Iterations on Witnessing is a durational film, installation and unfolding archive that navigates the paradoxes of vision—what is seen, what is hidden, and what is intentionally left out. Taking inspiration from the neurological phenomenon of “blindsight”—or subconscious seeing—the project unfolds in a series of sequential segments or “variations” connected to the artist's research and travels that collectively interrogate the ethics and violence of seeing.

Like variations in classical music, each segment revisits the central theme—vision as fractured knowledge—while shifting its focus: from war-blinded soldiers and colonial cartographers to post-colonial ghost towns and the ethics of observing migration and warfare. This structural rhythm—repetition with difference—functions as both narrative strategy and political method. It resists linear historiography and instead accumulates meaning through juxtaposition and return, allowing space for ambiguity, contradiction, and layered witnessing.

Each sequence operates as an iteration—self-contained but open. These are not chapters in a traditional sense but refrains in a larger composition, recurring motifs that evolve in tone, voice, and scale. What begins with the neurology of sight expands into metaphors of surveillance, colonial mapping, and the extractive gaze of empire. A shipwreck becomes a monument; a migration route becomes a wound; a childhood memory becomes the last archive of the vanishing remains of a colony.

The film is designed as an open system. Each time it is shown, new segments are added—reiterations that challenge the finality of documentary. This accumulation transforms the film into a living archive, where the viewer becomes complicit and implicated in the temporal and interpretive layering. Meaning is not fixed but shaped by the viewer’s position in time and space—by which segments they encounter, in what order, and under what conditions.

By mobilizing the act of “witnessing” as both subject and structure, the work asks: What does it mean to see, and to not know what one has seen? How do we record without claiming, observe without extracting, remember without possession?

Iterations on Witnessing does not offer answers. Instead, it accumulates questions—fragments, impressions, dissonances—stitched together by the fragile thread of witnessing itself. Each segment is a different angle on the same wound. A new echo of the same haunting. A refusal to look away, and a reckoning with what that looking costs.