Filed under: Cosmic love
What has been off about this trip and this festival for me (SUBVISION. KUNST. OFF) is the time lapse between my set day of departure and my actual departure from the country I am leaving from. In both cases, leaving from Beirut to Hamburg or from Hamburg to Beirut, I left the day after. This is bizarre. I am already in Beirut now, but back on my way to Subvision, Hamburg. I even feel that the temperature is warmer, that my body is Beirut reactive. I want to see Fares, smell his skin and kiss his lips. Being off, taking that day off, was nice on my way to Hamburg; we had sex all day, we kissed ate and sweated. On my way back, that day is 24 kind of infinite hours.
If I hadn’t shopped last minute at the airport, and bought the Dr. Hauschka Shampoo and hand cream Mounira told me about, I would be on the plane now, as I would have had money to pay the difference of my ticket reservation. Maybe that it his bet on probabilities and chance, as something beyond the democratic potentialities each of us has.
Filed under: Blogroll
-why not start writing about the little girl ?
-now that I have time, waht will I do ? waste it ? or what ?
-what will bring me back if I lie ?
-what makes me do what I do
-literature is like fresh air
- what did Marguerite Duras said about writing
-I love TRopical ,when I see a coconut tree it makes me happy
-how many detours are needed
-01 444 227 is the phone number I need to call to have tampax delivered
-she still didn’t solve the problem
-all the conditions are there and nice
-in sex in the city , when Carry is depressed after her failed wedding with Big, she asks when she will laugh again. Samantha or Miranda answer when a joke is really funny
-useless information designed to infire my imagination…
-he said that I thought badly, how can that be ?
-she has left me with too much energy in my body
-explaining is “sortir de soi” just like that scream
This is an old post. Not very critical and more about being exhausted. What is scary is that I still have these fluctuations, from being breathless to being too excited to sustain anything. Fares says two things that I like a quote from Lacan that I am probably misquoting here ” La vie n’a pas assez de valeur pour faire un lache” and that I have to start to “travailler la matiere”.This is why I am posting this old entry, confronting an old entry, which I thought was probably not good enough or ? The matter is there, it need to be looked at and worked.
As my stay in Beirut becomes less of a stay and more of life routine that never really manages to impose itself, some questions circulating in the artistic and cultural scene in Beirut have surfaced more clearly.
The blog has changed since I moved back, always, to Beirut. It is certainly not as spontaneous as it use to be, maybe because the platform where it emerged is not there anymore. There are questions, sentences, issues that are of interest of course, but they never find the time, space or even desire to make it through the screen. Thoughts come without ever materializing like a repetitive exercise or a fold of the mind which prevents any new shape or direction to be taken. It’s not the thoughts in themselves, but more the exhausting temporal lapse between having them and experiencing what they can do, provoke. Need some brain moist. The more I let go, the more the distance is intimidating, the more my voice resonates through some shrill echoes.
It is maybe a question of adjustment and rhythm, finding a right entry point and take it from there. Drinking more water. Maybe it is about starting to read novels again or watch more French films or American mafia movies. Maybe it is about just doing it, again and again, that is what L. said. You become this or that , once you decide to do it. Since I have decided to do it, things have gotten more complicated. Maybe it is about becoming a “professional” and this is probably what is most violent since it excludes so many things (like the mosquito that is sucking my blood in this very moment) by working in given set of coordinates; a space, a schedule, a language, an outcome, having responsibility ? Of course, we always have to do this in a way or another, it’s the only way to contest boundaries. Pushing boundaries then has never been so physical and my energy economy is simply crashing and in desperate need of pure speculation, imaginative inputs, exciting stuff. a routine.
Going back to criticism. I have started to write reviews for magazines and try to be clever about it. My relationship with language is changing. I have a new illustrated and colored dictionary and K. gave me William Strunk JR. and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style”. I took on my good student attitude and my will to learn. Still have it for the moment.
Filed under: Blogroll
While discussing with Fares A. Zaatari’s work after the screening and discussion of his two films at BAC, “All is Well on the Boarder” and “In this house”, I came to realize a couple of things on the problematic artistic research raises in terms of the translating a research process and the kind of ethics that this involves.
The screenings were programmed within the framework of Akram’s exhibition taking place at Sfeir Semler and at BAC. The show mostly presented blown up and aestheticized photographs of contested landscapes, objects, letters. Photograph portraying his 15 years research, the objects he has unearthed and the people who became part of his work.
Akram compares his practice to that of an archaeologist, digging and excavating in a process involving a physical/romantic relation to the earth (“earth of endless secrets”). Historiography, contrarily to Raad’s project (and I think that he is always making an implicit point in distinguishing his process from his peer), is not an articulated concern; he is not having spasms over the truth/ fiction boundary but more on getting the actual job done (filmed and photographed).
The problem was, again, the gallery’s all sucking gigantic white cube and the commercial nature of the show; the pressure of the space, of the market and of recognition tints everything differently, bugging the relation between the artist and his/her research, like a short circuit no longer able to convey the problematic of translation and image making. Letters of prisoners were blown up and framed. The frame remained particularly present as an after image, consecrating the letters as posthumous objects.
Questions can be raised; what is Akram adding to the material besides the frames? What is the relation to the prisoners he is working on/ with? Are his subject merely models for “nature mortes” where to project bourgeois and homoerotic fantasies? Is Akram “their” translator because they can’t express their experience? (I am quoting here the prisoner Nabih Awada who intervened at the end of Akram’s discussion). Who is translating Akram?
Everybody turned towards the prisoner; electricity filled the room, the current was on again and amplified. Fares, in his philosophical reading of almost everything, identified the prisoner as the “voice of the truth”; as a hypothesis, Akram might have made the films, research, question the nature of images, worked hard on the editing but the prisoner was something else, which we could not yet identify or name: he is not the audience, nor the filmmaker, nor the critic, so who the fuck is Alice? Mirene who is always critical about everything, said he is the subject, I say maybe the model, the Fidel Castro of the interview, or what? Anyway he provoked a special attention when he spoke.
Was it the theatricality of the situation, when Akram, following an audience’s question on the nature of his relation with the prisoner, asked, after a brief reply, replied, if Nabih Awada wanted to add something. Was it the fact of bringing to the contemporary art community, in a contemporary art center, a person with a whole different experience and background, in the tradition of a never exhausted exoticism?
I still don’t know how to understand the real prisoner’s role. If he was an actor in the script, his role was with no doubt different then the one of the actors reciting prisoners’ testimony in Akram’s earlier film, “All is Well on the Border”. This live intervention somehow undid the script, the script of the gallery, of the commercial show, of the research’s weight. It testified for a particular relation between him and Akram.
I came to realize that you (the artists, the researcher) can have sustained and grounded relations with the people that you re/present in your work, the people you work through, the people that give you information, testimony, time, while simultaneously producing products (these two entities, where traditionally and I don’t know if logically separated for me).
That there is always exploitation and economies at work in human relations but that it doesn’t prevent engagement, although it also does not imply it. This is why I thought Akram was “nice” and that became somehow important as a position that could be attributed a certain value, beyond personal character. I do think that the economy between Akram and the prisoner is a surplus one. This surplus sometimes materializes in his work, making drawing of flowers actually smell like flowers (I am referring here to Nabih Awada’s intervention saying that through Akram’s work, he was able to smell the flowers of his own drawings).
