Presentation of ideas under study
A lecture-performance by Rabih Mroué
Friday 11 January 2008 at 19.00
We are happy to announce the initial performance by Lebanese artist and performer Rabih Mroué. Rabih Mroué has performed internationally with great success in the past few years, mostly in the context of theatre festivals. He has become one of the most pertinent critical artistic voices inside and outside of Lebanon today. In his performance Make Me Stop Smoking, Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clipping and eyewitness reposts, that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations. In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archive documents as much as he negotiates the validity of the reconstruction 'reality'. What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representation?
"I have been collecting worthless material for almost ten years now, taking good care arranging it, documenting it, indexing it, and preserving it from any possible damage. This material is constituted of cut outs from local newspapers, photographs, interviews, news stories, excerpts from television programs, objects and other things ...Today I possess what resembles an archive, or let's say I possess a real archive that relates only to me: a kind of added memory that occupies different corners of my domestic space, despite the fact that I do not actually need. It is an invented memory that is exhausting me, and which I cannot liberate myself from. For this reason, I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that – by making it public – I can get rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn't know how to erase itself."
– Rabih Mroué