and inevitably extending to the objects existing in it. This allows us to see past events, influences, or people bleeding into the environments where they once existed. Such environments hold the multi-ethnic histories evident in the ‘unedited’ images of the Lithuanian countryside and the benches documented by Janulevičiūtė. By not subjecting the benches to strict typologies, her photographs offer a framework to view the historical plurality hidden beneath the layers of the landscape.

Extending this logic further are stills from Azza El-Hassan’s film Kings and Extras: Following a Palestinian Image (2004). The film depicts the environment as an archive that lends its past potentiality to the future. While the film sets out to find the “PLO film unit archive,” which went missing after the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, this effort proves futile. However, through attempts to locate the archive and the dead ends encountered in the process, El-Hassan creates new archives and, most importantly, reveals the old ones manifested elsewhere: in the greenery surrounding the Jordan River, the martyr’s grave in Lebanon, or the streets of the Jaramana refugee camp in Syria. The stills I have pulled from the film, depicting the Jordan River and the remains of the Allenby Bridge that Palestinian refugees crossed in 1967 following the Naksa, enable insights into the lost archive.

When I read the plurality of Janulevičiūtė bench images together with the stills from El-Hassan’s film, another meaning emerges. My reading is not for comparative study; I do not aim to flatten the many differences between them. My aim is rather like layering them on top of one another in the manner of double exposure; I intend to form a constellation between distant geographies whose multifaceted histories were (and still are) violently erased. When viewed as per a refusal of erasure, the past reemerges as still haunting the present through its extended being in the image. In turn, another not-yet-known or unpredictable future emerges. When these topographical images are brought together in this way, they index a historical juncture in which their proximity was closer than ever. They serve both to counteract the erasure of their intertwined histories and to offer a future-facing promise.

The ideas of international solidarity that emerged following the 1955 Bandung Conference and that were later echoed by the Soviet Union’s internationalist policy linked Eastern Europe to the Middle East despite their differences and inherent contradictions.^[2] Although the images I am discussing here were produced at different historical junctures, this post-1955 period is embedded within them. To catch a glimpse of this intertwined history, one has to encounter the opacity of the images, which requires further reading—a reading that defies immediate representation and delves into their different layers open to future-facing speculation. My topographical reading of the images aims to awaken the hope for interconnected futures.

Benches as keys to the past

Upon encountering each of Janulevičiūtė’s photographs (figure 1), the bench it documents seems to shapeshift—not so much the object itself as what the photograph evokes. At first glance, each photograph summons the feelings of a sickly-sweet summer day in the Lithuanian countryside—a pastoral image of a rural household evoking nostalgia for a past to be restored, a past that is slipping or the one that has already slipped away irreversibly.^[3] But what is the past, if not an ever-shifting shadow of the present? Through their opacities and imperfections, these images—images situated in the countryside rather than being representative of the countryside as idyllic linear illustrations—become tools to undo a restorative nostalgic approach to the past understood as a rigid phenomenon.

Familiarity with the history of a landscape is often required for being able to see the different layers involved in its current depiction. The Lithuanian countryside is not and has never been homogenous. Placed within the rural context, Janulevičiūtė’s images of benches offer clues for seeing beyond the fabricated facade of ethno-nationalist homogeneity. Before Lithuania was turned into a Soviet region, it was made part of a Russian empire and a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Its territory has therefore become a crossroad for multiple cultural and ethnic influences, which the current nation-state and its nationalist logic aim to erase. It is precisely this multiplicity that shapes Janulevičiūtė’s images. Through a seemingly random arrangement of objects and their environs, these images index interactions—with the land, its peoples, and its temporalities. A land of multiple tensions bleeds into the bench, organically merging it with its environment and turning it into an extended being.

It is only when the bench is viewed in its surrounding environment that it reveals its true time-travelling potential. Importantly, the benches portrayed in Janulevičiūtė’s images are of a special kind. Their main purpose is mostly utilitarian but they sometimes also take on a decorative role. Most often, they are made in the vicinity of where they are used; they emerge from an urgent need for an object to serve quotidian needs. The materials tend to come from the surrounding environment as well—the woods, the sticks, and found objects lying around the homestead. Since this environment itself consists of multiple historical layers, the bench becomes a key to unearthing site-specific histories.

Janulevičiūtė’s photographs evoke memories of togetherness—both in a physical and metaphorical sense. On a personal level, they are akin to a photo album of memories that may not necessarily be one’s own but seem so familiar as to feel like they are. This is what gives them their collective characteristic. Consider images featuring an enamelled bucket next to a bench (figure 2). Although they are black and white, I can see their colour and know exactly how the scene they feature feels. I even squinch from the visceral sensation of my fingers and nails brushing against the bucket which I used to fetch water from the well in my late grandfather’s summer house. Here the past feels sensorial. This haptic quality brings the potential of a ‘positive’ fiddling with a supposedly rigid past and opens up a possibility for disturbing not only what the ethno-nationalist capitalist state sees as its past but also the futures it shapes through this past. My memories and those of others coalesce here with the power to unsettle these state-authored pasts and futures. The layers that compose these images speak of the multiplicity of cultural, ethnic, and other histories that are made non-visible through present-day politics of historical erasure. As such, they are antidotes for the calculated future ideals of the post-socialist turned hyper-capitalist nation-state.

 

Pasts in Palestinian Flora

At 21 minutes and 10 seconds into Kings and Extras, a misleadingly serene scene appears on the screen. It features a calm greenery on the banks of a river that flows as if untouched by time. While this is not the only scene in the film that portrays proximity to nature (the Palestinian cause is attached to the land at its core), it is nevertheless striking because of the lack of subjects or objects in it. The image appears as one of untouched wilderness. Such images are particularly dangerous in the Palestinian context; they point to the infamous slogan “The land without a people, for a people without a land,” which has been prominent in Zionism since the late nineteenth century.

But soon, this scenery is juxtaposed with the following monologue by the filmmaker: “Hiba’s father stood here on the side of the River Jordan and filmed them [Palestinian refugees]. But since his shots are missing, all I can do is look at nature” (figure 3). These words not only superimpose the presence of Hani Jawherieh, Hiba’s father and a revolutionary Palestinian filmmaker, as well as that of Palestinian refugees, on a historical landscape but also point to the natural environment as an archive, bringing erstwhile existences to bear upon the elements that shape the landscape in the present. The extension of their being leaks into the landscape, shaping what we see in the stills. What at first appeared as ahistorical wilderness is reclaimed as part of Palestinian history. This immediate opacity of the image lends itself to a topographical reading of the past, which in turn interferes with the future forecast by the colonial ethno-nationalist Zionist state project.

 

Images containing historical references have both transparent and opaque aspects. Transparent ones are often geared towards documentation and associated with documenting a rigid past. In some cases, producing evidentiary images is important; their primary function is to pursue “justice-through-evidence in the realm of liberal democracy.”^[4] They require transparency to be legible as officially “archivable” images that serve “the general work of the state ”state”, which is that of constructing a singular version of history.^[5] Clarity and decipherability are required for their factuality claims: provision of one’s own homogeneous vision of the past rather than of speculative narratives. Yet, those images that are opaque resist representativity and open possibilities to look beyond what is visible, and to the layers underneath its primary representation.      The aforementioned scene from Kings and Extras is a premier example of opacity that opens itself to interpretative possibilities. To read an image, one must “look at nature”—as El-Hassan puts it in her film—an obligation that, in this case, is charged with both tragedy and hope for Palestine.

Peeling layers of nature can be manifold and allusive, but these qualities already point to an archiving practice of a different kind. When Azza El-Hassan archives the image of the environment as an extended being, she produces a counter-memory for the missing Palestinian Film Unit’s archive. In this case, the portrayed riverside, surrounded by greenery, becomes not simply an evidentiary case for historical atrocities—although it indexes a historical time inscribed in the natural landscape on screen—but also a way to travel in time, both backwards and forwards. Her depicting and narrating the landscape brings the past from its partial loss into the future. She disrupts the representation of wilderness as something homogeneous, untouched, and uninhabited, exposing how such narratives enable colonial futures to thrive.

Reading the Futures

So how can we use these flickers of the past to contemplate the future? And what kind of a future might emerge from them? Thanks to their opaque archival properties, the landscapes featured in BENCH, VOL. 1 and in Kings and Extras challenge the transparent image-making that serves the extractivist state. Counter-memory practices by those subjected to injustices open up the possibilities of plural pasts as well as plural futures. These practices call for an archive that “allows connections in a personal, affective, genealogical, and spiritual fashion.”^[6] They mobilize speculation through opacity rather than relying only on evidentiary norms.

Speculation points to multiple truths and therefore offers multiple paths to reach them. Future-telling could be one such path. I myself have used BENCH, VOL. 1 in this way during an evening gathering with friends. We used the bench images for foretelling the future—for oracularity and divination. For a future to emerge through them, the images had to be read topographically, going beyond their representational qualities. In this reading, it was the surroundings and not the benches themselves that took centre stage. The benches took a back seat, as it were, perhaps to mimic those people who used to rest on them quietly and at the threshold of visibility. There was something about the absence of the bench in this description that indicated its fusion with its environment. By disappearing into the environment, the benches offered a counterpoint to the ethno-nationalist state’s attempts at historiographical singularity.

There is, of course, an inevitable sense of loss and grief within this absence—more so in Kings and Extras than in BENCH, VOL. I. But this sense of loss and grief is not oriented simply towards longing for the past or the desire to restore. Instead, loss and grief here help trace the transformations of the environments depicted in the images and bring forth the past anew. The grief and loss imposed by erasure and violence become replaced by a desire to use disappearance for recovering hope. Since the past is lost, pasts can now be summoned for new futures. Although the images are documented either in the moment of transition—as they are about to disappear—or in the moment of their disappearance, it is precisely such absences that perpetually haunt the present and, in so doing, sustains hope.

For hope to emerge from loss, one must spend time and form relationships with the opacities and absences that are manifest in the images. When they are double-exposed on top of one another they reveal yet another set of connections binding them. In 1948, thus before the Six-Day War in 1967 when the Soviet Union supported the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli war, Stalin’s Soviet Union (which then brutally ruled over Lithuania, too) had facilitated the partition of Palestine by sending a large-scale military equipment and arms shipment there. This move, combined with Soviet Union’s support for partition, forever damaged Arab communist parties’ trust in and relationships with the USSR. The move therefore changed the course of solidarity between the USSR and the Arab states forever—a double loss for both of the geographies, forever marking them with the absences visible in their landscapes and extended beings. Reading the images against the backdrop of this historical moment and through the land-as-archive logic does not so much rewrite these events as it speculates on the ‘what if’. What if brutal Stalinist repressions had not occurred and Stalin had not supported the partition by supplying arms? Would another type of relationship have been possible between these regions? International solidarities and inter-contextual connections arise not in their exact past presence but rather in their ghosts haunting the present and being summoned for new futures.

The ghosts that emerge from the double-exposed images refuse to disappear completely, and therefore their absence is virtual, not absolute. It holds within itself the possibility of return. This return is not easily materializable, exactable or prescribable. It is precisely its hard-to-grasp absence that bears the promise of a different future, one which requires collective speculation. Derrida called it l’avenir, which he distinguished from the predictable future. For him, l’avenir “refers to someone who comes, whose arrival is unexpected”—“the real future. That which is totally unpredictable.”^[7]

Against the grain of a future deemed predictable or forecasted in a capitalist sense—rigid and calculated for expropriation—I lean into the absences evoked by the images’ opaque qualities. As I look at the images with the intent to see the different topographic layers of the past and describe the invisibilities in them, I learn how to foretell. It becomes clear that, given the current unsettling moment in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, this is an alternative route for tapping into the affirmative unpredictability of the times to come—not for predicting them but rather speculating together on them in a manner true to l’avenir.

[1] Monika Janulevičiūtė, BENCH, VOL. 1 (Berlin: TLTRPreß, 2022), p.3.

[2]  In 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR defined the new post-Stalinist era and initiated Soviet Union’s dedication to anticolonial struggles and the so-called ‘third world’.

[3]  These bench scenes are taken from real estate webpages for properties marked below 50,000 euros. Thus, following the logic of Euroremont (proprietorship-based Eurocentric renovation of housing in Eastern Europe), the physical environment documented in the images will most likely disappear upon purchase of property—a disappearance that adds a further layer to the various other disappearances and absences discussed in this essay.

[4] Samira Makki, “Even the Sea is Broken: Return and Loss in Razan AlSalah’s Video Works,” Film-Philosophy 28, no. 2 (2024): 248–268. This quote is from p.266.

[5] Ruoyu Li, “Archive as land: toward a land-based archival methodology with Lynette Hiʻilani Cruz and Emilia Kandagawa,” International Politics 61, no.2 (2024): 473–492. The direct quotes are from p.475.

[6] Ruoyu Li, “Archive as land,” 483.

[7] Kirby Dick and Amy Z. Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp.52-53.

Stills from the film Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004, Azza El-Hassan, 64 min).

Marija Nemčenko Aržanych is a Lithuanian researcher and multidisciplinary artist with a practice in archival material, film, installation, creative and critical writing. She is currently conducting her practice-based PhD research titled “Geocultural ties through land and landscape in Baltic and Levantine moving images” at the Vilnius Art Academy in Lithuania.

Marija Nemčenko Aržanych, “Constellating Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” JVC Magazine, 31 March 2025, https://journalofvisualculture.org/constellating-ea…-the-middle-east.