Interview with artists Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
By Arie Amaya-Akkermans and Karina El Helou
“In many of our projects, Khalil and me, we like to work with others, to collaborate, or to borrow the eyes, the words of others, the knowledge, whether it is from archaeologists, journalists or geologists, or poets”
Karina El Helou: Let us begin by talking about your project on poetry: I Stared at Beauty So much with five productions: Two suns in a Sunset; Waiting for the Barbarians, Remember the Light, Ismyrne.. It started in 2013 and developed over time, concluding with the final opus Where is my mind finished in June 2020. Can you tell us how this process began and whether it was intentional from the start to develop it over a number of years?
Image 1. Waiting for the Barbarians, Animated photography, sound, multiples sources, video HD format, 4 min 26 sec
Joana Hadjithomas: It really started in 2013, with a video commission on Cavafy that made us read all of Cavafy during the summer. We became very obsessed with this poem Waiting for the Barbarians as it seemed very relevant with the situation at that time in the region and in the world even. And unfortunately still is. We were also intrigued by the fact that Cavafy was a Greek poet, considered perhaps the most important Greek poet even if he was born in Alexandria, and he never really lived in Greece. We are interested by cosmopolitanism and this kind of non-border nationality and art as a territory more than a national or a geographical one. Then little by little, we felt the need to continue searching and producing visual artworks that deal with poetry as in the regions where we live, where chaos and violence are predominant, we need to find spaces for poetry, and things that mix poetics and politics.
That’s what we’re trying to do in many of our work, but here, we started to take it more literally, to work directly on poetry. “I stared at beauty so much” is a line from one of Cavafy’s poems that became the title of the project.
Arie Amaya-Akkermans: I was always interested in this conversation because I remember around 2016-2017 when Joana and I talked about beauty, that there’s always this idea in contemporary philosophy about the hermeneutic turn towards the fundamental questions of truth and beauty and happiness and so on, rather than epistemological technicalities. Hermeneutics is making a return under this semi utopian form because with deconstruction we have come to the end of criticism. We already demolished the foundations of epistemology but we still continue to live in the same world. It’s really a question of where do we go from here?
JH: Exactly, I don’t know if you mean the same thing, but, what we felt at that moment is that we had deconstructed so many things, we tried to work differently with photography and with films, but then what now?
AAA: Yes this is exactly what I meant. After the end of all the deconstruction, where are we now in our lives?
KH: I understand much better why you also created the film Ismyrna in 2016 with Etel Adnan. The film retraces Etel Adnan’s and Joana Hadjithomas’s roots who share a city where both have never been: Izmir, formerly Greek city known as Smyrna, and was conquered by the Ottomans. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Joana’s Greek family on her father’s side was chased from Smyrna by the Turkish army and Etel’s mother as well. So from Cavafy and moving to Etel Adnan, your interest in Etel was, of course, not only because she’s from Izmir, but also because she is a poet. How did Etel’s poetry influence you?
Image 2. Ismyrna, Color, sound, HD video, 50min, 2016
JH: In many of our projects, Khalil and me, we like to work with others, to collaborate, or to borrow the eyes, the words of others, the knowledge, whether it is from archaeologists, journalists or geologists, or poets.
In this case, for poetry, the poems that we recall, are the center of those works, like the poem of Cavafy, or the one of Seferis, but also the presence of Etel, it’s something beyond, she’s the poetry herself. Her presence was pure poetry all the time.
Khalil Joreige: But you see, this is about the notion of time. All those conversations leave traces, sediments that little by little start to constitute a kind of ground that gives you the fertility of things that can happen later. We always have other projects and conversations going on, even with Etel for example, and not just about Izmir but other places in poetry that give you this idea that you are working on the ground. And you are able to produce something that will grow from there, whatever it is, any seed you will plant, you start to work on this seed, and it will come together. Because it’s not just a poem, it’s an attitude, it’s a position, it’s a poet that you are confronted with. So suddenly, all what Etel is saying or producing for example is related to poetry.
KH: What is very beautiful in the film ISMYRNA is when Etel talks about the fact that she lives in an imaginary place. In these projects, I feel you’ve recreated this imaginary place through the eyes of those poets, and this world of antiquity through the archaeology, the Greek poets, then the Ottomans, Seferis, Etel, this utopian place Izmir, which doesn’t exist in the way it exists in your memories. Is this something you felt was important to trace and recreate lost identities?
JH: The film investigates the way we hold imaginaries without images, stories that Etel’s mother told her about Izmir (Smyrna) or that my grandfather continuously repeated. So little by little, a territory, a place starts to be represented in our mind, in our imaginaries. And inhabit us. We have the feeling of knowing a place without ever set a foot in it. It is also a question of transmission. When we use the term imaginaries it is all those representations that we build or that are being built for us : it is political as it includes images that we inherit (from colonialism, from family traditions, our communities, our gender etc), that we borrow from other places, other representations, be it fictional or real, present or past. Imaginaries are very active.
KJ: There is a risk to consider that these places are a kind of allegory that is not related to anything anymore, and this is something we always try to avoid, the risk of dwelling in a mythical world. Those imaginaries are related to contemporary worlds and to the notion of territory: To the word cosmopolitan (loaded by too many things), we prefer instead to use the notion of being contemporaneous, as sharing the same time. This means that the territory is shifting from a geographical conception to a temporal one.
AAA: When you talk about this notion of contemporaneous, it’s related for me to the non hegemonic experiences from these countries like Lebanon and Turkey, and that we’ve seen also in many other places like Colombia, where I was born. There is always this philosophical idea that the hierarchical, linear concept of time has broken down, and this is something that has been theorized since the nineteenth century, but actually, we have the direct political experience of this break, of how we have lived in this universe of broken temporality for a long time. But we’re not necessarily trying to fix this time, so I think in a lot of these works that we’re discussing, this poetry, these artists, what we’re trying to do is to describe this experience more accurately.
JH: I think that we also didn’t choose just any poets, it was always poets that had this kind of experience you’re talking about. And also linked to the Ottoman Empire and its collapse; this is one of the things that we work perhaps not directly on, but not very far from. Because this is a moment when a lot of things have changed in the region and few people are really talking about it, addressing it. We’re interested in building temporal continuity. So when we use a poem of Cavafy with images that we’re producing today, about situations that are occurring today in Lebanon, we’re linking two situations, two moments, two temporalities. And by linking these two temporalities, we feel that we are also trying to understand more the past and the present in front of us. For us, we see this also as a reactivation. And when we say that we borrow the eyes, the words, we engage in a conversation with people even if they’re not present, to pay them a tribute. In some places where past history is not written, people are forgotten easily.
KJ: Bridges are broken, and if we go back to what you were saying about the temporal break, we remember the preface to ‘The Crisis of Culture’ by Hannah Arendt, where she’s talking about this impossibility to move, stuck in between past and future, to be in a breach. So we recognize ourselves in those breaches, meaning that we feel that we are in the middle of a breach where you cannot go back and you cannot continue because something is broken, because an event or an accident happened or, like in the film Je veux voir, Catherine and Rabih are forbidden to continue walking because of the impact of shells that destroyed literally the road, this specific road that we have successed to open at the borders. There is always something that occurred, an unexpected event. So you have to build something aside from it, or to use it in order to be able to continue.
JH: When you use the word non-hegemonic, we use the word contemporaneous, in order to talk about a representation and construction of imaginaries: We have to produce our own images and what Khalil was saying about this breach that Arendt was evoking, this is a place where we have to stand, it’s a non-comfortable place. You have to stand in a place where you are torn by many temporalities, by many movements, a place of fragility.
KJ: You need to accept being in a place of non-power, but maybe a place of influence. When Joana was talking about paying tribute, it is about acknowledging that sometimes influences will be able to build a different kind of network that is not powerful. The shift from power to influence.
Image 3. Where is my mind, video installation, 2020
JH: After the blast, the installation we did a month before Where is My Mind terrorized me a bit. It was very shocking. This idea of working on this poem of Seferis (Seferis, see below) that we had in mind for many years and to edit it with those statues that we filmed at the archaeological museum in Izmir. All those statues without heads, headless statues and in some other place, heads without corpses. It was linked with our interest lately around archaeology, what is left, or what we leave behind, the traces, what stays with us and what is lost. And this poem of Seferis was for us always summarizing a bit what we live, always coming back to ashes.
But when the 4th of August explosion happened in Beirut destroying a third of the city, killing and harming so many victims and on a personal level, the destruction of our house exploded and our studio, the production company Abbout, all what we tried to build in Lebanon all those years, and also a bit before, Metropolis, the cinema that we were working with for so many years, they were all lost. I was then obsessed with these words of Seferis. It added so much to my confusion at the time, to have done this work about a month before the explosion, because we worked on this video in very fast way, as if there was a particular urgency.
AAA: There is this archaeologist I was reading recently, Gavin Lucas, who says that “the archaeological record is a palimpsest, the cumulative remains of multiple past processes, and does not reflect any particular moment”. This made me think about your project Unconformities, that we have seen together in Athens, about interruptions in geological stratigraphy. Then I was thinking about the consequences of time, the result of temporality is not smooth or homogeneous. Arendt talks about the possibility of action, the ability to start over, to begin, to restart things again.
JH: Palimpsests, as you know, are very present in our research lately with all the archeological cores we’re been working on, and the fact that it is a constant movement of destruction and construction, disaster, catastrophe and regenerations. Each civilization destroying the previous one and using the same stones to rebuild a new city. Temporalities are sometimes layered but troubled, upside down, mixed. This is what archeologists call actions. History is seen more as actions and not chronological layers. And the most striking situation that we have been working on, is the situation of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr El Bared, which was destroyed during a war that occurred in 2007 between the army and an Islamist group, Fateh el Islam. The camp was totally destroyed (more than 98 per cent) and when they started the reconstruction and removed all the rubble, they found underneath the camp, a lost mythical Roman city, Orthosia, very well preserved as a mini Pompei. So Orthosia was there, all the time. Latent. With the destruction of the camp, it reappeared, it was found again! But because they had to rebuild the camp for the Palestinian refugees to come back, the government decided to seal the Roman city, to cover it with a giant tissue and put a concrete slab on the whole camp to protect it for future generations of archeologists to be able to rediscover it.
AAA: When Joana and Khalil talk about nostalgia, looking at the space in which they work, it seems to me as if nostalgia is always politically conservative. And for me, saying this as someone who works a lot with antiquity and the idea of antiquity, every classicism is a restoration. A restoration of order. In works like Where is my mind? There is this thing that comes from the past, but we can see in this past something about living in the present: That the present will always be endangered. There’s no real safe place, and you need to stand on these edges, to see who we are, beyond the historical construction.
JH: Those statues are coming from the past, and of course, archaeology treasures them in the way that they’re traces, but for today, for me, they’re totally contemporary. And this idea of a conservative nostalgia was so present when we started, Khalil and I, we started producing images and creating installations to fight this nostalgia, to reactivate the past in the present. In the end of the civil wars, images from an idealized Beirut were brought back as if present, as if nothing has happened, in a tentative to put the lebanese war into brackets. This amnesiac movement (that goes also with the amnesty of all the wars criminals and militias chiefs that are in power till today) pushed us to produce images that would fight nostalgia used as a political tool. As for exemple the Wonder Beirut project were we burn old postcards to make them more conform to destructions and war traces.
KH: I understand your interest in unveiling different temporalities but I want to come back to the notion of shared identities because you were saying Khalil, that we share the same time, but also the same space. With Perambulation, we are interested in these regions (Greece, Lebanon, Turkey and so on..) and how history links together the different people into an amorphous and very versatile identities that are hard to grasp. However, we still share the same imaginary. How do you look at this part of the region in your work? Since you spoke about the Ottoman era, Greek antiquity, and archaeology in Beirut, for example, how do you tie up everything?
KJ: I don’t know if we would talk about everything being linked. It’s a continuity. This is maybe our real subject: How do we represent ourselves? From where are we drawing influences, from which standpoint are we talking? So it’s linked with geography of course, but for us it’s more about how to free yourself from nationalism, from conservatism, from a type of representation that can be very colonial. Here in the region we’re reproducing a lot of colonial or anti-colonial representations all the time. But what are our images? The images that we would make as persons right here, in this moment. And I think that perhaps the geography you’re talking about, for us, is like the territory of art and films. This is another territory that we are sharing. The space is very rooted in the reality of the region, but works and idea also try to operate in a non geographic territory that will link artworks, people and concerns.
AAA: It’s like you’re searching, searching, searching, and then you stumble upon something which is a truth-making place. And I am convinced that all the truth-making discoveries are political acts beyond their cultural and historical space.
JH: It cannot be only a reaction, we have to produce our own images. This is very important. To produce our own narratives, our own possible narratives. Because this is also how we re-master our relationship to the world.
KJ: By staying in this region, in these uncomfortable places where we’re not the winners, where we’re not the majority.
JH: But we also refuse to be portrait as victims without history, faces…We need to become subjects.
KJ: We’re asking for singularity. We’re asking to have our own representation.
JH: After the blast, I began working on the myth of Orpheus, two ideas emerged. When Orpheus went back to bring Eurydice, he went through death, and the question is : Can you come back the same when death goes through you? You cannot return being the same. You change, you shift. We did a previous research with Khalil a few years ago, on those people who would commit suicidal operations and announcing their death as Rabih Mroue wrote in his performance Three posters. We developed the following question : What happens to people that try to do a suicidal operation, announce their death and survive their operation. Can they stay the same after declaring themselves dead? Can we stay the same after what we have went though? And who comes back? I also had this image of Orpheus being torn from the Maenads, and all his limbs, all over, scattered all over the world. And I think this was the impression each of us felt when we were in the middle of fire; I had the impression that I exploded internally. My head was somewhere, my feet were somewhere else, my body was completely dismembered. You can’t heal from it, you have to live with it.
KJ: And to transform it.
JH: To transform it into poetry. The head of Orpheus, even if it was completely dismembered from his body, the head was still reciting poetry and singing.
AAA: What I was thinking of is, in January 2017 I came back from Istanbul to Moscow after this horrible terror attack at a nightclub, in what was a really catastrophic year for Turkey. And then I remember that I had this conversation with Joana, where she said to me, you have to remember the light! Which is coming from the work of Joana and Khalil we had seen first in Sharjah together the year before. And then, there’s the letter to Marguerite Duras. The letter made me think about the way you described Beirut today before we began the interview. Tell us about day and night, light and day, today, where do we stand or where do we go from here?
Image 4. Remember the Light, 2016, Color, sound, 2 HD videos, 8min
JH: Remember the Light is a video installation to question what we can do in those desperate situations that we live and we cannot even have the luxury of despair. We recalled the fact that under the water, the perception of colors gradually disappear as we go deeper and deeper into the sea. The red, then orange, yellow, green and blue and we are left with only black. But if we action a light, the plankton remembers it and reflects it in the darkness.
KJ: The action of adding a light or borrow light from somewhere else, against this shrinking of the colors. But when we started working on this project, it was before the Mediterranean became this open graveyard, so it gave us connotations that were very present and strong.
JH: Those migrants recalled me the story of exile of my grand-father and of Etel’s mother in the film Ismyrna. There are a lot of recurrent figures in the project I Stared at Beauty So Much like the suns, the apparition of multiple suns in this chaos, those people leaving their country, like some of us, like my grandfather on this boat.
KJ: A Letter to Marguerite can be part of those poetic attempts, because Marguerite Duras is a very central figure to us. During the lockdown, we had this E-flux proposition to work on a film echoing the film she made called Les Mains Négatives. And we had just seen this film during the first day of the lockdown. Les Mains Negatives is a very beautiful text and film talking about the possibility of love, the possibility of light, where Marguerite Duras is talking, in her own and incredible way, about the moment, someone goes out of a group, out of the choir like in the Greek tragedy, and starts to express something as an individual. At that moment, there is a possibility of alterity and the possibility of love, of something happening between two persons. For many years, in films like Ashes or A perfect day, we worked on this idea of an individual, going out of his group, of his community, to become a subject, to be able to say ‘I’, in a country like Lebanon, where everything is about community.
JH: Poetry for us these days is as Gilles Deleuze wrote, reasons to believe in the world, we have to find reasons to continue believing in the world. And poetry is part of something that gives you reasons to continue doing so.
They told us you’ll conquer when you submit.
We submitted and found ashes.
They told us you’ll conquer when You love.
We loved and found ashes.
They told us you’ll conquer when You abandon your life.
We abandoned our life and found ashes.
We found ashes. It remains to rediscover our life, now that we’ve nothing left.
– Georges Seferis
Mr.Stratis describes a man, Collected Poems, ( 1924-1955)
Translated by Keeley Edmund, & Sherrard
Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film.
Together, they have directed numerous films that have been shown and awarded in the most important international film festivals before having theatrical releases in many countries. Their films include ISMYRNA (2016); The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of The Lebanese Space Race (2012), which received multiple awards such as Best Documentary Award in Doha Tribeca Festival; Khiam 2000-2007 (2008); Je Veux Voir (I Want To See) (2008), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, which premiered in the official selection of Cannes Film Festival in 2008 and was awarded Best Singular Film by the French Critics Guild; A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar) (2005), premiered at Locarno International Film Festival and awarded, among many other prizes, the Fipresci Press Prize; The Lost Film (Al Film el Mafkoud) (2003); and Al Bayt el Zaher (Around the Pink House) (1999). Several retrospectives of their films have been presented in renowned institutions such as Cinematek (Brussels), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Institut Français and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), International Film Festival of Gijon (Spain), Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Lincoln Center (New York), Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland), MoMA (New York), Paris Cinema, Tate Modern (London), Visions du réel (Nyon). Their latest feature film, Memory Box premiered in competition at the Berlinale and will be released in 2021.
The artists are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret such as the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities. Their artworks exhibited in numerous museums and art centres including lately the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, Haus der Kunst (Munich); the V&A Museum, British Museum and Whitechapel Gallery; the Guggenheim, MIT Boston, the Hamburger Banhoff, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Home Works Forum, Beirut, as well as many biennales including Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, Yinchuan, Venice and Taipei. In 2017, they were awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize, for the project Unconformities.