Alert

An occupation, military or civilian, is lived out at many different levels, modalities and distances. The suffering that is visited upon those whose freedoms are curtailed, whose movement is blocked and whose lives are threatened is rarely matched by the misgivings of those implicated in inflicting the occupation, or those associated with it through citizenship or other modes of inscription. Our concern here is with the question of how the occupiers might vigilantly live out an occupation beyond the simple rhetorics of resistance. There are many levels to such a living – out ; the need to be alert and vigilant in seeing what is actually going on, the need to document it, the need to find ways of incorporating what one sees into one’s work – often in oblique and indirect modes.