Found Footage / H.264 codec / 4:3 / 6.44 min. / 2019
Gravity — In Memory Of Latakia is situated within the research cluster Archival Reconfiguration. The work engages with archival television material as a site of projection, transformation, and speculative memory.
The video draws on the musical practice of Momen Shaweesh, who combines traditional sounds from the Syrian Mediterranean coast with contemporary electronic structures. This hybrid musical language forms the temporal and emotional framework of the piece. In response, fragments from a Soviet television broadcast on rhythmic gymnastics from 1985 are re-edited and synchronised with the composition.
Through this process, the archival material is detached from its original context and reorganised into a new visual rhythm. Bodies, gestures, and repetitions begin to shift in meaning. What once functioned as a televised performance becomes a carrier of imagined memory.
The work unfolds as a video essay that visualises a possible recollection of the city of Latakia. These images do not document lived experience. They operate in a speculative space, shaped by displacement, distance, and reconstruction. A world emerges that has no direct historical reference, yet remains emotionally plausible.
In this way, Gravity examines how archival images can be reconfigured to produce collective memory. The footage becomes a malleable structure. It holds traces of a past while opening a space for projections that extend beyond it.
