[spectre] screening and discussion: everything and nothing

[Diana McCarty]

[ For those of you in or around Berlin... ]



Screening and Discussion with Jayce Salloum & special guests
RAUM3, Bootlab: Ziegelstr 22  (nahe Monbijoupark)
Sonntag, 4 August, 21:00


(as if) beauty never ends..    +     everything and nothing


Eintritt Frei:  Join in for viewing, drinking, Denken, & discussing....
In cooperation mit: b.books & Werkleitz Biennale

www.werkleitz.de
www.bbooksz.de
www.bootlab.org

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(as if) beauty never ends..
Jayce Salloum, Lebanon/Canada, 11:22, 2002

A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and plants 
growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 
1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon. Cloud 
footage, Hubbell space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract 
shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present 
context and forbearance. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan 
(a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told 
by the rubble of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio 
accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on 
dystopia in contemporary times. A elegiac response working directly, 
viscerally, and metaphorically.


Originally commissioned and screened by the 5th Werkleitz Biennale, 2002


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everything and nothing, part 1 from the continuous tape, "untitled"
Jayce Salloum, 40:40,  France/Canada, 2001


An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a
figure (of resistance) and subject with, *Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National
Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the
Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam
torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for
10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and
will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image
and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera
juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the
distance between the subject and the loss, of what is left behind and what
remains.

*Soha Bechara is a heroine in Lebanon, pictures of her are seen in many
houses in the South and posters of her were seen all around downtown Beirut
when I was working there in the early 90s. She was captured in 1988  for
trying to assassinate the general of the SLA, Antoine Lahad (the South
Lebanese Army was a proxy militia set up & controlled by the Israeli forces
to give a Lebanese facade to the occupation of South Lebanon). I didn't ask
her anything specifically about the torture she underwent or the trauma of
detention, she was being interviewed to death by the European and Arab press
over the details of her captivity and the minutiae of her surviving it and
the conditions in El-Khiam and the detainees and the resistance. I went to
her small dorm room, not much bigger than her cell (she is presently studying
international law at the Sorbonne), she sat on her bed and I asked her about
the distance lived between Khiam and Paris, and Beirut and Paris, and what
she left in Khiam and what she brought with her, a story about flowers and
how she never puts them in water, how it felt for her now to be under such
demand, and who she was, and what the title of the tape should be, and a few
other things. This video material that I recorded of the time spent with her
is not precious, just time and a conversation, and intense intimacy at a
close and unbreachable distance

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Mehr Links Von Salloum:

http://www.dijafragma.com/konverzacija/1salloum.htm
http://www.civilisations.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_20p5.jpg
http://www.wwvf.nl/2001/programme/0salloum.htm
http://www.argosarts.org/exhibition-salloum.html
http://www.lot.at/politics/contributions/s_jayce1.htm
http://www.lot.at/politics/contributions/s_jayce2.htm
http://www.wwvf.nl/2001/0newarabvideo.htm