Salma Bakr

The project is inspired by Laila Soliman’s performance, Zigzig, which draws on historical archives in its treatment of a British military tribunal that was created in order to investigate the claims of women from the Egyptian village of Nazlat El-Shobak that they were raped by British soldiers during a violent raid of that village by British occupation forces in 1919. The performance plays on testimony furnished by the women, but delivered in English, since it was impossible to obtain local Arabic sources on the incident. The only available documentation was the court transcripts written by British army officials at the time and accessible to the public in the British Foreign Service archives. Salma’s research is also based on anthropologist Ann Stoler’s call to write the contemporary history of Egypt “against the official grain”. Rarely do historians in Egypt speak of the circuitous paths they need to pursue in order to be able to study their own history through archival material even though such material is a fundamental part of the history they want to write about, and this is what Salma will be treating in her short experimental video.