Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (click to view link)
When in 2005 the English playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he gave a speech entitled “Art, Truth and Politics”. The speech is of great assistance in the interpretation of Lamia Joreige’s Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, without being actually related to it, because of the similarity of the opinions conveyed.
Pinter began his lecture saying:
“In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”
In her video-piece Joreige faces the same contradiction: the necessity of playing a double role, the artist and the citizen. Such a contradiction gives life to a work which cannot be easily labelled as fiction or as documentary, but shares the nature of them both. The artist employs archival material and a digital camera to record her research, but does not use any voice-over to guide the audience through its interpretation.
After the 1975-1990 civil war, the Lebanese government took two controversial decisions that are addressed in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere. First, the State opted for complete amnesty towards the militias, which means that no investigations have been carried out to discover what happened to those who were taken or who the perpetrators were. Ostensibly, the government wanted to avoid a new vicious circle of violence and revenge, but at the same time, the families of the victims obtained no justice at all. Second, post-war reconstruction plans took no account of the conflict, obliterating all traces of it in the refurbished areas. “Buildings have been torn down, plots of land have been re-zoned and streets and traffic patterns have been redrawn, all radically altering the layout of Beirut’s spatial environment”. Everything seems to point to the idea that the State wants to forget, without accounting for what happened.
Joreige’s video opens with an image of a digital map of Beirut, where from north to south a green line halves the city into East and West. The artist is redrawing the line of checkpoints that were used during the wear to separate the conflicting sects—points across which it seems that roughly 18.000 have been kidnapped from both sides and disappeared. Similarly to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, the Beirut line divided disputing sects: in this case, Christians from Muslims. In the press release anticipating his Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, the artist Francis Alÿs asks, with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Green Line, “Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place?” One could ask the same question about Lamia Joreige’s video: when she asks people living next to the spots where kidnappings took place whether they knew about any episode of abduction, and shows them archival photos of the checkpoints, does the action of remembering produce any change in the way they perceive the surrounding environment in the present moment? Her questions often produce a “palpable sense of disorientation” in the interviewees, as if they had never thought about the new geography of Beirut as compared to the war-period one.
The artist generally interrogates people who are old enough to remember not only the war, but also the city as it used to be before. However, when she shows them the archival, black and white images of the Green Line, not everyone is able to collocate them with the present landscape or to give names and describe the circumstances of the abductions. For instance, two middle aged men, once shown a picture, start discussing the exact location of the latter, until the one who is able to be more specific dismisses the other, telling him “You are too young to remember!” Since no further proof is given, the viewer probably deduces that the “older” man is right, and yet there is no evidence to confirm where the truth lies. In another scene filmed in the Sodeco area, Joreige obtains the name of a kidnapped individual, Imad Arzouni, by a man who claims to have been his neighbour, but when she moves over just one street, the answer she gets is radically different: “Arzouni? No, he was not kidnapped. [Who told you this] just wants to talk for the sake of talking.” But the interview with this second witness stops here and the audience is given nothing to decide who is telling the truth.
Harold Pinter continues his speech, asserting that “the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other.” Lamia Joreige seems to share the same point of view, and she admits that she has no hope of discovering the “Truth”. Therefore, the fact that she does not skim the material and chooses not to highlight to the audience what she thinks is more plausible is not surprising. Such is probably one of the features that most distinguishes her work from a documentary: the artist asks questions, collects and records the answers, but does not provide a ready-made truth. Her task is quite different. The way Joreige moves is well described by Pinter again, through a metaphor: “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes.” The artist goes to a different street, to a different person, and the truth, the answer changes. “But sometimes [an artist] has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.” And there she goes, assembling the fragments and presenting them, clashing, to the viewer. She has smashed the mirror, as now the audience knows that they cannot rely on one sure solution and just because she simply asked an uncomfortable question.
Another man, in the Ring checkpoint area, tells the artist that there is no reason to record his stories “because they may be true, they may not. And they won’t give you the answer you’re looking for.” Even though the man is potentially right, and those stories will not provide a remedy, it is not pointless to ask for them. He assumes that Joreige is looking for something specific, for an answer that would solve her perplexities about the disappearance of so many people, but perhaps the artist is not doing that. Perhaps she is interpreting another role in her work: she is the artist, whose task is not to find a solution, but to ask questions, which will in turn raise other questions and so on. Such is also the reason why she does not attempt to discover to what extent the stories she collects are real. The artist interviews the people she casually finds in the streets, asking them sensitive questions that bring to light the memories of troubled times and of those who died, and some of them are prepared to share with her and her camera what they know. Even though she has a stake in the matter, being Lebanese, by means of carefully avoiding any definitive answer, Joreige might be saying that although Art has the task of asking questions, it does not have the right to state where the truth lies.
If the role of art is that of asking questions, according to Pinter that of trying to discover the truth is the role of the spectator and citizen: “You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.” Even though Lamia Joreige, when interviewed, does not mention any such thing, the very composition of Here and Perhaps Elsewhere encourages the audience to question the testimonies, weighing their words and trying to read their faces. But since no tangible proof is given, no story is confirmed or dismissed, the viewer is obliged never to stop their individual pursuit of truth. Pinter claims that politicians are generally more keen to protect their power than the truth, and “to maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of truth, even the truth of their lives.” 6 Generalising as it might sound, such a statement suits particularly well the situation Joreige finds in Beirut, where the government has decided to forget the past instead of understanding what exactly happened. However, the citizens have the faculty of choosing not to remain ignorant of the events, by means of the search – but not necessarily the discovering – of truth.
Towards the end of the video, the audience learns that Lamia Joreige actually is looking for something in particular, for one episode amongst many others: that of her uncle’s disappearance. When she finally finds someone who knows about it, she ceases to be the artist for a moment and becomes herself, asking for more detail about the story. Unfortunately, not even in this case does the narration come to a closure, since it is not clear whether what the elderly couple tells her after she has revealed her identity as the victim’s niece is reliable or has been made up to appease her desire of knowledge. However, through her personal research of the kidnapped relative, Joreige reminds the viewer that looking for the truth is always necessary, even though the process will eventually reveal to be fruitless, or uncomfortable. “But the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot” Pinter says, and indeed, Joreige reacts to the “State amnesia” by means of conducting a research on her own, retracing the Green Line and interviewing the people living in the area. Even though the artist aims to prove the impossibility of finding the truth, as she writes in Out of Beirut, she is nonetheless looking for it.
The fact of not being able to discern the truthfulness and the falsity in the stories is particularly disturbing because of the documentary style employed in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere. Documentary is often associated with the notion of historical objectiveness, conveyed especially by means of a voice-over which guides the audience’s thought while sounding impersonal and impartial. Lamia Joreige’s work questions the very idea of an objective history being possible. Her witnesses are not able to produce a coherent reconstruction of historical events and no records are made available by the State, thus nothing is left that can constitute an objective history and the truth of what has been is not accessible. In this light the artwork itself is of no help in reaching a definitive truth of what happened along the Beirut Green Line during the war, but it succeeds both in documenting the difficulty of obtaining a coherent and reliable answer from the witnesses, and in stressing nonetheless the importance of persisting in its search.
Further Reading and Sources:
Demos, T. J. “Out of Beirut,” Artforum International (October 2006): 234-38.
Wilson-Goldie, K., Joreige, L.“Contemporary Art Practice in Lebanon,” in Out of Beirut (Oxford, 2007): 18-20; 82–84.
‘Harold Pinter Art, Truth and Politics’, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html.
‘Francis Alÿs, Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic’ http://www.davidzwirner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/2007-FADZ-Show.pdf.
A.A.
