Liat Berdugo: The Weaponized Camera

“So it becomes this dance of cameras where the whole goal of the Palestinian camera is to document a human rights violation, to take back some kind of power. And the goal of the Israeli camera is to block that power from being taken through vision.” — Liat Berdugo

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has been running its Camera Distribution Project since the early 2000s. The project distributes video camcorders to Palestinians, training them in documentation, and building an archive of citizen-recorded video. These videos cover a wide-range of topics, including settler violence, IDF night searches and demolitions.  How do visuals disrupt historical narratives of conflicts? What does it mean for someone to later on witness preserved traces of events? And in the context of Israel-Palestine, what impact does a camera actually have in the face of entrenched power dynamics? 

Producer Emily Bell interviews Liat Berdugo, author of the recently released book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine.

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Video courtesy of the B’Tselem video archive.

Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, was released from Bloomsbury in 2021. She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. Berdugo lives and works in Oakland, CA.