02:05
Faizan
When in 2005 the English playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he gave a speech entitled "Art, Truth and Politics". The speech is of great assistance in the interpretation of Lamia Joreige's Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, without being actually related to it, because of the similarity of the opinions conveyed.
Pinter began his lecture saying:
"In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.' I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?"
In her video-piece Joreige faces the same contradiction: the necessity of playing a double role, the artist and the citizen. Such a contradiction gives life to a work which cannot be easily labelled as fiction or as documentary, but shares the nature of them both. The artist employs archival material and a digital camera to record her research, but does not use any voice-over to guide the audience through its interpretation.
After the 1975-1990 civil war, the Lebanese government took two controversial decisions that are addressed in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere. First, the State opted for complete amnesty towards the militias, which means that no investigations have been carried out to discover what happened to those who were taken or who the perpetrators were. Ostensibly, the government wanted to avoid a new vicious circle of violence and revenge, but at the same time, the families of the victims obtained no justice at all. Second, post-war reconstruction plans took no account of the conflict, obliterating all traces of it in the refurbished areas. "Buildings have been torn down, plots of land have been re-zoned and streets and traffic patterns have been redrawn, all radically altering the layout of Beirut's spatial environment". Everything seems to point to the idea that the State wants to forget, without accounting for what happened.
Joreige's video opens with an image of a digital map of Beirut, where from north to south a green line halves the city into East and West. The artist is redrawing the line of checkpoints that were used during the wear to separate the conflicting sects-points across which it seems that roughly 18.000 have been kidnapped from both sides and disappeared. Similarly to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, the Beirut line divided disputing sects: in this case, Christians from Muslims. In the press release anticipating his Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, the artist Francis Alÿs asks, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, "Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place?" One could ask the same question about Lamia Joreige's video: when she asks people living next to the spots where kidnappings took place whether they knew about any episode of abduction, and shows them archival photos of the checkpoints, does the action of remembering produce any change in the way they perceive the surrounding environment in the present moment? Her questions often produce a "palpable sense of disorientation" in the interviewees, as if they had never thought about the new geography of Beirut as compared to the war-period one.
The artist generally interrogates people who are old enough to remember not only the war, but also the city as it used to be before. However, when she shows them the archival, black and white images of the Green Line, not everyone is able to collocate them with the present landscape or to give names and describe the circumstances of the abductions. For instance, two middle aged men, once shown a picture, start discussing the exact location of the latter, until the one who is able to be more specific dismisses the other, telling him "You are too young to remember!" Since no further proof is given, the viewer probably deduces that the "older" man is right, and yet there is no evidence to confirm where the truth lies. In another scene filmed in the Sodeco area, Joreige obtains the name of a kidnapped individual, Imad Arzouni, by a man who claims to have been his neighbour, but when she moves over just one street, the answer she gets is radically different: "Arzouni? No, he was not kidnapped. [Who told you this] just wants to talk for the sake of talking." But the interview with this second witness stops here and the audience is given nothing to decide who is telling the truth.
Pinter began his lecture saying:
"In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.' I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?"
In her video-piece Joreige faces the same contradiction: the necessity of playing a double role, the artist and the citizen. Such a contradiction gives life to a work which cannot be easily labelled as fiction or as documentary, but shares the nature of them both. The artist employs archival material and a digital camera to record her research, but does not use any voice-over to guide the audience through its interpretation.
After the 1975-1990 civil war, the Lebanese government took two controversial decisions that are addressed in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere. First, the State opted for complete amnesty towards the militias, which means that no investigations have been carried out to discover what happened to those who were taken or who the perpetrators were. Ostensibly, the government wanted to avoid a new vicious circle of violence and revenge, but at the same time, the families of the victims obtained no justice at all. Second, post-war reconstruction plans took no account of the conflict, obliterating all traces of it in the refurbished areas. "Buildings have been torn down, plots of land have been re-zoned and streets and traffic patterns have been redrawn, all radically altering the layout of Beirut's spatial environment". Everything seems to point to the idea that the State wants to forget, without accounting for what happened.
Joreige's video opens with an image of a digital map of Beirut, where from north to south a green line halves the city into East and West. The artist is redrawing the line of checkpoints that were used during the wear to separate the conflicting sects-points across which it seems that roughly 18.000 have been kidnapped from both sides and disappeared. Similarly to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, the Beirut line divided disputing sects: in this case, Christians from Muslims. In the press release anticipating his Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, the artist Francis Alÿs asks, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, "Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place?" One could ask the same question about Lamia Joreige's video: when she asks people living next to the spots where kidnappings took place whether they knew about any episode of abduction, and shows them archival photos of the checkpoints, does the action of remembering produce any change in the way they perceive the surrounding environment in the present moment? Her questions often produce a "palpable sense of disorientation" in the interviewees, as if they had never thought about the new geography of Beirut as compared to the war-period one.
The artist generally interrogates people who are old enough to remember not only the war, but also the city as it used to be before. However, when she shows them the archival, black and white images of the Green Line, not everyone is able to collocate them with the present landscape or to give names and describe the circumstances of the abductions. For instance, two middle aged men, once shown a picture, start discussing the exact location of the latter, until the one who is able to be more specific dismisses the other, telling him "You are too young to remember!" Since no further proof is given, the viewer probably deduces that the "older" man is right, and yet there is no evidence to confirm where the truth lies. In another scene filmed in the Sodeco area, Joreige obtains the name of a kidnapped individual, Imad Arzouni, by a man who claims to have been his neighbour, but when she moves over just one street, the answer she gets is radically different: "Arzouni? No, he was not kidnapped. [Who told you this] just wants to talk for the sake of talking." But the interview with this second witness stops here and the audience is given nothing to decide who is telling the truth.
Posted in: arts
