Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Endless Fall / or Love Innocently

The first love that marked my late adolescent years was of a schoolmate, a classic scenario for gay men in general, when a young man desires a classmate who doesn't share his feelings, and who is eager to have his first-time sex with a woman. My beloved friend had a childhood friend who had left Lebanon after high school to study abroad, and whom I used to regard as a rival before I even met him. I had been told so many things about him and felt I knew him fairly well. Among the things my two friends had shared in the past was a dream, literally a dream, which embodied the evidence of their closeness. It was a dream of being in an elevator, freefalling endlessly. Ambiguous as dreams may be, they were both not sure whether they were falling or flying. As much as this dream embodied their friendship, it was my first initiation to jealousy.

It was a funny and awkward situation, and indeed a strong friendship, fortified naturally by the feeling of isolation and closure that one experiences in a situation of war. It is the same war that is sometimes remembered by others in my generation as the years of sexual openness, which-to my surprise now-was not the case in my middle-class protected entourage. 

For me, war experience has strong ties to details, and that is indeed shared by many, who were sheltered inside-relatively safe-domestic spaces. As a child I learned to use my pen and paper to write accounts of the war, accounts of family activity, or else. I learned to use my camera at home, and to use my audio recorder to register all that happened around me. In war times, the sound of the fridge signaling the end of long power cuts used to evoke a feeling of normality, even safety. This is not about nostalgia as much as it is simply about discovering the power of the detail, banality's capacity to speak with emotions. 

There is a ten-year age difference between Ali Cherri and me, yet we share so much of this experience, which I wouldn't necessarily describe as traumatizing. For my generation, talking about war is talking about childhood, adolescence, and innocently about first love experiences. When I watched Un Cercle autour du Soleil I was marked with Ali's imagination of Beirut's cityscape, which enabled him to make a continuous and surprisingly endless tilt-down on an ugly, yet charmingly familiar urban tissue. “I was certain that any confrontation between my weak flabby flesh and death was absurdly inappropriate. I lacked the body suitable for a dramatic death.” Was Beirut saved from destruction by its chaos, or is chaos a result of being through war? Why would one want to know? The tilt becomes further disturbing because it alludes to a mutated body/city, or a surgical intervention on a dead body. Do we inhabit the ruins of our past city? 

Ali Cherri's work bases itself on personal history to communicate something about war. A story of a young boy's desire-collecting pictures of naked bodies and ending up with images of mostly dead people in Give Me a Body Then (performance)-becomes a story about war. The wings printed on a man's back become evidently about war. How can a story of war be told without the desire, the dream, and the life behind it? 

Body's natural desire for flying is betrayed by gravity. I remember this dream, freefalling in an elevator shaft. The truth is that I, too, used to have a similar dream when I was young, a dream that would start with falling, and end with ejaculation in bed. The dream had a pleasurable taste of liberating oneself from gravity. Now I know that flying is everybody's dream. 

Beirut, February 9, 2006