“Suspended between Past and Future”: Larissa Sansour's Sci-Fi Archaeological Archive in the Past-Future Tense

Archaeology and psychoanalysis share a commitment to collect information from/about the past—to “dig out” parts of the past that are otherwise in danger of escaping memory (collective and personal) and hence of disappearing altogether. Larissa Sansour’s film In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016, 29 minutes) explores these two logics through a narrator-archaeologist and her psychoanalyst, who promote radically different modes of “archival repair.” In the Future introduces a temporal dimension to the present impossibility of Palestine (as a nation state, at least) and the lack of archival “evidence” to its past existence. It introduces the future as the time of Palestine, the time of imagining Palestine, the time of becoming, which is shamelessly fictive: not quite a dystopia, but rather a counter utopia.