Close Encounters

A project by Charlotte Bank exploring the interrelations between urban spaces, memory and reality presented at the 1st Visual Arts Festival Damascus

Artists: Marwa Arsanios, Raed Yassin, Mohanad Yacoubi, Salah Saouli, Bass Brèche, Gheith Al-Amine, Christophe Katrib, Siska, Ghassan Halwani.

The exhibition „Close Encounters“ presents works by nine artists from Lebanon and Palestine that all investigate different aspects of the phenomenon „city”. The 21st century is often termed the „century of the metropolis“. For the first time in the history of mankind more people live in cities than in rural districts, the urbanization of large regions of the Earth is constantly increasing, urban life styles becoming the norm. Thereby cities represent highly complex social structures offering space to a large number of different and even rivaling communities built on such varying concepts as class, professions, ethnicity, education, politics and economy. This diversity is what guarantees the life and cultural dynamics of the city, but it also holds the inherent danger of getting out of balance with possible disastrous effects.

Hardly a city in recent history has experienced this to such a dramatic extent as Beirut, making it - in the words of researcher Mona Takieddin Amyuni - “the symbol of the possible fate of every city, the “archetypal city”, model of every city in all times as an extremely fragile construct with the possibilities and dangers inherent in this phenomenon”. In this reading, the fate of Beirut seems to remind every city dweller of the fragility of his/her own existence. This also accounts for the overwhelming presence of themes of urbanity, destruction and memory in the works of many artists from the city. Bass Brèche’s film “Both” (2007) relates through dream-sequence like images the two cities Beirut and London and shows fragments of the life of a former militiaman trying to escape from the ghosts of his past. He builds up his own world centered on a beautiful woman who seems to move in and out of the images in a space located between reality and fantasy. In a similar way, Salah Saouli’s installation “Movimento” (2010) draws the spectator into a dream-like process of recalling and imagining. Through the use of photos of destroyed cityscapes, alternating between sharp and unsharp images in a pulsating rhythm, the piece invites a personal engagement of the spectator, a journey into personal memories. Creating a kind of movie in the head, the work serves as a reminder, a memento of the fragility of human existence and the safe world we seek to create around us.

The memory of destruction and violence in these works seems to leave no possibility for escape or relief. Whether an actual escape from memory and mental inheritance is at all possible or even desirable is the subject of Ghassan Halwani’s “Jibraltar” (2005). In this experimental video combining animation and fiction, the idea of an adult’s birth is explored, a grown up human being with all faculties but without the burden of a past. However, in Halwani’s tale, this experiment only leads to disorientation and emptiness. The protagonist is lost in the desolate spaces of a featureless city, similarly un-inscribed as his own mind.

Fantasies and anxieties of various kinds are often projected onto urban landscapes. For Italo Calvino cities were closely related to dreams in the way that both phenomena are constructed through desire and fear. His “Invisible Cities” presents a multitude of possible and impossible cities, some of them resembling dream-like mirages taken out of ancient legends and full of alluring temptations, others closer to the nightmarish visions of Paul Auster’s “Country of Last Things”, a world where everybody is at war with everybody and mass-organized suicide seems an attractive way out of life’s misery. Somewhere in between these two extremes, the works gathered in the exhibition are located.

The labyrinthic alleys and stairs of the London underground form the setting of Mohanad Yacoubi’s video “Exit”, a reflection on space, freedom and confinement in relation to the human body. Hostility and confining coldness, that leave no room for human creativity are beside danger, violence and crime some of the negative connotations of cities. These dark sides of city life are at the centre of Raed Yassin’s experimental music and video performance “Horror is Universal”. Through a mixture of extracts from Egyptian popular crime and detective films, re-arranged and abstracted, the piece presents a plunge into the depths of dark obsessions and fears. Different kinds of fantasies stand at the centre of the works of Christophe Katrib (“Rue du délire”, 2005) and Gheith Al-Amine (“Once Upon a Sidewalk”, 2009). The urban settings appear as unknown lands to explore and conquer, “asphalt jungles” where adventures yet undreamed of are waiting. In an investigation of the realms of voyeurism, reality and the imaginary, both videos seem to blur the boundaries between observer and the object of observation and question our perception of subjectivity.

Urban spaces are subjected to constant change and continuous re-interpretation. As a result of changing socio-political circumstances, neighbourhoods witness surprising re-shapings, architecture is re-conceptualized and re-structured. Siska’s two-channel video installation investigates the contradictions of placing race horse stables in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut. The precious horses belonging to rich families and politicians are kept in some of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city where their grooms also live. The piece contrasts the beauty of the horses, the harshness of the life circumstances of the men taking care of them and the roughness of the surrounding city and thus reflects the stark discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and power in contemporary Beirut.

In “I’ve Heard Three Stories“ (2009), Marwa Arsanios documents the metamorphosis of the once fashionable “Acapulco” beach resort in the outskirts of Beirut into makeshift dwellings for poor refugees. The experimental 1950s architecture of the “Chalet Raja Saab” stand in contrast to the improvised re-buildings of the new dwellers who nevertheless seem to take a certain pride in the history of their home. While being a documentation of the shifting uses of entertainment architecture, the video is also an investigation of different stories related to the resort, notably the disappearance of a young dancer from the Crazy Horse Saloon of Beirut and frequent guest of the place. Partly documentary, partly 2D animation, the piece links past and present, the stories of the former clientele of the resort are interwoven with the efforts of the new inhabitants to carve out a space for living in an alien setting.

While all works are firmly positioned in the 21^st century, they investigate timeless aspects of urban reality, the conflicts, changes and dreams connected to this “most precious collective invention of civilization, second only to language itself in the transmission of culture”, as urban historian Lewis Mumford said of the “City”.

“Close Encounters” is part of the official program of the 1^st Visual Arts’ Festival, Damascus”, organized by Association IN (AIN), 18^th  – 31st October 2010, Zeitouneh House, Zeitouneh, Medhat Pasha - Old City, Damascus