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Colony, 2022
Three-channel video installation, color, sound, 13 min.
Narration: Saleh Bakri.

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During the First World War, vast swarms of locusts swept across Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, devastating agricultural land and intensifying the food shortages that would contribute to widespread famine. Among the most striking photographic records of the 1915 plague are two images of a fig tree, taken fifteen minutes apart, before and after a swarm had passed. The photographs were made by Lewis Larsson, a photographer associated with the American Colony in Jerusalem.

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Colony (2022) is a multidisciplinary installation developed through five years of research in the American Colony photographic archives in Jerusalem and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The project examines the relationship between photography, colonial systems of representation, environmental catastrophe, and the formation of collective identities.

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The American Colony photographers documented the region during the final decades of Ottoman rule and the subsequent British Mandate. Their photographs reflect the visual conventions of Orientalist photography, frequently depicting local Arab inhabitants from elevated or distant perspectives, often as anonymous figures within agricultural landscapes.

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Central to the installation are historical stereoscopic glass negatives, originally produced to create the illusion of three-dimensional vision through two slightly different perspectives. Some of these negatives were subsequently damaged by water, which altered their photographic emulsion and produced abstract, stain-like formations across the images. Guez approaches these marks not simply as evidence of deterioration, but as an additional visual layer through which the archive can be reconsidered.

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The installation draws a parallel between the transformation of solitary grasshoppers into collective swarms and the processes through which individuals become part of larger social and political formations. Under particular environmental conditions, certain species of grasshoppers undergo profound physiological and behavioral changes, shifting from solitary existence to coordinated collective movement. This transformation becomes a metaphor for the emergence of colonies, the consolidation of collective identities, and the tensions between individual agency and group behavior.

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The three-channel video installation incorporates two distinct sound elements. One is based on laboratory recordings of insect communication, translating vibrations beyond the range of ordinary human hearing into an audible composition. The other is a narration performed by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, adopting the authoritative tone associated with nature documentaries. Delivered in Arabic, the narration moves between descriptions of biological transformation and the historical formation of colonies, without explicitly identifying whether its subjects are insects or human societies.

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In the concluding sequence, Guez digitally manipulates historical stereoscopic photographs, replacing their original paired perspectives with mirrored images derived from individual negatives. This intervention redirects attention toward the damaged areas of the photographic plates, where abstract formations evoke swarms, fire, and traces of destruction.

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Through the convergence of archival photography, ecological transformation, and the history of colonial representation, Colony examines the conditions under which collective structures emerge, expand, and ultimately become vulnerable to collapse from within. The work returns to the locust plague that struck the region during the First World War, devastating agricultural land and exacerbating the severe food shortages and famine brought about by wartime conditions. From this historical reality, the installation also considers the question of life in the aftermath of catastrophe: how war, plague, and environmental destruction continue to shape landscapes and societies long after the events themselves have ended. In this context, the damaged photographs become images of a world that carries the traces of catastrophe within it, suggesting that destruction does not end when the event is over, but continues to exist in material, memory, and social structures.

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