Associação Cultural Videobrasil

You live in Amsterdam. Why did you choose the Netherlands? 

Two years after finishing my course at the Lebanese University in Beirut, I realized I needed to go to another city. For reasons unclear to me, no longer could I be a flâneur in Beirut at that moment. I believe I was a flâneur since the day I learned to walk the streets with my father or mother around Beirut, way before I knew about or was able to read Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Beirut has a series of alleys in between houses and buildings, empty, deserted plots that made it the ideal city for an amateur flâneur. In Beirut, even though there was no official war in that particular moment, you could sense that people hated and discriminated each other. Tourists and expatriates had returned to the country; the center and other parts of the city underwent a massive renewal; there was a notable increase in trade flow. I would go to the same bar on Hamra Street in Beirut almost every day, it was called The Barometer, and I would drink until four in the morning. I had never left Beirut, I was twenty-four years old and thought the world was limited to Hamra Street and Corniche, Zarif, Cola, and Barbir, which are different areas of the city. For a change, Jemayzé and Ashrafieh. I had the “Hamra syndrome” and, like many other people, I still have it. To the flâneur, the city is a labyrinth. Beirut, however, was becoming more of a comfortable room than a labyrinth to me.
At that time, the most convincing reason for living abroad was to study. The Rietveld Academie was the ideal place for me, for there not only was I able to get to know, I could also compare myself to young artists from all over the world. In Amsterdam, as art students, we float across “castrated” cultures. Nothing is real to us, and everything is real at the same time, and that helped me try to discover who I was. After three years, I finished my studies at the Rietveld Academie and was accepted at Rijksakademie. From 2006 onwards, I started living in Beirut and Amsterdam.
Working with my project The Sea Is a Stereo, still under development, has given me the chance to be a flâneur in Beirut once again. I am a flâneur among those beachgoers who turn their backs every day to the city in which they live, and swim onto the horizon as if they were about to vacate it. In The Sea Is a Stereo, I give a lecture in which I compare my status as a student in Amsterdam to that of swimmers in Beirut, and to me we have decided to be on the threshold between emigration and immigration. They inhabit a space that is made of water. In Amsterdam, I am far from my parents, my tribe, my language, my surrounding family. Making some other street into my favorite place, turning myself into an immigrant in the wrong place, perhaps, at the wrong time, perhaps, being “a stranger to myself.”
Quoting Kristeva: “The foreigner has changed his discomforts into a base of resistance, a citadel of life. Moreover, had he stayed home, he might perhaps have become a dropout, an invalid, an outlaw... Without a home, he disseminates on the contrary the actor’s paradox: multiplying masks and ‘false selves’ he is never completely true nor completely false, as he is able to tune in to loves and aversions the superficial antennae of a basaltic heart.”

In your work I was able to detect a touch of irony and humor, and it seems central to your creation a quest to destroy stereotypes regarding what it is to be a Lebanese and an Arab, like the one about having your life conditioned by faith and politics. 

I am not as ironic as it seems. If you have a second look at my work, you will perhaps realize that I am more like Kristeva’s “stranger to myself” and an existentialist. But it is also true that I am ironic. I do not regard it as a goal in my work; I believe that this humor has more to do with the absurd of existence. Humor sometimes helps me make characters and stories more human. 
For example, when I made Reclining Men with Sculpture, I really wanted to try and think that art, as well as political leaders, is typically a human creation. That was after the Israeli invasion in 2006, when the civil war began with posters and images of political leaders all over the streets in Beirut. It was incredible: you could not dream of anything else. Those politicians and leaders would go real deep into your unconscious mind. If you were to leave home to go to the grocery store, you would see Hariri and his son ten times, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Hezbollah, more than twenty times, Nabih Berri, Walid Junblat, general Aoun in posters and banners covering huge buildings, and dangling in the middle of the streets.
There was nothing to be done about it; we had to live like that. But I wanted to change that and, instead of having them control my imagination, I started to create fictional situations for them, in order to make them into people that had the same cultural tastes and the same needs as I do. That is why you will see them at the Venice Biennale or the Tehran museum of modern art. Those are funny or maybe quite absurd settings.
As for the second part of your question, I sometimes think war is a sort of opium. In Beirut, for instance, the war keeps us busy, we do not have to face boredom, as in Amsterdam. We have a reason for everything: our failures, our depressions, the fact that we are poor, rich, ignorant, corrupt, drunk, for not reading enough, for having a headache, for not combing our hair... The people that I knew who committed suicide did so when there was no war. When the conflict was going on they would not dare to commit suicide, or maybe they were too busy with survival strategies. 
When I made Rawane’s Song, I had seen, in the Netherlands and Europe, a huge amount of works of art and conferences on the Middle East. Unfortunately, most were not critical enough. All they did was say: “We are exotic victims, come and see us.” To me that is unacceptable, and I made Rawane’s Song as a reaction to that attitude. That is why there are some politically incorrect parts in it. I wanted to be more honest, and the only way that I could do it was by appearing to be naïve.
Nevertheless, I would not say that my artistic concern is to disrupt stereotypes linked to what it means to be a Lebanese and an Arab. Maybe this aspect is openly approached in Rawane’s Song as an initial layer, but it would be limiting to say that that is the main concern of my artistic practice. Due to the fact that, as I have mentioned before, I am above all a flâneur. Or at least that is how I feel right now. According to Tabucchi, Pessoa needed no more than a chair and a desk to be able to travel. His chair and his desk were his legs, which took him far. I envy him, in a way. In the streets of Amsterdam, I believe you must ride a bicycle in order to be a flâneur. And I like doing that, I like pedaling without having to go anywhere. In Beirut, it is impossible to ride a bike, the city is too mountainous. Walking is the ideal thing, and, as I said before, it was by looking at the swimmers in Beirut that I became a flâneur again. 

How did you discover the characters in the series The Sea Is a Stereo?

As a matter of fact, I did not discover them. They are all my father’s swimming pals. They hang out together all the time, and I am always with them, so it happened naturally. But I must admit that I thought about doing work with them as early as 2005. Abou Sakhra, just like some of the other swimmers, loves to be creative in front of the camera, and that gives him the opportunity to feel good looking and eternal, which is something we all need, in one way or another, as human beings. While I was making The Sea Is a Stereo, many times I thought of Jean Rouch and the way in which he created a film with the people he was recording as a sociologist. I find it impressive how they became actors after having worked with him for years. I dream that one day me, my father, Abou Sakhra, and the others will feel so comfortable together that we may improvise a film. Anyway, the idea for this particular work is that it is still in progress. In Beirut, there are many different groups, swimming in different places, but I am mostly interested in the men surrounding my father, and the work gradually becomes broader and broader.
When I was studying painting at the Lebanese University, in Rawché, I spent two years with Lina, Mahmoud, and Nagi, my best friends, swimming every day at Dalieh, the same beach that those men sometimes go to. I would stay at the beach even if it was raining. Sometimes my father would stay with us. He swims every day, for the past twenty years. Every day, he dedicates one hour of his routine to it, no matter what. With Lina, Mahmoud, and Nagi, I stayed immersed on Dalieh for two years. We were aware of the fact that it would make us strangers in Beirut without leaving the city, and that it would help us to be like a group of flâneurs. We were in Beirut, but we were not there. The sea somehow swallows up the sounds of the city, you can see it from atop the mountain, but you do not hear it.

Art takes on an anecdotal character in many of your works. It is not at the center of events, and is part of an innocent past of characters such as the girl who sang like her grandmother and then became a housewife. What type of relations do you like to make between life and art? 

Making art to me is very close to being who you are. What I mean is I do not separate art from life. Even though my work pretends to be fictional at times, it all comes from living experiences, and from the present that is taking place right now in front of my eyes or under my skin, inside myself, my “strange self.” That can also be seen in As if I Don’t Fit There, in which I wanted to show that whether you make art or you are a lawyer or a housewife, as you have mentioned, there is no big difference, because at the end of the day you define everything based on the way you view things, and not the opposite. Thus, perhaps we are back at the point where what seemed anecdotal to you, is more of an existential thing to me.

The NOA magazine project is also quite ironic, as it is a quasi-secret publication: you prescreened the readers and led them to a specific location in order to read the magazine. Which were the purposes of that project?

NOA is more of a performance-magazine. It is a publication that not everyone is authorized to read. And even though it is a magazine, I printed no more than one or two copies of each number. People are not allowed to take it home in order to read it comfortably in their private spaces. It is a very complex work, and I am starting to work on the next edition right now. The first issue is entitled Treason Is like a Bible. The second issue is still untitled, because it is in progress. I cannot tell you now why NOA has to be restricted, and not open to a broad public, but it is definitely not because I am trying to be ironic. The reason is more vital and urgent. It has to do with safety, because the contents of NOA must not be disclosed to all. 

What are your upcoming projects?

I am preparing the next issue of NOA little by little, and I like the fact that it is based on teamwork. The coeditors are Mona Abu Rayyan, Fadi El Tofeili, and Noa Roi, and the producer is Christine Tohme. The creative director is Lynn Othman, and that makes NOA magazine very special to me. I must thank them for helping me make NOA and I hope that we may continue doing it together. I am also preparing new works, some of them for The Sea Is a Stereo. I am making the video Let’s Not Swim Then!, and I would like to finish it soon. I am also starting to work on brand new projects that I am showcasing at the Open Studios in the Rijksakademie, as well as the videos and photographs that I recently created for The Sea Is a Stereo.