Breathing Archives: Art and Tacit Knowledge in the Post-Oslo Accords’ Palestine

This doctoral research proposes the Breathing Archive as an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methodological tool for understanding Palestinian knowledge production and identity in post-Oslo Agreement Palestine (1993 - the present). The objective is to accumulate tacit knowledge emerging from the artistic practices of Palestinians living in and beyond historic Palestine, whose identities have been shaped and maintained by colonial and hegemonic power dynamics.

The Breathing Archive, a practice-based research methodology, critically examines the challenges involved in institutionally producing and disseminating Palestinian narratives within the explicit structure of the Oslo Agreement’s state project in the West Bank and Gaza. It then reflects on Palestinian art practices, including my own, as a means of tacit knowledge production, and looks at the limitations of the state and other institutionalised archives (Polanyi, 1966).

The theoretical framework encompasses an analysis of historical paradigms impacting Palestinian knowledge production. It also explores additional power dynamics embedded in the professional field of art, within the post-Oslo Agreement paradigm, as a way to critique and reflect on contemporary Palestinian identity. The practical aspect involves reflecting on Palestinian art practices and introducing the Breathing Archive as a new method for transcending the limitations - conceptual and practical - of both the institutionalised archive and the Palestinian art scene, since the signing of the Oslo Accords.

Structured according to Kurt Lewin’s (1997) ‘Action Research principles’, the research proposes the Breathing Archive, as an intervention, to creatively address some of the challenges associated with producing and disseminating Palestinian knowledge. The Breathing Archive employs ethnographic and participatory dynamics to capture tacit knowledge embedded in Palestinian artistic engagements, positing new ways of understanding and conceptualising Palestinian experiences, beyond the narrow geographical definitions of the Oslo Accords. This questions how Palestinian epistemologies are understood outside of colonially imposed borders and explores the role of art in both imagining and bringing into being concepts of Palestinian selfhood.

The thesis includes a body of artwork emerging from this theoretical and creative process. Within this, I trace the origins of the Breathing Archive, reflecting on how it emerged from both my own artistic practice and other artists I engaged with during ethnographic fieldwork.