Ava Aviva Avnisan with HereIn
Ava Aviva Avnisan, Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: A beautiful image, seemingly hand-rendered, of two dilapidated buildings overgrown with lush vegetation.]
In her multidisciplinary practice, Ava Aviva Avnisan combines research with an array of digital tools—such as 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality, and generative AI—to craft works that reframe dominant narratives and upend historical balances of power. Avnisan, who was born in Jerusalem and moved to the United States when she was six years old, currently teaches at San Diego State University.
She is at work on a new project that she describes as “a lyric film essay featuring a masculine voice narrating the writings of an unnamed female time traveler whose personal and family histories are fatefully entangled with the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948; the First Arab-Israeli War; the Jewish Exodus from the Muslim World; and the Palestinian Nakba, in which approximately 750,000 Palestinians fled from their homes or were expelled in response to threats, raids and attacks carried out by Zionist militias and the Israeli Army.”
Avnisan spoke with HereIn Editor Elizabeth Rooklidge about her process for this new project and what it means to “trans” the archive.
Ava Aviva Avnisan in collaboration with Doug Rosman, Specters of Home - Prologue (first 90 seconds), 2024. Click here for video description.
HereIn: Specters of Home is a quietly riveting film that blends archival imagery with generative AI animation and digital renderings, framed by a voiceover narration. Will you describe the work formally for us?
Ava Aviva Avnisan: Specters of Home—Prologue is a short film about my early childhood in Jerusalem and the ways in which I was indoctrinated into two different but entangled ideologies: Zionism and the gender binary. The film is in conversation with Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil; the opening of my film is a kind of remake of the opening of Sans Soleil, or a “cover”—as in a cover song—an idea I’ve been exploring with my collaborator Judd Morrissey for a number of years in other creative contexts. What does it mean to cover a song, to cover history, to cover over or recover a personal, family or national story, a body, a gender?
Sans Soleil resonates deeply with Specters of Home’s leitmotifs—it is a lyric meditation on the legacies of colonialism; the nature of memory and history and time; and also the nature of images in relation to the documentation of history—how do we trust images and, by extension, image archives? What is their truth value? What do they show and what do they leave out of the frame?
My film weaves together a diverse range of source materials as a way of thinking through the ways in which the personal, the familial, and the geopolitical are entangled. These different scales are represented formally through my appropriation of different types of still and moving image archives: family archives, national archives, commercial stock footage archives, and a 3D scan I created of the Palestinian village of Lifta in 2019—which I think of as forming the beginning of a kind of counter-hegemonic documentary archive, a kind of “counter-forensics,” to draw on the thinking of Eyal Weizman.
My family’s archives include digitized 8mm footage of my sister and I in the mid-1980s in Jerusalem, as well as a coffee table book titled The Holy Land From the Air, published in 1987, that showcases a beautiful body of aerial photographs shot by my dad when I was very young—the film includes original footage of my manicured hands turning the pages of The Holy Land from the Air.
The national archival material is sourced from the Israel Film Archive, whose website makes accessible an extensive repository of film from Israel’s history, including archival footage, historic news footage, and narrative films created by Israeli filmmakers.
I also use a little bit of stock video footage in the film, which gestures both toward Sans Soleil’s use of stock footage and to my dad’s career as a professional photographer: he supported our family in part by creating and selling stock images.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: A haunting point cloud rendering of the Palestinian village of Lifta, created from 3D lidar scan data. Two dilapidated buildings are visible in the foreground, the one on the left overgrown with vegetation. The bright points comprising the image are set against a dark background, creating the illusion that the scene was captured at night, with the buildings brightly lit as if by spotlight.]
Finally, the film includes a 3D rendering of the Palestinian village of Lifta, located just outside of Jerusalem, that I created out of 3D lidar scan data I collected in 2019. Lifta figures significantly in Specters of Home both literally and figuratively. It is the only Palestinian village in Israel depopulated during the Nakba of 1948 that was neither completely destroyed nor permanently repopulated by Jews. It also happens to be a place where my Arab-Jewish great-grandparents, who were displaced from their homes in Baghdad as part of the Jewish exodus from the Arab world, were temporarily housed by the State of Israel for a short time in the 1950’s. Today, Lifta is a dilapidating ghost town that by a fluke of history and politics—as well as through the hard-won victories of activists—has not (yet) been erased and covered over, though its preservation is precarious still. What remains of Lifta powerfully evidences both the rich beauty of Palestinian life and culture before the Nakba, and the unimaginable magnitude of the loss of that life and culture, which happened due to the forcible dispossession of Palestinians during the Nakba of 1948.
The 3D lidar scan data of Lifta is rendered as video using custom software I began writing in 2016. The lidar renderings have a very particular aesthetic that I’ve been developing in my practice over the last eight years. They are photorealistic yet simultaneously ghostly, ethereal and otherworldly. I think of this aesthetic as a visual vocabulary of haunting, and my thinking around it is indebted both to Jacques Derrida’s idea of “hauntology” and to Karen Barad’s quantum mechanical reading of Derrida’s idea of “hauntology.”
These family, national, commercial stock, and counter-hegemonic documentary archival sources are represented not only in their “original” form but also as animations rendered using a generative-AI engine—an aspect of the project that was created in collaboration with Doug Rosman. The generative AI animations have a very particular aesthetic, which borders on the sentimental. These animations look like beautiful and impressionistic hand-wrought watercolors. Very nostalgic. I use jump cuts throughout the film to suture the original and generative AI versions of each scene. As a narrative device, these jump cuts into and out of the generative AI renderings are a way that the film’s mysterious protagonist travels through time, seeking out alternative versions of history that may lead to more just collective futures.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: A gauzy image of a child running against an indistinct background. At the bottom of the frame, yellow text reads, “It was as much a lie.”]
HereIn: How did you originally come to make this work?
Avnisan: The full story of what led me to make the film is in part what the film is about—being indoctrinated into Zionism from a young age and then becoming very disenchanted and disillusioned when I came into critical consciousness about what really happened in 1948. It was more than disenchantment, I became very resentful, feeling that I had been betrayed by my parents, my teachers, my family—I was deliberately lied to when it came to the history of the formation of the state of Israel. And I also became ashamed—of my identity as somebody who was born in Israel and who is half Israeli. Shame is an important throughline in this project because it connects my journey of coming to terms with Zionism to my journey of coming to terms with my identify as a transgender woman.
There was a ten-year period—2009 to 2019–during which I was metabolizing this waking up into critical consciousness. It was a long period of shame and repression about my own positionality with respect to the conflict, and at the same time a sort of denial—not wanting to look at that, not wanting to deal with it. And that showed up as a reluctance, after the 2009 trip I made to Israel-Palestine, to return. I couldn’t wrap my head around what a trip back would look like. Not only were my politics in conflict with the large extended family I had in Israel, I was also beginning to understand myself as queer during this time. (I didn’t yet understand that I was trans but I understood that I was queer.) Identifying politically as anti-Zionist and, on top of that, identifying as queer—together these things felt like an insurmountable barrier to going back to Jerusalem and seeing my family. How would it have worked? Would I lie to them about who I really am, trying to pass as the nice (read: straight, Zionist) Jewish boy they expected me to be? Or would I come out to them? And if I did come out to them, would they accept me? It was so fraught and like so many aspects of our shadow lives, much easier to avoid than to confront.
And during all this time my grandmother was getting older and older and there was an unspoken question between my mother and I about whether I was going to try to see her before she passed away. And then finally in 2018 I had a profound realization: I had to go back to Israel-Palestine, had to confront this head on. Figure it out. Make work about it. That wallowing in shame and denial was not doing anybody any good. Sadly my grandmother died around eight months before I returned to Jerusalem and I missed my chance to say goodbye to her. In a way, the film, which is dedicated to her, is my way of saying goodbye.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: A view looking down on a book spread open to reveal two map-like images. Someone’s hands hold the book open. The film still appears hand-illustrated in ethereal tones of gray, brown, and blue. Yellow text at the bottom of the frame reads, “as vital to the project of colonization.”]
HereIn: What did the process of making the film look like?
Avnisan: I dreamt up an overly ambitious and politically naïve project, and received a fellowship from the Simpson Center for the Humanities to support a preliminary research trip to Jerusalem in support of that project. Though the original vision for Specters of Home was unrealistic, my 2019 trip was essential and set in motion the creative process that led to me creating Specters of Home—Prologue in early 2024, and which is continuing to grow into a larger multidisciplinary project.
When I traveled back to Israel-Palestine in 2019, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing—I intuitively decided to purchase and bring with me a Zoom audio recorder—and ended up spending a significant amount of time just talking with folks and recording those conversations. I’d never done that before in my practice. The people I met with were incredibly inspiring and opened my eyes to the cultural, political and artistic situation on the ground in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. I met with radical, anti-Zionist, left-wing Jewish Israelis; Palestinians citizens of Israel working for NGOs doing political activism on the ground; and Palestinian artists on both sides of the green line. I was also thinking very intentionally about the ethics of making this work—a process I go through each time I make work that engages with marginalized communities and histories. This included a wonderful meeting with the Lifta Historical Society in Ramallah in the West Bank.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: A small child picks food up from a kitchen counter. The image appears hand-rendered in soft browns, oranges, and blues. Yellow text at the bottom of the frame reads, “It was a double bind—the archives.]
It was a profoundly transformative trip for me on multiple registers. Personally, reconnecting with my history was very powerful—I did several long walks in Jerusalem to formative sites from my childhood, which surfaced powerful embodied memories of this really important time in my life, a time when I had no understanding of the political landscape. That was a time in my life that largely predated what I now understand as the pivotal moment when the violence of the gender binary was imposed on me. So there’s a kind of innocence and authentic embodiment that I think I was able to have in Jerusalem during my early childhood that I was getting in touch with then and which I engage with in the film through the archival childhood footage. I remember visiting my grandparents’ old apartment and seeing over the fence the bougainvillea and fig trees and the eucalyptus trees, which, by the way, is one of the reasons I feel so at home in San Diego. The landscape and the flora are so similar.
And then there was the familial register. My family—who are all Zionists, ranging from liberal Zionists to militant, ultranationalist Zionists—had gotten wind that I was doing some kind of project and they knew it was something they didn’t agree with. It led to a very fraught visit with some of my extended family, which was challenging but also important.
And finally there was the political register—seeing the occupation with my own eyes was really powerful; understanding the brutality of it, the pervasiveness of it, the injustice of it. And then I met a Palestinian refugee and political activist named Yacoub Odeh, to whom the film is dedicated along with my grandmother. He was born in Lifta in 1940. He is a deeply inspiring person. We spent an afternoon at the Jerusalem Hotel in East Jerusalem and he told me his life story. He was eight years old when the Nakba happened, so it’s a firsthand account of the Nakba from somebody who was living in Lifta. I created an artist’s publication that features an edited transcript of our conversation and which I show alongside the film, and which I am also selling as a fundraiser to support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Another powerful aspect of the 2019 trip was meeting Jewish Israelis who shared my political values, who were anti-Zionists, who were doing incredible activism on the ground. Meeting these people helped me to realize that I didn’t have to be ashamed of being Israeli. That there’s a radical, anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli lineage that I can partake in. It’s a kind of political-intellectual chosen family, or chosen ancestry. It was profoundly healing. Meeting these folks—one of whom has become a dear friend—helped me to move out of that space of shame and repression and into a place of pride and activism. I finally understood that not only do I not have to be ashamed of being half-Israeli, I have an obligation to leverage my privilege to support the work of decolonization in Israel-Palestine and everywhere.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: An abstracted depiction of the two buildings in previous images. Here they are painted in rich colors, while their shapes seeem to disappear into the air. Yellow text at the bottom of the frame reads, “all that had been repressed.”]
HereIn: You recently gave a talk about the film—you titled the talk “Transing the Archives” and proposed using the word “trans” as a verb. What does it mean to trans the archives?
Avnisan: In the context of my own gender transition, “transing” my personal history is an ongoing process of critically revisiting my past in order to both understand how my femininity came to be repressed below the level of my consciousness until I was 38 years old, and to empower myself to move forward with the process of transition, self-actualization, and healing from the toxicities of internalized transphobia and internalized transmisogyny. I think of it as a kind of mashup of Walter Benjamin’s idea of brushing history against the grain and José Muñoz’s idea of “disidentification,” but directed at those histories and/or archives that have been formative to one’s individual sense of identity.
What I realized in making this film is that my 10+ year process of coming to terms with having been indoctrinated into the ideology of Zionism non-consensually was not so dissimilar from the “transing” I have to do to come to terms with being non-consensually indoctrinated into the ideology of the gender binary. And so in the talk I am generalizing the idea of “transing” and offering it as a framework through which cis folks might critically engage with toxic ideologies they might have internalized and would benefit from healing from that may or may not have to do with gender. In the talk I draw on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word “transition” to craft my own definition of “trans” as a verb:
Trans. Verb. From the latin transitio—the action of going across or past, of crossing over to the other side, desertion
transitive. A critical-creative-therapeutic process of revising, rewriting and/or reframing history by brushing dominant narratives and internalized ideologies against the grain. A process of self-transformation, self-actualization and/or spiritual awakening often precipitated by a sudden and unexpected insight that forces an individual to question fundamental aspects of their identity. The process of following ghosts.
Most of the archives I’m working with—my dad’s book, the narrative films, the archival footage, and the news footage from the Israel Film Archive—exist in support of the Zionist narrative. I understand these as essentially Zionist archives. And so by appropriating these Zionist archives and interpellating them into a narrative critical of the formation of the state of Israel, I’m hoping to uncover some of the things that archive is very deliberately covering over. For me this is taking up Benjamin’s call that we “brush history against the grain”—which is one of the two epigraphs that open the film.
Specters of Home—Prologue, 2024, film still
[Image description: An abstracted body, wearing purple, lays on a sandy ground. Yellow text at the bottom of the frame reads, “a land without a people, for a people.”]
In my reading, the events of 1948 are a critical inflection point in those archives and in that history. The way that I understand the difference between the liberal Zionist position and the anti-Zionist position hinges on the interpretation of 1948. For the liberal Zionist, the original sin of the state of Israel was the military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that began in 1967. ’48 is understood as a miraculous and righteous miracle—the redemption of a traumatized, stateless people, summed up by the classic Zionist myth that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” which of course is totally false. And so the liberal Zionist wants to de-occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and give that back to the Palestinians as an exchange for peace. That’s the classic liberal Zionist peace camp vision.
The anti-Zionist, on the other hand—at least in my reading—understands that the settlement of Palestine by European Jews from the end of the 19th century through the Nakba of 1948, along with the ongoing Nakba we are seeing today, needs to be understood using settler-colonialism as a critical framework. For the anti-Zionist, the Nakba of 1948, in which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly dispossessed of their homes and lands, is the State of Israel’s “original sin.” For the anti-Zionist, that tragedy needs to be acknowledged—that’s where the repair needs to happen, politically, culturally, emotionally. That’s why Lifta is so important. That’s why the right of return is so important. And that’s the story that I’m trying to recover in the film, through the lens of my personal experience.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.