Object! On the Documentary as Art

White Oil excavations and the Disappearance of the West Bank was a paper drawn from my PhD that unpacks how artist-moving image (my own practice) makes visible the spatial politics of Palestine through the quarries in the West Bank. The research addresses the way in which the quarries in the West Bank are not just industrial spaces in which labour and excavation of raw material takes place, but also paradigmatic and metaphorical spaces around sedimentation, stratified layers, excavation and transformation and how these dynamics are inseparable from the disruptive spaces of colonialism and globalisation. The paper looks at the role of the filmmaking in making visible the complex political entanglements of land, labour, military, nationalist identities and sovereign state in the region. How the quarried limestone can be perceived as a cipher for the biography of the collective worker, that acts as an archive for their personal histories and experiences as well as the changing landscape and conditions of the quarries bringing to bear the myriad losses of land, economy and history. This paper was part of a one-day symposium that brought together filmmakers, artists and scholars to explore the aesthetic potential, political stakes and ethical challenges that arise from regarding documentary film as an art object and consider documentary as a commodity in circulation, a resource in artistic production, a material trace, a document.