Borrowing The Eyes and Protocols of The Other

Clément Dirié: Stream 05 explores forms of intelligence and knowledge to be passed on to future generations. Though you are known as artists, researchers, and filmmakers, you have also participated in creating and running an art school and a cinema in Beirut. Has this lead you to question this idea of transmission between generations? What has this experience of producing education brought to your work?

Joana Hadjithomas: We both started teaching at a very young age, around twenty-three, when, paradoxically, we had studied neither art nor film but rather other fields. We learned by doing. This allowed us to consider teaching as another form of transmission, not of knowledge but of a shared concern. This question of transmission is central in a country like Lebanon that has experienced civil wars, where the younger generations have had to deal with the figure of “fathers” who were often defeated along with a world in rupture. And this rupture, or rather these ruptures, that Lebanese society has experienced and continues to experience, question the notions of sharing a History, of a common narrative. Collective history is not shared. We therefore need to transmit, to reenact certain moments, certain acts, in order to become part of a temporal chain within a country where there is this gigantic problem of memory, of amnesia. This is why the writing of History and the construction of the imaginary interest us. We have always wanted to hold on to this laboratory aspect in our teaching practice. While thinking about the development of Home Workspace, the art school created by Christine Tohmé in Beirut in 2011 that we contributed to, we had in mind the creation of a very flexible platform, with the exciting idea, one that is difficult to sustain over the long term, of “delivering” the school to a different artist or thinker each year who would then establish the program. We were intentionally looking for a very malleable quality with no fixed definition.

Khalil Joreige: In the beginning there was a debate around the idea itself of school and how to define it: as a place of education, a laboratory, a place for research, a space for sharing? The idea was rather to create worlds, a place where thought in the making could be discovered; in any case, not a school in the traditional sense of the word.

Joana Hadjithomas: A placed filled with participants as opposed to students.

Khalil Joreige: Today we question positions of power, institutions, and the notion and position of knowledge. In our practice we have looked for ways to create the conditions for encounters rather than embodying the vertical figure of the teacher, the knower. We share our problems and unlearn with the students, rather than putting ourselves in the position of the one who knows. Something drives us to adapt.

In a strange way, we have the impression that, because of the highly disrupted contexts in which we work, we are constantly challenged in our modes of intervention, of producing knowledge, of sharing intelligence, and of collaborating. No sooner have we begun to develop a project or research when the world is disrupted and we find ourselves forced to reconsider practices and conditions of production.

Joana Hadjithomas: This questions relationships with reality and thus with fiction, the representation of self, our bodies, and our presence in the world. The fact of not having attended art or film school, of not having pursued a “normal” path, gives us a feeling of illegitimacy that we accept but that also provides us with great freedom, of not having these structures of functioning and conditioning, especially in this area of the world that suffers from different imperialist and hegemonic discourses. Teaching, the Métropolis cinema–created in 2006–or even the Cinémathèque which we are determined to keep operating, are above all places of support and research. This is the best way to share, to work in a collaborative manner, to provoke encounters.

Clément Dirié: From words like support, encounter, and collaborative work, I would like to address your artistic practice through the example of the project Unconformities, where this idea of the collective versus the individual has a strong presence. Unconformities is a group of works by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, but it is also a collaborative process with archeologists, geologists, and draughtsmen. How does this sharing of intelligences, both singular and shared, operate?

Joana Hadjithomas: It is important to begin by saying that as we always work together, and that each one of us is a number of people as Gilles Deleuze says, we are used to this collaborative aspect. Not to mention that this is a central aspect of filmmaking, our second major practice. Our projects often emerge from encounters and are quite close to our own lives, without being autobiographical. Unconformities came out of an exchange with a friend who is an engineer and who does geological core studies in building sites. When he invited us to come see one of the sites and began to tell us about what he did, we were immediately fascinated. By sampling layers of soil in a cylindrical manner with his coring, he moved away from archeology to begin to work in geology. He physically moved through time by digging; he allowed us to discover what was lying under our feet and to see History written in fragments of stones and soil.

Khalil Joreige: Philippe, our engineer friend, was only interested professionally in geological elements, for the purposes of analyzing the ground on which buildings are erected. To do this, he had to move through all of the anthropic elements, covering the whole of the history of humanity as it were. Once he finished the analyses necessary for the construction, everything was thrown away. It is fascinating when you think about it; it is as if the whole of the history of humanity was of no interest. And so we began to collect these scraps, to become interested in all of these stories that were left behind, similar to how we became interested in spam emails, those Internet scams that fill our digital trash cans, or the secret stories that form the edges of history.

Joana Hadjithomas: Once we had recovered these stones, we were unable to read them, to understand them. We had the feeling that they were interesting, but we didn’t really know what to do with them. In order to transform this material, another encounter was required. By chance, a major archeological discovery was made on the site opposite us in Beirut. Visiting it, as neighbors, we met the archeologist Hadi Choueiri who accompanied us in our research. Hadi revealed himself to be an incredible storyteller and “translated” the cores for us. He was one of our first interpreters and one of the main collaborators in the project, as was Maria Benissi, a Greek engineer and geologist who had done the coring of the Athens subway, which she entrusted to us and told us about with great passion.

Khalil Joreige: We fundamentally need the eyes of other people as they possess expertise that we do not, but also because they allow us to see certain realities differently. And so we borrow the eyes and protocols of others. When we are blocked, when something becomes a sticking point, we call upon a different discipline, a different practice, other eyes that will allow us to move forward. As after the war in 2006 when we asked actress Catherine Deneuve and actor Rabih Mroué to face the ruins of war, to look at things by borrowing the gaze of the other (Je veux voir, 2008). Borrowing tools from archeology, geology, and illustration allows us to question what we are doing while continuing to pursue our artistic research.

Clément Dirié: In Unconformities, as it is shown to the public, the different gazes needed to create the work can be found in the work itself, in the sense that a same idea, a same reality can be shown by a sculpture, by drawings, a video. The multiplicity of the process is thus reflected in the multiplicity of the forms shown. Why is it so essential to show this complexity to the spectator?

Joana Hadjithomas: Firstly because the project is difficult to exhaust thanks to its rich nature and, more specifically, its complexity. We were excited to explore it. This is also why, in order to achieve this, we gave it different forms and why it is in fact still not finished. For the time being we have carried out the project in three cities–Paris, Beirut, and Athens–with three very different archeological and geological forms.

This work overwhelmed us, especially the encounter with geology, with this idea of moving through time. It was dizzying. Grasping this vertigo and understanding this relationship with History and possible narratives, with rupture, discordance, and continuity, expressed through different scales of time and size: the immense is confronted with the minuscule and the macro with the microscopic, both essential for the purposes of reading. There are interactions between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. We need both the whole and the detail, which gives rise to the need to propose back and forth movements between video, sculpture, photography, narratives, and drawings.

Khalil Joreige: Within this perspective, I would like to return to what Bruno Latour said about Time Capsules, a collection of artworks from the Unconformities project: “A major anthropocentric work that can be read from top to bottom or from left to right depending on whether one wishes to move from ‘nature’ to ‘civilization’ or vice versa.”

Archeology is generally perceived as a succession of stacked layers but, working on the subject, we understood that it doesn’t tell things in a linear manner. It tells them through actions, and certain events or work carried out by humans can actually reverse the chronology, for example when earth and embankments are moved. The idea of action is fundamental to us, and illustrating it through archeology makes it even more tangible. What struck us was that we were actually considering how difficult it is to write our history. We think that the violence and destruction experienced by Beirut prevented us from writing stories and we were looking for ways to do this. But with this project, all of a sudden, it is the destruction itself that allowed the traces of History to be made visible, and the new stories of the city to be revealed. As if destruction allowed history to be rewritten.

Joana Hadjithomas: This totally challenged us in terms of our relationship with history and memory. On the face of it, in a paradoxical way, we had more access to our history in Beirut than in other cities. As Beirut is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, its soil is endlessly solicited and “speaks” volumes.

Khalil Joreige: The fact that the city was destroyed by bombing, along with the many construction projects, has allowed it to be studied archeologically on a scale unrivaled by a city like Paris. A similar discovery “happened” to us recently and gave rise to an art installation entitled Under The Cold River Bed (2020). The Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared, located in the north of Lebanon with over thirty thousand inhabitants, was destroyed in 2007 during fighting between the army and Islamists. It was completely razed to the ground in order to be rebuilt, and on this occasion, an archeological dig was carried out that made an incredible discovery: that of Orthosia, a Roman city that had remained buried for over fifteen centuries.

Joana Hadjithomas: In Beirut, in the wake of two civil wars that took place in the 1990s, there 1.5 million square meters of open space and the history of the city had actually been completely rewritten during this period of reconstruction which, in the same movement, allowed for major discoveries and archeological progress while simultaneously destroying the vestiges. In all of this there was a vertiginous kind of palimpsest that fascinated us, one that mixed eras and civilizations, distant and recent pasts, like continuous cycles of construction and destruction, with each civilization using the stones of the previous one, demonstrating that after each catastrophe regeneration is possible.

Philippe Chiambaretta: I would like to return to this relationship between archeology and geology, because what makes the moment when humanity entered the Anthropocene so particular is indeed precisely this encounter between the time of man and that of geology, that had been completely separate up until that point, with different timescales. Geology expressed itself in millions of years, the history of humankind, hundreds of thousands of years at best. This seems to me to represent a major rupture, and I would like to ask you if global climate change is present in your work. Does this rupture seem to you to question the very posture of the artist today? Do you consider your work as a way of using art to try to adopt this political dimension with regard to the Anthropocene?

Clément Dirié: The Anthropocene or Urbanocene for that matter, as one of the major axes of your practice that connects with the Stream project is the question of the city, this relationship with Beirut that you have been exploring for over thirty years.

Joana Hadjithomas: It seems important to me to first specify that the question of the Anthropocene is strongly linked to a Western vision of the history of the world and that, if one wishes to date mankind’s impact on nature in a broad sense, one needs to go back even further, to the major waves of colonization and modernity in general, to capitalist hegemony. Of course, we question our relationship to the world in which we live through our research which attempts to be simultaneously formal and political. We are interested in constructions of imaginaries. Of course, as artists we are looking for representations of this type of subject and ways of making them visible. Presenting the visible and the invisible, the perceived and the latent.What we produced in Unconformities for example, are poetic and not scientific recompositions concerned with imagination.

Khalil Joreige: To speak of the Urbanocene or the Anthropocene is a way of designating a new indicator of geological change. But one must keep in mind the way that an event, even anecdotal, can be inscribed geologically. One hundred million years can for example leave a deposit that is ten centimeters thick, whereas a sudden event such as a volcanic eruption or tidal wave can provoke a deposit that is three meters thick.In geology one speaks of a “seam,” in other words a highly visible rupture in a uniform layer. The term itself of unconformities refers to temporal ruptures, geological accidents or disorder.

The cores reveal these heterogeneous layers, which leads to all sorts of narrative speculation to try to uncover what happened. What is extraordinary is that thickness or density are not necessarily indicators of this rupture. The question is then not the importance of the visual thickness but how to render it visible. It is very interesting because all of a sudden it is a question of representation, proportion, and scale. Showing this evokes questions of art. When one dives in all of a sudden, it is dizzying because of the different temporalities, and scales.

Joana Hadjithomas: Beyond this dizzying aspect of the relationship between archeology and geology, what is very important to us is figuring out how to position ourselves to look at this, to question our perspective. We all have a tendency to place ourselves in the present and to give an enormous, central importance to our thinking and our view. But working on these materials and speaking with specialists from other disciplines than our own, like archeologists, provides a very different form of humility. They have a very different grasp of time, in particular when thinking of the archeology of the future. Even when they do make an important discovery, they only analyze one part of it and cover the rest because perhaps with time we will have developed other, more powerful means to understand a certain number of things. This was very important for me to learn. This relationship with a much broader temporality, which is totally beyond us, is a form of humility that helped me a lot with what we have been going through, both in Lebanon and in the world. It is a way of realizing that our activities are part of a different and much larger flow.

Khalil Joreige: We try to create works about what we leave behind us—What we leave behind (2019) is the title of a recent art work—whether it be related to nuclear technology as with the sculpture Sarcophagi (2019), that shows different tests and materials used for sarcophagi including those used to contain that which cannot be contained, thus defying any imagined temporality, or with human waste, when we photograph core samples taken from the mountain of over forty-five meters of rubbish accumulated over twenty-five years in the region of Tripoli.

Clément Dirié: In this relationship with catastrophe, with rupture, I have the feeling that Lebanese artists always work within a “pre-war” aesthetic. I imagine that as a Lebanese artist, one is always thinking of the war that has just occurred but also of the war to come. This radically modifies one’s perspective, in particular in relation to the West and to Europe, where we have been in a post-war period for quite some time now, whereas you continue to be in a pre-disaster period.

Khalil Joreige: That is very true and, deep down I think this is what drives us to work.

Clément Dirié: This brings me to a question. In the work that you have done since the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, there is a formal, poetic, and political intelligence, but there is also an intelligence of survival, one that we call on when faced with extreme situations. What is it like being constantly in this unbalanced, unstable situation? Because this is also what survival intelligence means, spending one’s time falling, but at the same time, spending one’s time getting back up.

Khalil Joreige: We do not have the luxury of despair. We must continue to do, to walk, otherwise we fall down. From there, we develop tools that allow us to experience our present.

Joana Hadjithomas: In the situation that we are experiencing, it is indeed necessary to continually adapt. Above all, one must accept the notion of risk, the unexpected, and a loss of control. Because we have no mastery of things. When we make a film, we try not to be in control, which is different to a certain traditional cinema. We don’t give the script to the actors, with the idea being to establish a framework and see what happens. We set up a system without knowing what will happen.

Khalil Joreige: Fundamentally we are seeking this loss of control, this fragility, the moment of rupture in our artistic and cinematographic work because it is impossible to live in a country like Lebanon and not accept this on a fundamental level, not turning it into a strong line of artistic research. We seek to develop this spirit with the idea that what we produce should resemble the place in which we stand, this place of the unexpected that always occurs. 

Perhaps as French people we are less afraid of the unexpected, but on our side we know that something is always going to happen. We are on the alert and yet we are constantly surprised. Why this loss of control, the accident? Because we are in search of the living, the surprising, of speech that escapes discourse, of poetry despite the catastrophe. They emerge like oases in the desert.

Joana Hadjithomas: We experienced the explosion on August 4, 2020 in Lebanon, the third most powerful explosion in history after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t know what the consequences of that explosion will be on a geological level or how the ground will absorb the event, not to mention those who were nearby. The explosion was extremely violent; a deadly blast blew through us, sweeping everything away. It was extremely impressive, our bodies couldn’t manage to walk or to run quickly. We were all moving in slow motion in the incredible devastation of the landscape, unimaginable, stunned. We now have to live with it.

Khalil Joreige: The artworks that were in our studio, in particular the photographs that were taken in the 1990s in the ruins of the city center of Beirut were torn, burnt, and twisted. They bear so many traces that we don’t know what to do with them. Traces on top of traces, ruins on top of ruins. Some people wanted us to exhibit these photographs, where the representation of destruction itself is altered, but we considered that it was really a tautology.

Joana Hadjithomas: And, in a way, these photographs were sadly ejected—most of them blew away and we found them in neighboring buildings and surrounding carparks.Weeks later people were still bringing things back to us. For us it was a sign, they had been ejected. Let’s not pick them back up, they had been lost. What do the images of Wonder Beirut (1997–2006) tell us today? At the time they depicted a photographer witnessing the destruction of his city in his everyday life. Which destructions of Beirut do they now show? That of the 1970s, 1980s, or todays’ destruction?

Khalil Joreige: What is interesting is to know what a situation really does to you, how does it drive you to work?

Joana Hadjithomas: This is what Jacques Rancière said when he wrote that we are not interested in images of war but rather “what war does to images.” We do not restitute images of war but rather what the war does to our images, war in a broad sense.

Khalil Joreige: And the change in scale also. This was not a small explosion, it was something that touched all of us. It is immeasurable. It only took a few seconds for a third of the city to be destroyed.

Joana Hadjithomas: Can it be represented, and if so, how?

Philippe Chiambaretta: This brings us back to the heart of the question I asked about the Anthropocene because, from a scientific point of view, we are caught up in a kind of slow motion explosion. The West is not prepared for that but you are. The only predictable gesture today is the catastrophe to come, the reason why we have come to this subject of transmission of intelligence, in other words looking at how we can change this trajectory of Humanity whose predictable scientific consequence is an uninhabitable, “unbearable” world in thirty years. The question that we are asking with this book, with the point of view of each person, is then to understand how in our activities of transmission to others, we can make people aware of this urgency, of how important it is to change things. 

Clément Dirié: You use the word unbearable but in fact the situation in Lebanon has been unbearable for a while now. Someone said “Lebanon, the laboratory of the world.” This is a form of idealization or heroization of Lebanon and Beirut. Nevertheless, it is true that to a certain extent, all of today’s problems have already been made visible. It is unbearable and yet the Lebanese people continue to bear it.

Khalil Joreige: This “unbearable” is terrible because for many there is no other choice. Yet what is incredible is the intelligence and energy of regeneration. We say today that we want to be more “resilient,” that we should not repeat what we have done in the past, not get back up anymore to repeat the same gesture like Sisyphus. But there is obviously much more to learn from what is possible, from the energy and courage that is deployed in Lebanon, inventing possibilities for existence and for life.

Joana Hadjithomas: We both began making images in the period of the post-war transition, in the early 1990s, when things were clearly unresolved but remained latent. This city filled with ghosts and spirits, ignored at the time, always seemed to us to be on the point of exploding. But it was a question of working outside of the trauma so as to produce parallel representations, other imaginaries. Latency for example, and remanence are very present in our research. I think that the ecological problem is a result of this latent threat. We all know that it is there, it reveals itself but not entirely; we take the measure of it but in some way we continue to live. I do not know if we are better prepared in Lebanon today, we are definitely desperate and lost. It is very difficult to change things when one is doing well. It is also extremely difficult to change them when everything has collapsed. This is the paradox.

Clément Dirié: To come back to the idea of new intelligences, I have a final question around notions of fiction and poetry. In Stream’s production-creation-architecture triptych, what distinguishes the production-architecture diptych from creation is the place of the imagination, of fiction. What does this passage through poetry, fiction, and the imaginary bring to your work or even your understanding of the world? Is it a way to bring balance to this catastrophe that has always already happened?

Joana Hadjithomas: Poetry and fiction are a way of providing visibility and representation, of making the environmental problem felt. When we work on an artwork, we are looking for a form of visibility that makes things perceptible without illustrating them. And the way to do this is through poetry, fiction, and beauty. This is how one leads the other to appropriate a film or an artwork. To pose essential political questions like those of the environment. This is very important to us because we remain convinced that there is an essential and joyous side to thought, to art also and to sharing.

Khalil Joreige: Fiction allows us to consider the world, to represent it so as to grasp it and realize this. We are primarily interested in reality, but fiction allows us develop other ways of perceiving it. They are the tools and situations for perceiving reality: they let us see once again what we have become unable to see. Like Catherine Deneuve, who, through her offbeat and cinematographic presence in Je veux voir allows reality to be perceived differently, for ruins to be seen and for fiction to come in to being in a strange manner. 

Joana Hadjithomas: Similarly, when we use the past as a basis, by working for example on a space project from the 1960s—The Lebanese Rocket Society (2013)—or by using notebooks that I wrote in the 1980s for the film Memory Box (2021), we do it in such a way as to reactivate the past in the present, because what we are fundamentally interested in is the present.

Khalil Joreige: This includes archeology. What interests us is to question what archeology is looking for, what it retains, what of History remains in our imaginaries. What does History retain that could help us to face what is to come? Often, it is something particular that is being sought, by passing through the rest. For us, it is the opposite. All of our work consists of finding something other than what we were looking for, of losing ourselves through an encounter, of being diverted from our path.

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