The World Like a Jewel in the Hand: a film by Ariella Aisha Azoulay

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. Within this wide landscape it focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places.

Objects and images are held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. This long and enduring ransack, cannot be addressed only through the discourse of restitution, especially when arguments are made in support of the restitution of individual objects; rather, it requires a questioning of the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. The film looks at them as part of the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labor, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonizers’ cameras. Before the colonization of North Africa by the French, this was the world of my ancestors. The film insists on the right of descendants of the Jewish Muslim world to refuse to conceive this world, destroyed by the colonization of North Africa by the French and of Palestine by the Zionists, as over.

Speaker Bios

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) teaches 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. Her books include: La résistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023). The Jewelers of the ummah – Algerian Letters (Verso 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Among her films: The world like a jewel in the hand – Unlearning Imperial Plunder II (2023), Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder I (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Among her exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2023–04), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Samia was an invited tutor at the first-ever Biennale College Architettura 2023 at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future,” at Venice Architecture Biennale. She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton university, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University. Currently, she is an invited Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and the co-chair of the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University. In the fall of 2024, Samia will join the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.

Organized by Jude Abdelqader, Ph.D. student in Architecture GSAPP