IN CONVERSATION
Sarah Shamash
Sarah Shamash is an Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University. Her PhD focused on an archive of films in Brazil known as Vídeo nas aldeias. Her artworks comprise the use of media in a wide variety of formats such as installation, documentary, photography, sound, performance, and video. Her work has been shown in curated exhibitions and film festivals internationally, and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema as a pluriversal art. She lives on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh First Nations in what is known as Vancouver.
Check out Sarah's website.
Let us start by talking about the archives. I've spent the last four years researching the British archives to reimagine queer South Asian pasts. You teach a course on decolonizing, reactivating, and intervening in the archive at Emily Carr University and you've published a paper titled 'A decolonising approach to genre cinema studies' (2022). You've also used archival visual material in your project 'Cataloging is Not For Superheroes' (2020) where you use absurdist humour to critically interrogate what gets categorized, archived, taught, and shown in an art historical context. 'From Chile to Canada: Media Herstories' (2022) is what you call an "(un)archival" documentary that revisits a historic 1987 all Chilean women art/media event in Vancouver. Tell me why the archives interest you. Why do you think the archive continues to remain a site of valency? What are the ways in which you think we can question and write over colonial/patriarchal archives?
“Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues on fire” – Gloria Anzaldúa. This quote by Anzaldúa provides an effective answer to the question of how to write over colonial/patriarchal archives.
I think of archives in expansive ways. In part, archives can be clues or pieces of a puzzle that we can use to investigate the past – both the stories we were taught as well as the stories that were and continue to be withheld from us. I’m currently developing a film project working with my personal archives of quasi obsolete videos (mini-DV tapes) from a couple decades ago. For many others and me, archives are often a basis for artistic creation; they are also about systems of power. We know archives have been used as a tool of colonial oppression; we also know settler colonies have done everything to erase and destroy the archives of the colonized, of queer, trans and marginalised people.
Rehab Nazzal, a Palestinian-Canadian artist, who has been documenting the ongoing genocide in the West Bank, stated in an Instagram post (March 1, 2025), in response to the settler army’s systematic destruction of memorials for Palestinian martyrs, how the “settler state seeks not only to crush the resistance, but also to erase what honors and symbolizes it.” Even when the colonizer has looted, burned, and destroyed “the archives,” the land tells a story, bodies tell stories, songs, dances, food, textiles tell stories and oral histories are passed down to new generations. For those who have had to piece together their stories, often from the scraps of violent histories, Anzaldúa (alongside many others), remind us that we must continue to tell our stories, using all the materials at our disposal, like our life depended on it.
We recently organized and hosted a talk as part of Apartheid Awareness month events at Emily Carr University on “archives/counterarchives.” One of the speakers, Alia Hijab, spoke about archives as loss and archiving as a duty and responsibility to community. Her framing, as a woman of colour, in the Arab diaspora, reminded me of Stuart Hall’s discussion on diaspora archives. Stuart Hall explains in his seminal text, 'Constituting an Archive,' how remediating an archive in a new work builds “a relation among past, community, and identity” (2001: 89). My particular interest in archives and trying to think through a philosophy for what they do and mean to me and what it means to not only work with them but to remediate them (while creating new archives) become a means to contribute to the living political memory of our entangled histories and communities.
Cataloguing is not for superheroes. 2022. Installation.
Another theme that informs much of your work (as it does mine) is feminist solidarity. You explore women's invisible labour in your live performance project 'Recipes of Undomestication' (2020), and write in art/mamas: Intermedial Conversations on Art, Motherhood and Caregiving that it is "both a survival mechanism and a utopian project that, despite the obstacles (i.e. colonization, neoliberalism, racial capital, patriarchy) persists." Tell me a little about how diasporic flows of knowledge exchange inform feminist solidarities in Canadian arts spaces?
I am inspired by and continue to learn from those who teach us about solidarity as a culture, code of ethics, and way of life. While there are many historical examples, today, I am thinking of the work of Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian leader. While imprisoned in Israeli jails, she used her time to educate fellow female prisoners. Despite incredible obstacles, Jarrar fought for the rights of prisoners and the education of imprisoned women. She managed to organize a first “cohort of defiance” in 2015, from inside and outside the prison system. She ultimately created a system for future cohorts to continue their education and attain high school degrees while incarcerated, demonstrating what real solidarity can look like. In Jarrar’s words, “Hope in prison is like a flower that grows out of a stone. For us Palestinians, education is our greatest weapon. With it, we will always be victorious” (cited in Baroud, 2020). Despite the dire political moment, powerful leaders, like Jarrar, have left a legacy of solidarity, reminding us to never underestimate the colonized and their power for self-liberation.
Angela Davis, another important leader in intersecting liberation struggles, stated today, May 2nd, on Democracy Now, that: “Now, Palestine is really the center of the world. And as someone who’s been active in the Palestine solidarity struggle for the vast majority of my life, I can say that even as we experience the unimaginable grief of witnessing an ongoing genocide, a genocide that is available in terms of being able to witness the consequences all over the world, in one sense, I want to say that this is the movement we’ve been struggling for, for decades and decades.” Her statement articulates the importance of international solidarity as part of a consciousness that understands our interconnectedness. We witness this natural alliance between colonized people in the work of Stó:lō author Lee Maracle (1950-2021), a leading voice in Indigenous literature who articulates a parallel struggle when she said in 2006, “Canada was a gift from Britain to the white male settlers of Canada who cleared the land, killed the Indians and Buffalo in exactly the same way that Israel [was a gift from US and Britain to the European Jews] has cleared the land of Palestinians, expropriated their villages, farms and murdered all those who resist.”
Poster. 2025. University of British Columbia.
Banding together with a politics of mutual support and resistance to colonial violence, in the art collectives we form, the solidarity collectives we join, and the community building we do, is the world building. When Deanne Achong and I first came together to perform our recipes of (un)domestication, we somehow recognized each other – a shared politics and experience. We were both thinking about how the reproductive labour we perform is largely unrecognized in multiples arenas we occupy - professional, artistic, domestic, public/private – and how that “work” is not only the work of daily survival but also the labour of unlearning capitalist patriarchal structures and working towards mutual freedom. While our world-building happens in local spaces through collective creative acts, learning, and exchange, our solidarity is internationalist as part of an investment in collective liberation.
I was drawn to the scent of soaps in your 'All the Perfumes of Arabia' (2008) video installation which explores notions of amnesia and terror in the context of the American occupation of Iraq. As a novelist, this draws me into the worldscape immediately. In my stories, characters often end up juxtaposing painful memories alongside those of beauty. Please tell me a little about this project of yours, and what you hoped to achieve through it.
I completed this work in 2008. We had all witnessed the fallacy of the US’s invasion of Iraq to “eliminate weapons of mass destruction,” seen the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the staggering number of Iraqi civilian deaths and war profiteering by the US. We had been witnessing the atrocities committed on the Iraqi population while the US continued to terrorize its Brown and Black domestic populations with a spike in Islamophobia, racism, and anti-Muslim sentiment after their 9/11. (Chile has its own 9/11/1973). The title of this work draws from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth says “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” after murdering King Duncan. The idea was to show how the US will never remove the blood from their hands - the stain of empire and colonialism - from our collective conscience.
Using the Dove soap brand, meant to evoke purity, whiteness, and peace as an olfactory screen to project moving images of a calm ocean that turns violent (shot on Super 8 b/w film), was a means to process the unfolding injustices and violences we were witnessing. I worked with Brady Marks at that time, an expert in interactive technologies, so that the viewer could, from a distance, see and hear a calm ocean on a white screen. As they approached the screen, the waves got progressively more violent as did the sound track so that the final image was red crashing waves on the white dove soap screen to the sounds of bombs.
A lot of your work has been about registering histories of migration and displacement through art - tracing migration routes through oral histories as you've done with 'Telling Traces' (2013-16) or re-mapping spaces as you do in 'Trigger Space - Banff' (2008) where I liked the bar you wrote: "If the original purpose of mapping was to appropriate and colonize land, I am interested in exploring ways of subverting official maps through documentary narratives of memory and public space in order to create spaces of resistance." Tell me about why geography and memory interest you, and how you've used the two in your work.
Thanks for asking me about these older projects and ideas that continue to inform my work and thinking. I have worked a lot with subjective mapping as a counterpoint to colonial borders, reifying my belief in border abolition. Building on the mapping projects you mentioned above made in Toronto and Banff respectively, I then went on to do some artist residencies and visit family in Brazil. At that time, I was reading a lot of Milton Santos, an important Brazilian geographer, scholar and theoretician of space and geography from a global south perspective. In 2010, I made a work called (dis)location – sampa, part of a diptych with a first part in Salvador, Brazil. The project maps the daily ritual of three workers in São Paulo’s historical city center. I was thinking about the complex economic systems that co-exist, define, and transform the physical route each character makes in the world and how that leads them to São Paulo’s geographic historical centre.
As Milton Santos puts it: “Modes of production write history in time; social formations write them in space” (from Da Totalidade ao Lugar.) Milton Santos articulates the ability of a majority population of urban working-class poor to navigate their social-spatial conditions as “tropical flexibility.” I understand this framing as an asset developed by a global south majority to adapt and survive their economic and spatial conditions. In line with Santos’ thinking, the idea of my project was to reframe ideas around periphery and center through a reframing of capital, labour, and space. The subjective mapping showed how these workers were changing and enriching the cities social-spatial relations, ultimately, showing how space, like borders, are unstable and ever shifting. I continue to think about our interconnected, interrelated worlds, and thus geographical formations, as ever-shifting multi-directional networks of co-creation.
More recently, I have been thinking with and learning from abolitionists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer and abolitionist, who has helped us think about abolition geographies in the face of geographies of racial capitalism. Gilmore reminds us that “Freedom is a place” that we need to continually make and remake (from her Abolition Geographies: Essays Towards Liberation). Gilmore along with Santos, consider how space is constitutive of social movements. The concrete history of our time calls for the most militant international solidarity with people facing genocide, with incarcerated people, including migrants in detention centres and political prisoners, and with everyone who is struggling to survive the conditions of late capitalism. Again, to cite Gilmore, who reminds us that “If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to undo an occupation.” This is true of the occupation of all settler-colonial states. Worldmaking requires radical imaginations from the pluriverse, from the self-determination projects and liberation movements of Congo, Palestine, Sudan, Turtle Island, Abya Yala...
Trigger space - Banff. 2008. Locative media.
In 'Didactics to Postpone the End of the World' (2024), you reflect on your grandmother’s displacement, whose Arab-Jewish ancestry included migrations from Syria to Palestine to Brazil, grappling with ways to be an artist during a livestreamed genocide. I saw you recently at UBC's Framing Asia event in Vancouver, where you mediated a panel: 'Palestine in Focus.' What has stayed with me since is the memory of the old refugee woman who takes soil from Palestine to plant mint in her pots - from the documentary Return to Palestine. You and the panel of filmmakers spoke about creating art in the time of genocide - the struggles, the persistence, and the memories that remain.
All peoples resisting settler colonialism and genocide, have had their worlds destroyed. Witnessing so much violence and horror was more than destabilizing; it paralyzed my artistic impetus and production. I really didn’t know what made sense anymore during a livestreamed genocide. In the early days of this livestreamed continuation of the Nakba, the only thing that made sense, was to connect with comrades, other media artists and film programmers, to ask what they were doing and to ask about how we could create solidarity spaces through film screenings. That’s how I came to be part of a collective called from the 'river to the sea collective' where we have been organizing film screenings in solidarity with Palestine since November 2023. We fundraise for relief efforts in Palestine, provide BDS information (thanks to some members who are also part of Artists for Palestine), and we invite Palestinian and Indigenous speakers to open the screenings and host post-screening discussions.
I have managed to work on some art zines to collectively process rage and grief and raise some funds for Palestine. Collective organizing and art in the service of solidarity has been a form of channeling some of the rage and grief. I have returned to some projects where I am working with archives of sorts to connect with myself and my community. I am no longer interested in making art for the institutions that have failed us. I have taken a bit of a break from social media and turned to reading political theory. The digital break and focus on reading have been helpful in, the very least, to calm my over stimulated and reactive nervous system.
Undeniably, cinema, art, theory, and literature have been some of my greatest teachers and shaped and informed my creative universe and moral-political compass. I’m listening to the actions, words, and ideas of Indigenous land defenders, Black feminist abolitionists, Palestinian activists, poets, writers, and filmmakers, Latin American thinkers, Chicana feminists. Mostly, their theories come from their embodied experiences, “a theory in the flesh” (Cherrie L. Moraga). More than healing, their imaginations provide possibilities for another world where we can co-exist with each other and the planet.