Elias Nafaa
Work in Progress

Diplomatic correspondence does more than document a political decision. It is also a space within which that decision takes shape.

Using letters, telegrams, photographs, maps and other archival documents, Elias Nafaa studies the relationships between diplomatic language and the material reality of the events to which it pertains. These documents circulate among individuals and institutions, conveying requests, authorizations, disagreements and negotiations. They play a part in the organization of territory, regulating access to it and movements across it, while sustaining the relations needed to implement these operations of control.

The language of these exchanges is seldom strictly administrative. It reflects friendship, trust, concern and care alongside strategic considerations. A polite form of address may follow a military demand; a show of affection may conclude a negotiation that will have impacts across thousands of kilometres. Elias Nafaa’s research concerns precisely what is made possible by that closeness: What does a personal relationship within a political apparatus allow? And how does language contribute to transforming an intention or negotiation into infrastructure, displacement or a border?

From Montréal, Nafaa traces the communication channels through which documents, decisions and information flow between one place and another. His research addresses the disparities between a sentence and its effects, between the place where a decision is formulated and that where it materializes, and between the archived source as it appears to us today and the relations it originally helped produce.

This project is made possible with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, through its program Initiatives structurantes pour la circulation d’œuvres en arts actuels.