I was born in Beirut.
When I was young, the civil war started, which
lasted for 15 years.
When we started working, we started to do
works about the war.
But we started to escape from telling what
happened during the war and we started to
do art works that is reflecting on the war,
and trying to analyze, to understand what
happened.
So we were not interesting to tell about the
horrors of the wars.
We were much more interested in ideas and
questions.
For me, theater is always, like, where I have
to provoke myself.
So I don't like to provoke audience.
I find something that challenging me, something
that makes me afraid of, and when I feel such
kind of things, then I would say, okay, now
I'm on the right track.
The non-academic lecture could be equivalent
to what is known as lecture-performance, but
I prefer not to use performance because what
I do actually is I present the lecture.
So there is a form that is taken for granted
like: lecturer, audience, table.
In "Sand in the Eyes," I put next to each other
two images that contrast each other.
This is a photo from a video concerned with
terrorism and this is a still photo from a
video concerned with the war on terrorism.
One is very very clear and sharp, actually,
which is the terrorist one, and one is blurred
from far away, you don't see really.
But both of them actually document the act
of killing.
I work a lot on this idea, where is the border
between the subjectivity and objectivity,
or like also between what is fact and how
we tell the fact.
So it's always an invitation for the audience
to be skeptical and to think.
[Metronome clicking]
[Music]
"Borborygmus" is a work in collaboration with
Lina Majdalanie, my partner, and with a friend,
Mazen Kerbaj, who's an artist and a musician.
Mainly, it's about our age, about life, also
about our relation to our profession.
And the only condition that we put to ourself
is that we should not do anything that we
used to do before.
We had a lot of improvisations together and
then we started to put things that are very
personal from our lives, our fears.
And this has pushed us to go to some other
spots that we don't know in theater and this
is what is very interesting for us.
In the exhibition, "Again we are defeated,"
the idea it comes from my experience in my
country where, like, the dead, especially
the killed, they don't leave the living.
We walk in the streets in Lebanon and you
see all the photos of the dead.
And I see this image, like, maybe when they
took the corpse, the shadows stays.
And then the shadows start haunting our daily
life.
I wanted them all to be one work altogether,
and be the screen that will receive, or welcome,
the shadows that comes from the projector.
We had hope to go for a better future, better
country, but every time something happened
and it's like worse and worse, and every time
we are defeated.
Again we are defeated.
But we still going on with our life which
means that there's still hope.
And as the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous
said, “we are condemned to hope.”
