The Lebanese filmmakers and artists recount the start and evolution of their journey in search of a poetic and committed narrative.
‘We met at a very young age and started to make art when we were about 19. We have always considered ourselves as a duo – as a collective, we could say today. It is a life project. There is no separation between our life and our art. We often say that we came to our practices, both artistic and cinematographic, by accident and above all by necessity, given the context that we lived in. We did not study art nor cinema, but literature. This is also why there is always a form of storytelling in our practice. Even if our works are centered on formal research, they tell alternative stories to the dominant narrative. We describe them as secret stories. They explain what destruction does to our images, to our representations, and they reveal a sense of latency, the invisibility of forms, digital scams, a forgotten space project, or more recently the geology or archaeology of underground spaces in cities.
‘At the end of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1990s we began creating images. Things happened for us in a very organic way. Nothing was really planned. We were growing up in Beirut, a city that was coming out of a war and was utterly destroyed. We felt the need to keep traces through art. This context made it possible to ask real questions of representation, about the construction of the imagination. The country was in effervescence, in full reconstruction. On the one hand we had no academic artistic training, while on the other the art market in Lebanon was still nonexistent. We were therefore in a limitless space of play. We have kept this freedom in our practice by working with several media, such as photography, sculpture, tapestry, installation, film, and performance. This fluidity is also explained by the fact that, at the beginning, we had neither rules nor codes. Encounters, chance, and serendipity have played a central role in our research to this day.
‘This context also incited us to use specific artistic tools, such as photography. The relationship to reality that this type of medium allows helped us to understand a changing territory and a city, Beirut, in constant transformation. The idea of representation was not just a formal question, it fundamentally defined our relationship to the world. This is how we started to question ourselves. Such was our artistic training.
‘From the start we have been rejecting categories and definitions. At the same time we were looking for a territory in which we could recognize ourselves and establish a place for meeting and sharing. However we are not tied to a definite position or place. These notions are always in motion for us. We consider ourselves researchers. We are not interested in what we have found. We are interested in the idea of searching and exploring, of immersing ourselves in the vertigo of time. Our latest project, Unconformities [2016–2022], deals with the invisible and underground world of three cities – Athens, Paris, and Beirut – as well as the Roman city of Orthosia, which was buried, forgotten, and which recently reappeared.
‘One defining moment in our career was our first exhibition, “Beyrouth: Fictions urbaines” [1997], which had the subtitle “The Archeology of our Gaze”, at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. This project allowed us to reflect, through photography, on the way our gaze has been formed and transformed over time. The last work in this exhibition, Le Cercle de confusion [1997], presents a photograph of Beirut cut up into 3,000 pieces, where each fragment is marked on the back with the phrase ‘Beirut does not exist.’ Visitors were invited to choose and take a fragment of this photograph, which, as it was removed, revealed a mirror reflecting each individual’s own image. It is a work that we still often present and which marked a pivotal moment in our practice, as we understood that we would not be doing traditional photography and that a territory like Lebanon can act as a revealing signal, a guardian for the state of the world.
‘Unconformities includes sculpture, drawing, film, photography, and tapestry. It occupies an essential place in our practice. After the explosions at the Port of Beirut in 2020, our studio was destroyed. Tapestry-making is a lengthy process and had a restorative power during that period. From one work to another, we never stop learning and exploring different media that open our formal field and push us to experiment, to look for new approaches, both poetic and political. Today we are preparing for the Biennale de Lyon. We will present three different artworks. They are linked to a project entitled I Stared at Beauty… [2020], which questions and places poetry in opposition to the chaos of the world and its uncertainties.’
From the Art Basel website
