Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In a text about Un Cercle autour du Soleil, you mention “the amnesia that the Beiruti society has deliberately chosen as a path out of the civil war.” Do you consider your work to be an antidote to this amnesia—or an alternative path out of the war trauma?

I do not approach my artwork as a healing process out of a traumatizing experience, whatever the nature of this experience. I think one of the reasons that Lebanese people have chosen amnesia, as a path out of the civil war, is the inability to “properly” communicate this experience. A war situation is not necessarily a unique experience that cannot be represented, but the preexisting image of “war” that we might have from fiction, or from reportage on the news, is remote from the actual experience. I think that we lack the means and the language to talk about the war. I try to find, through my art, a language that can communicate or share elements of this experience, not as an antidote to the amnesiac state we might be living in, but by fictionalizing my war memories. It is not “to remember,” but rather “to invent,” in order to understand. 

How do you think the experience of war affects you as an artist?

During a civil war, especially when it lasts seventeen years, the logic of things is disrupted. But war chaos has logic too. The war is lived in its daily routine, its daily happiness and sadness, and melts in our personal histories. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that war cannot be approached as a series of events that we are able to recall. But at the same time, it cannot be approached purely as a series of personal stories, since the nature of the trauma affects these stories. Maybe what war does is it exposes the link between personal experience and history.

When did your first experiences with art happen? What were they like? How did recurring themes such as death and the body surface in your early work?

My first degree was Bachelor in Graphic Design from the School of Architecture in Beirut, where I had studied the history of Art and Architecture. My design career has given me the opportunity to work closely with artists but from a designer’s position. I was first drawn in to theater as a performer, then as a stage set designer. I was always intrigued by murder mystery stories. I was fascinated with the detective that goes looking for a missing clue, or a missing body. One of my early projects was a murder mystery interactive game of a murder that took place in a library. There is an opposition between matter and language in classical detective stories; which is why the library is the most appropriate—or because it is the most inappropriate—, the most disturbing location for a body to be found. The project Un Cercle autour du Soleil had started as a story of a detective that roams the streets of Beirut looking for a missing body. I am interested in dealing with this unfinished business in my city after the war. I like to inspect this hazy line between being alive and being dead, between Beirut, the metropolis or the necropolis. I wonder if anyone makes it out of the war alive. 

In As Dead as Ever, you use addresses of deceased people to draw your own map of Amsterdam—a way of appropriating yourself of the new city. While you were growing up, was there a similar process in the way you designed your personal map of Beirut?

While growing up, Beirut was not so much a geographical city. It was torn down to its elements: it was streets, gas stations, shops… All streets had lost their names. It used to be divided and subdivided everyday. I could not see Beirut in an eyeless map. And even today, most of the Beiruties do not know how to read a map of their city. Beirut, the city, was a name, an idea. The streets, the geography did not necessarily correspond to that city. 

What is the history of the Noteboomschool, to which RedRum info refers? Why does it make references to The Shining, by Stanley Kubrick?

In the beginning of the last century, Noteboomschool was a school for children with respiratory problems. The school has an intense history, since many sick children had died in the building. DasArts, the school of performing arts, was the first institution to occupy the building after the closing down of Noteboomschool, in the early 1990s. The building is quite eerie, with long corridors and multiple doors. Through the installation RedRum, we tried to evoke the history of the building, and our relation to this school as newcomers. We wanted to revive the myth of the school, calling the kids to come back, as revenants, to reclaim their space. It was an attempt to think our relation to the new space we wanted to occupy, commenting on the “unheimlich” (unearthly) feeling we were all sensing in this new building. A tricycle was offered to DasArts to be put in its long corridor, as homage to Kubrick’s The Shining. 

The images you mention in you performance Give Me a Body Then are seductive and, sometimes, deadly. What is the power of the image, for you?

The relation between photography and death has always been evoked. Images bring us back to an objectified state, and are always in tension between the photographed and the photograph. One of the very first photographs ever made is a self-portrait of Bayard as a drowned man, dated 1840. Photography from its birth was flirting with death, and therefore carried the germ of its own end. I find this character of images quite seductive. As a graphic designer, I am a producer of images, but I am aware of the power of the images I produce: a power, even over me. I see the authority of certain images in their availability to be touched, to be looked at and to look back at us; in their availability to be possessed and to be penetrated. 

Was this performance the first time you explored the limits between memory and fiction?

In all my work I do not draw a line between what is fiction and what is memory. In Un Cercle autour du Soleil I narrate a personal relation to my body, and to Beirut. But in what seems to be an intimate account of the war years, I allow fiction to inhabit my story. I do not question these limits and I surely do not try to define them. I feel a need to fictionalize my experience, so I can explore the link between body and public space, personal memory and collective fantasy. I find, through fiction, the unconscious is able to inhabit public space. 

You are preparing an installation in collaboration with Rabih Mroué for Hadith (Conversation), a group exhibition to be shown later this year in Beirut. What is it about?

The title of the installation is I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again. It uses a reproduction of famous photographs of performances of western body artists. These reproduced photographs are laid on the backdrop of the images of the demonstration of one million Lebanese people on March 14, 2005, after the murder of former prime minister Rafic Hariri. The reproductions are of Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966-67), Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), and Vito Acconci’s Conversions (1971). In our society, the individual has no place; we are always part of a religious group, part of a tribe, a family. The installation tries to think the relation these body artists had to their body, and our relation to our bodies when being part of this massive demonstration in Beirut. As individuals, this demonstration expels us and throws us out. Do we have a face when we are part of one million other faces? 

What are your current projects, apart from Hadith?

Currently I am preparing a video project as a continuation of my research about bodies and cities. I am now in the process of writing a series of small texts as a preparation for this video.