Installation Project
Jayce Salloum
background
Continuing my series of projects (1979-1999) addressing cultural/political manifestations, ethnographic representation and the methodology behind these, I would like to propose an installation focusing on borders, nationalism[s], movement[s] (shifts, transitions, and interstitial space/time) and subjectivity, and the conditions of moving and living cross- and trans-culturally.(see Appendix 2) The basic material of this project will be edited dialogues/conversations and oral histories recounting experience, locating sites, subjects, and events, and the theorizing and accounting of the issues, with the use of associated ambient and direct imagery forming a history of locations and a location of histories.
Much of my work in the past 8 years (in video, video installation, publications and lecturing) focused on the representation and politics of the ëMiddle Eastí and itís relationship to the ëWestí, this new project extends my interest in deconstructing history or representations from the ground up and working with current realities and accounts of experience in a way that respects and is immersed in the complexities of contemporary culture[s]. The aim of these acts of taking apart and rebuilding is more than an exercise in laying bare the elements, process, and motivations of policy/power and regulating bodies, it is an attempt to articulate the conditions that exist for a subject and a subjectís life, in relation to community, and the forces that confront our individual and common realities.
The proposed video installation will challenge the conventions of documentary and experimental, weaving together threads of each. They will slice up, or sever the approach of documentary, and will look at finding ways to reconstruct lived experience that is outside the essentialist restrictive gaze of documentary and in opposition to its over determined seamless ërealismí and its naturalizing effect. Stylistically they will differ from my previous works but will incorporate a similar working method with the use of massive amounts of footage, various forms of text and the combination of many types of material. The installation will continue the series of triangulations, of histories and positions, between countries, cultures and subjectivities that my work has increasingly focused on.
This project will also work with issues of dialogue, recognition/misrecognition, alienation, transnational/local identity, subjective affinities and, objective trusts.(see Appendix 3)
The subjects of the installation will be come from many different constituencies; immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, community groups, residents (permanent and transient), political prisoners, students, workers, cultural producers, and others interested in focusing on the recording of histories (oral and visual) and the intersection of cultures in particular places and times. The dialectical relationship of the speaker and the spoken will be highlighted, the speech laid bare and layered between the story, the fields of images, the suggested frames and the butted fictive and documentary process. Difference will be articulated in and around the literal and metaphorical spaces of displacement/placement and dwelling, the constitution of this being viewed as cultural meanings rather than only as an extension of (an)other locale/space or subjective relationship. The project will also investigate what types of freedoms allow people to stay home and what types of powers force people to move and vice versa. Histories of movement will be specifically examined along gender, class and race lines, taking into consideration the legacies of empire, conflict and capital, and the contested and conflicted notions of home (heimat), homeland, nation, diaspora, exile, travel, integration, assimilation, refuge, native, and other.
research and development:
In the spring and summer of 1999 I planned an elaborate tour through former and present Yugoslavia with stops in New York, Vienna, Karlsruhe, Brussels, and Paris. I was interested in looking at/recording sites of emigration, places that people had or currently were leaving from as well as immigrating to. I also wanted to videotape conversations with people that were working in areas related to or theorizing/writing on these threads of movement and trans/cross or intercultural circumstances. I developed an extensive network of writers/theorists, activists, artists, anthropologists, architects, academics, musicians, human rights workers, and organizations. During the trip the project continued its stages of refining to include articulations of interstitial being, and illuminated how that could be a central theme of the project. The 50 hours of material recorded in these sessions will form the basis of the installation.
installation description:
There will be two primary threads of material, i) body/speaking parts/speaking subjects, and ii) determined land/cityscapes/ environments (interior and exterior). Other tertiary material will be filtered throughout each. The two bodies of material will be kept separate during the editing process, and then programmed on two separate video tapes/disks. Generally the footage will be edited into segments and sequences and programmed in tandem/sync to produce the exactly timed desired effect/juxtaposition/overlay/ relationship. The period of time to view the complete piece will be approximately 10-20:00. The disks will be programmed to loop back continuously. (see sketch Appendix 6)
i) One of the two main elements of the installation will feature selections, excerpts and fragments from videotaped conversations with people on topics such as, the disintegrating body/nation, nation as metaphor, body as nation, dysfunction and crisis as experienced through the body/speaker/nation, the 'east' as shit/abject nations, ethno-fascism as a subjective test, the self in interstitial space/and in motion, notions of resistance as agency and manners of survival (cultural and otherwise), refusal as a claim of the subject, and the perseverance of will. The speaking subjects are framed closely, creating a tension with and acknowledgement of the ongoing framing/mediation. Voice is/will be recorded with a Lavaliere mic giving an intimate sound quality. Only available lighting is used, daylight where possible.
ii) The other main element balancing this will be location shots or interior scenes setting up environments for the stories/accounts as well as other types of associative/ambient imagery, cityscapes and landscapes shot from buses and trains: ribbons of rivers, dishevelled fields and arrays of forests, rolling hills and valleys blanketed in heavy fog where only occasional glimpses of ephemeral objects and homes and houses pierce through, and a series of eternal cloud formations taped from airplane windows. These will be used to materialize the verbal and localize the discourse through levels of physicality, materiality and immateriality. Images of the land and city, especially moving images (ëdollyí shots/bus/train rides) vary from very close croppings zoomed into details of edges and shapes, to distant views contextualizing the scenes and revealing patterns of colour and form.
The act of videotaping is used as a direct way of tracing lives, revelations of the self (positions, strengths, actions, stresses, desires, needs, dreams and paradoxes), subjectivities, and the environment, as well as a tool for looking at issues of self-representation, governing paradigms, and control of oneís image/life (why we make the decisions that we do), and to develop an analysis and awareness of the construction of meaning that the medium allows. Besides synchronous audio when the subjects are speaking, their asynchronous voice will also be used with overlays separate from subjectís image, at times over the land/city imagery or in conjunction with blank screen and title/text sequences. I am interested in colliding the intensely personal space of the dialogue moment with the context of the intrinsic social and political site, different with each subject but with overlapping and overarching points of contention/correspondence, sense of place, notions of community, disenfranchisement and the ties of transnational concurrences.
Inherent/vague and explicitly critical references to documentary will be woven into the installation, as a subtext. Some of these will be made visible through the structure and elements used, aesthetics and techniques. No voice of authority voice over will be utilized, there will be no voice telling the viewer what to think/see. The voice-overs to be used will be either texts written/spoken by me, re-recorded excerpts from researched writings/videotaping, or audio clips taken from the subjects recorded. This audio/voice component will carry its own content (and form) which parallels the video component forming relationships of the: oblique, directional, expansional, delineating, and speculative. There will be no easy monikers used, i.e. no reductive forms of identification/representation, no seamless editing (creating the artifice of ëobjectivityí or a naturalizing discourse), nor a ëgrandí summarizing narrative or imposition of closure resolving all.
What will be evident will be the ësyntaxí structure or editing ësystemí developed and the critiques inherent in it, the refining and slicing up of the material, building of sequences, the re-joining, the deliberate weaving and layering, the conceptual and physical shifting, the building of narrative through reoccurrent types of metaphors/tropes, the dispersion of narrative, fragmenting it in continuous and discontinuous threads, the use of disjunctive video and audio elements, the matching & mis-matching and editing of audio from material recorded and gathered, the use of text in titles, sub-titles, inter titles, rolling and scrolling script & headlines, the suspension of belief, the ending of information per se, the insistence on moments of visual and aural pleasure and the production of frustration as a constructive experience.
The installation material is currently planned to be divided into four main parts as follows:
I. Soha Beschara: after El Khiam, 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 silent 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. (for further details see Appendix 4)
II. former Yugoslavia/Yugoslavia: taped conversations and other footage as described above.
III. here/West: material from taping sessions in New York, Vancouver, MontrÈal, Vienna and elsewhere in the west; people in communities who have experienced upheaval, change, cultural dispossession and polemic shifts and realities of difference.
IV. bits, the ephemeral histories of the familiar/family histories, a differing manner of recounting history, will be used sparingly, forming a small component as part of the final section of the installation, layering.. personal but kept at a distant, the distance of generations and assimilation, cultures grasped through material and social relations encountering lived experiences of the same.
Each tape/disk (video source) will be projected onto itís own screen/image area (ca. 10 feet x 13 feet). At this stage of the production the two projection screens will be butted side by side on adjacent (right angle/corner walls) or the same long wall with projectors ceiling mounted. I will be experimenting with overlapping the images (0 ñ 33%) to see if they can be displayed this way in the final presentation. There will be an atmosphere of visual collision, collaboration, contextualization, critical interference or mutual existence emanating from the action of the screens and the viewing of the material. The screens will be playing off of each other. The moving ëscreensí/image areas, and superimposing and overlapping of images creates a focus on the physical experienced imagistically and viscerally and on the underlying subjectivity experienced through the body, as crisis, nation, metaphor, or in transition and shift, and in the recounting or enunciatory nature of the interstitial site.
ending/closure:
This project continues and expands from my previous work, it will be my first videowork produced in 6 years after working in other media and will be an expansion of recent installation concerns into new directions, working with new subject matter, different geographies, histories, and notions of home (mine and others.) It extends my work into a social and political domain previously engaged with but now carried affirmatively to other milieus, close to home and abroad. This project is crucial in taking my work further not only in terms of production but in its progression towards addressing local and translocal concerns, with the aim of challenging our realities and perceptions and in doing so, reclaiming and reconstructing an agency that is complex and self determining.
Appendix 1
Sample reel:
27 test clips from a small portion of the 50 hrs shot to date. Only one of these is a ëlandscapeí, this does not reflect the balance, layers, or approach of the tape. This is NOT a rough edit, not even close, just a selection from some of the tapes to give an idea of some of that material only for this jury viewing. This reel (transferred from camera to deck), has no audio level, colour (chroma nor hue) level or balance correction, or white/black (video) level adjustments. The final tape will look very little like this technically, formally, and aesthetically. This material will not be used this way, and it may or may not be used in the final edit as (that will be determined at later stages) there are a minimum of 5 more months of shooting to take place. See Project Description for details.
*for the rough translation of Soha Bescharaís 2 sections please see Appendix 5.
Appendix 2
The video installation will focus on:
borders: real and metaphorical, how they define, restrict, inscribe, enclose, and ëshieldí us; as margins and zones of autonomy; their emplacement and necessity or uselessness, their histories and permanence/impermanence; porousness and impermeability in terms of the movement of goods, capital and people, and in terms of meaning, placing the borders where meaning can slip around and through,
nationalism[s]: their construction, relationship to the individual and community, the attractiveness/seduction and repulsion, range from struggles of self determination and resistance/liberation to oppressive or antagonizing forces/ideologies,
movement[s]: as shifts between or through polarities/points of geography, ideology, times, culture or identity; transitions, and stagnating or static predicaments,
interstitial space/time: sense of the momentary (living between/during events) or as a permanent point of being, temporally or spatially bounded, trans/transit/transfer of the geographical, cultural, philosophical, and ideological/idealized space, the transitional or dysfunctional normally devalued rendered not only as anxiety, lack or tentativeness, defining and attempting to describe the space itself beyond a peripatetic field as a concrete entity or place of action/living, a space of resistance or change, exploding this notion, this site, into discursive areas where it can be seen as a productive/constructive space, with increasingly important relevance to our public and private lives,
subjectivity: where it is placed and how it is revealed in terms of the issues at stake, the lives lived, and under what conditions and circumstances, as a basis for ëobjectivityí,
the conditions of moving and living cross- and trans-culturally: where cultures confront, as standard or anomaly, intersect, suture or overlay, ameliorate, redefine/reshape, morph, hybridize, apartheid, erasure or augmentation, miscegenation and rupture.
Appendix 3
This project will also work with issues of:
dialogue: aspects of enunciation, ways of speech, of transferring meaning, specificities of language and the act of transcribing and translating,
recognition/misrecognition: valuation and validation, how cultures and individuals presume to understand or acknowledge distance, how viewers identify, construct meaning, prejudge or can be challenged based on limited information, or the information/image and context provided,
alienation: as a form of perception, of position, relationship, and gaps in understanding, as a provisional or analogous response to difference and miscomprehension, as disjunctive and constructive, and as a determining factor,
transnational/local identity: the particularities of each and the movement between the two, the split and interconnectedness, the usurpation of either,
subjective affinities: rendering a relationship and engagement with the viewer/reader and the linking of information or ëdocumentaryí evidence or more ephemeral matter, common struggles across various states and,
objective trusts: in that relationship developing a system of comprehension and delineating the bank of ëknowledgeí that is being produced while undermining or recognizing its authority.
Appendix 4
Partial list of people videotaped to date:
Soha Beschara: writer, member of the Lebanese National Resistance, ex-detainee from El Khiam ëdetentioní centre (a torture and interrogation camp) in occupied South Lebanon. She was held there for 10 years, 6 years of which were spent in isolation (in a 3í wide x 6í long x 5í high) cell. The centre (still operating today with approximately 175 detainees from ages 12 to 65 yrs old) was permanently set up by the Israeli Forces in 1982 and is administered by them and their proxy (puppet) army, the predominately Christian right-wing South Lebanese Army (SLA). Everyone ëdetainedí at Khiam is held under no due process of law, detentions are arbitrary at the whim of the Israeli Forces/SLA. Soha is a heroine in Lebanon, pictures of her are in many houses in the South and posters of her were seen all around downtown Beirut when I was working there in the early 90ís. She was captured for trying to assassinate the general of the SLA, Antoine Lahaad. I didn't ask her anything specifically about the torture she underwent or the trauma of detention, she is 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 Khiam and the detainees and the resistance. I went to her small dorm room (she is presently studying international law at the Sorbonne), not much bigger than her cell except it had one big window at the end and 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 installation should be. Soha was finally released from El Khiam ëdetentioní centre in September 1999 largely due to the actions taken by a committee that was set up in Paris after the viewing of my videotape, ìUp to the Southî (1994), screened at the Institute of the Arab World, Paris, 1995. This new 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. (for tape clips translations see Appendix 7)
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Boris Buden: theorist/editor ìArkzinî and ìBastardî, Zagreb/Vienna.
Marina Grzinic: video artist/writer/theorist, Ljubljana, Slovenia, co-author ìArtintact 4î [ZKM], ed. ìFrom Elsewhere to Cyberfeminism and Backî [MKC]. Discussing "Beauty and the East" (title borrowed from Vuk Cosic for the first Nettime conference), and the relations and representations of Eastern Europe to the West and itself.
Eda Cufer: founder of NSK Theatre, co-author of ìTransnacionala: Highway Collisions Between East and Westî [SPH], director of public programming, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Miran Mohar: member of art/music/performance collective, Irwin/Neue Slowenische Kunst (http://www.kud-fp.si/nsk/), Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Renata Salecl: theorist/professor, author of, ìPer Versions of Love and Hate (Wo Es War)î [Verso], ìSexuationî [Duke], ìThe Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialismî [Routledge], Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Schmrtz Teatar members: alternative street theatre group, Zagreb, Croatia.
Dunja Blazevic: Centre for Contemporary Art director, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Ismet Nuno Arnautalic: SAGA film collective, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina.
Zarana Papic: feminist anthropologist/sociologist, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, discussing her thesis on Ethno-Fascism critically looking at Milosovic's rise to power and herself as a subject of the state.
Slavica Indzevska: program coordinator Open Society Institute, producer of East-East projects, Skopje, Macedonia.
Dejan Krsic: co-founder Arkzine/Bastard magazines, Zagreb.
Nebojsa Seric-Soba: ex-Bosnian soldier, performance and visual artist, Sarajevo.
Jakob Finci: executive director Open Society Fund, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina.
Amra Baksic: director Pro.ba media center, Sarajevo
Iskra Dimitrova: artist, Skopje, Macedonia.
Micz Flor: coordinator ECX - European Cultural Xchange (cultural protection program), providing artists, academics, curators, journalists and related cultural practitioners from the European conflict regions with an opportunity to continue their work in an open and secure environment.
Mihajlo Acimovic: Yugoslavian activist (www.angelfire.com/nv/mihajlo), in exile in Vienna.
Marcell Mars: net artist, director Multimedia Institute, Zagreb.
Dragan Krizic: punk rock musician, skateboarder, Sarajevo.
Emir Salihovic: journalist, novelist, Sarajevo.
Dragan Ambrozic: B2-92 (Free B92) radio station promotion manager, Belgrade.
Darka Radosavljevic: art critic, reporter, initiator of many urban actions, Belgrade.
Ivan Kucina: architect, www.ortlos.com/akcelerator, Belgrade.
Zana Poliakov: media artist, project coordinator Cyberkitchen (www.mi2.hr/cyberkitchen), Belgrade.
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Ella Shohat: cultural studies professor City University of New York, editor ìTalking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age [New Museum of Contemporary Art] and author of ìUnthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media [Routledge].
Ammiel Alcalay: culture and media professor Queenís College, editor ìKeys to the Garden: New Israeli Writingî [Small Press Dist.], author of ìThe Cairo Notebooksî [Singing Horse Press], ìMemories of Our Futureî [City Lights Books], and ìAfter Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture [Univ. of Minnesota Press].
Rasha Salti: Palestinian-Lebanese, cultural producer from Beirut, graduate student New School for Social Research, New York.
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss: architect/theorist from Belgrade, http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/proj/akcelerator/
Claude LaCloche: WWII French underground resistance fighter, Nazi concentration camp survivor, Paris.
Sonya (Zenia) Sava: Polish immigrant recounting life under communism and Nazi occupation, and life in Canada.
Andreas Guibert: Argentinean performance/visual artist, Halifax.
Carmen Aguirre: actor, theatre director/writer ëQue Pasa de la Raza Ayeí, Vancouver.
Appendix 5
Rough translation of Soha Bescharaís two clips on Sample Reel:
(see Appendix 4 for more information)
0:00:57 Distance carries in its essence so many things and the question is, is distance determined by kilometers, imposing apartness and determining nostalgia, the longer the distance is the more pain.. and less if its shorter? ..or the more I am close to the unjust, the more painful it feels? and the farther I am from injustice the less painful it feels?
If distance was essential for me and determined my feelings and decisions, we could not have continued on the road of resistance, which is a very difficult road. People once said that Lebanon, this small country that lives in a sea of realities, mired in a civil war, would not be able to resist and confront the formidable forces that have standing behind them the strongest super power which is ready to arm that ëforceí with the most sophisticated weapons. Can we confront them? Yes. The distance [gap] is very wide between us but we reduced it by through our act of resistance.
0:15:00 If we want to talk about the material things, I left my bed, I left my mattress - I left my pillow, I left my plate and my cup. I left the clothing I used to wear, that the families used to bring for their children [sons and daughters]. And the detainees who could never receive anything from their families, we used to divide it with them. I left these clothes that represent for me ñ a picture of the families support ñ for us ñ for all these years. I no longer have just one family, I have many families equivalent to the number of prisoners whom entered the detention centres. Each mother, each father - each brother, each sister works to bring with them anything, the smallest items, theyíre bringing it to the detainees, even if itís a package of Kleenex, theyíre bringing it to the detainees. The package of Kleenex will pass through the hands of all the detainees and I amongst them. As I said, I left everything and I left nothing.
