Frame of Accountability
Film/Installation Series Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
15min Episodes
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2021
15min Episodes
To be premiered by The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York in 2021
Surface noise of archival documentation used as evidence of enacted violence, 'Frame of Accountability', 2021.
‘Frame of Accountability’ tells the story of the little-known events that take place in the Allied invasion into Vichy French controlled Lebanon and Syria in 1941, as under the legal guise of ‘military necessity’ two foreign forces fight for control and access to natural
resources in the territory. The accidental discovery of Top Secret government documents in the personal archive of General Spears, the first British Minister of Lebanon and Syria, reveals the violent ambition behind the military campaign and the (neo)colonial mechanisms of governance put in place in the years following. The film foregrounds a contract of ‘risk’ created by these events as a colonial technology imposed in the racialised consequence of decontextualising resource commodities through capitalist financial systems and violent modes of conflict. Resource commodities are disconnected from bodies, land and context to enter financial markets that rationalise its capital value. International laws of war and aerial bombardment become the violent process and action undertaken by strong states to secure sovereignty, control and power over bodies, land and resource. Recontextualising risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate affect of this lived limit-condition. An extra-international legal hearing uses radical legal and creative methods to invert the coloniality of law’s authority, producing a legal precedent that brings accountability to normalised forms of international violence. This legal fiction is told as a speculative attempt at dismantling the continued capacity of international law as structural violence.
Frame of Accountability is part of supra-disciplinary and research-based multi-media project led by Helene Kazan, realised through film, installation, writing and public engagement. The project investigates ‘risk’ as an integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism, analysed at the intersection of international law and architecture. Framing feminist, intersectional critical legal and creative methods through poetic testimony, as a means of expressing and translating the violent and disproportionate human and nonhuman
effects of risk.
Episodes
(Un)Touching Ground
In Complex View of her Body
In Law’s Terms
Credits
Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
Human/Non-Human Archival Modelling by Anabel Garcia-Kurland
Sound Design by Mhamad Safa
Camera and cinematography by Jad Youssf
With the support and special thanks to The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York.
resources in the territory. The accidental discovery of Top Secret government documents in the personal archive of General Spears, the first British Minister of Lebanon and Syria, reveals the violent ambition behind the military campaign and the (neo)colonial mechanisms of governance put in place in the years following. The film foregrounds a contract of ‘risk’ created by these events as a colonial technology imposed in the racialised consequence of decontextualising resource commodities through capitalist financial systems and violent modes of conflict. Resource commodities are disconnected from bodies, land and context to enter financial markets that rationalise its capital value. International laws of war and aerial bombardment become the violent process and action undertaken by strong states to secure sovereignty, control and power over bodies, land and resource. Recontextualising risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate affect of this lived limit-condition. An extra-international legal hearing uses radical legal and creative methods to invert the coloniality of law’s authority, producing a legal precedent that brings accountability to normalised forms of international violence. This legal fiction is told as a speculative attempt at dismantling the continued capacity of international law as structural violence.
Frame of Accountability is part of supra-disciplinary and research-based multi-media project led by Helene Kazan, realised through film, installation, writing and public engagement. The project investigates ‘risk’ as an integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism, analysed at the intersection of international law and architecture. Framing feminist, intersectional critical legal and creative methods through poetic testimony, as a means of expressing and translating the violent and disproportionate human and nonhuman
effects of risk.
Episodes
(Un)Touching Ground
In Complex View of her Body
In Law’s Terms
Credits
Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
Human/Non-Human Archival Modelling by Anabel Garcia-Kurland
Sound Design by Mhamad Safa
Camera and cinematography by Jad Youssf
With the support and special thanks to The Vera List Centre, The New School, New York.