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Jalal Toufic, Beirut
Walid Raad, New York:
I arrived in Lebanon on 10/23/1999. I was initially struck by
the unsightliness of the nondescript architecture in much of Beirut.
Almost all of those among the inhabitants of that city whom I
encountered told me I would get habituated not only to the bad
manners of its drivers but also to its architecture. One of them
even volunteered: “You have to see not only the beautiful
but also the ugly, otherwise you will never have the possibility
of acceding to the abject and the sublime.” “The ugliness
of the majority of the buildings of Beirut is not of the sort
that allows one to continue to see it: it is unsightly.”
When after a while I no longer complained about the latter, they
thought that indeed I had gotten used to it. I began instead to
nag about my new inability to write. My eyes were oppressed by
the relentless mass of unsightly architecture and the constrictive
arrangement of space, and so each time closed a little more. My
initial impulse to use close shots to extract from these nondescript
buildings something to see vanished. There came a day or night
when my eyes had almost closed completely: “Though seeing,
they do not see.” (Matthew 13:13). Then, momentarily, light,
which no longer served to illuminate anything, rather than as
usual making things visible while remaining itself unseen, became
visible for itself, shone and glared with an unmitigated brilliance.
Did this brilliant light complete the blindness of the eye from
overexposure? No. On 12/5/1999, there occurred for the Nietzschian
and Deleuzian writer that I am a kind of minor reversal of Platonism:
my eyes opened again in the magnificent Jeita Cave. After being
oppressed for weeks by the lack of empty space in the city—the
pavements occupied and the parkings jammed by vehicles, and the
narrow roads often blocked by cars disregarding the one-way signs—to
see empty space even inside a mountain! I felt again the desire
and ability to write. I realized then that my writer’s block
was merely a symptom of my inability to see, and became aware
how crucial vision is in my writing even when I am not addressing
cinema or art or dance. Maybe with time, I would have resumed
writing even without such an opening of the eye in the Jeita Cave,
but my writing would have had to have changed radically, become
linked to another sense: touch? Or would I, who does not smell
except when people point out a scent for me, now smell (and consequently
better remember)? I am considering starting a service in this
country infamous for its hostage-taking that, for a reasonable
fee, would provide incognitos who place over the passenger’s
eyes on his or her arrival to Beirut’s international airport
bandages to be removed only once he or she is in his or her apartment.
It certainly was not to simulate the conditions of hostage-taking
in much of what used to be West Beirut, but so as to be spared
blindness on encountering so much unsightly architecture. What
is preferable: that people see again at the risk of the resumption
of a civil war to destroy so much revolting architecture? Or that
they continue to be blind in the midst of the unsightly architecture? |
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At the airport, Walid
Raad, the videomaker of The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs,
1996-1999, and the producer through the Atlas project of Hostage:
the Bachar Tapes (English Version), 2000, is approached
by two men who place blindfolds over his eyes and put him in
a car and drive him to the Union Building at Spears Street in
Sanayeh. There, he thanks the two men, pays them a hefty tip
and then ascends to his apartment. “In Beirut, I drive
and walk only in Achrafieh, the Central District, and the Sodeco
area.” “Do these areas not include some ugliness?”
“Yes, but not unrelenting unsightliness. When I have to
move to another area, Hamra for example, I call the Blindfolds
service, which was started by my friend Jalal Toufic. Why don’t
you too put blindfolds when in Hamra street?” “Since
as a film sound person I can see only when there is sound, be
it ambient—I can actually see better then—but not
the artificial silence that forms when one places one’s
hand over one’s ears, I do my errands in Hamra street
ears covered.” “What about you?” The addressee
of this question, a writer, did not answer the question. Raad
wondered how come being exposed to such unsightly architecture
did not blind this visionary author? He later discovered that
that person is a vampire, one who, as dead, did not see what
was in front of his open eyes. Once, when he had to attend a
meeting of an artistic association at the Hamra apartment of
Saleh Barakat, the owner of the gallery Ajyal (Generations),
the entire mobile staff of the Blindfolds service, two employees,
happened to be sick. He tried hard to devise a way to go to
the meeting without being affected by a loss of the ability
to see as an effect of the unsightliness of the architecture.
He ended up calling his friend Jalal Toufic for any suggestions.
His friend’s suggestion was to walk there while videotaping
all along the way with a camera having a black and white viewfinder,
so that the act of seeing and therefore its consequences on
him would be delayed till the viewing of the shots in actual
color; and to later not to view the color footage, but tape
over it. And that is indeed what he did: he walked to the meeting
in Hamra while videotaping with a black and white digital video
camera, at several points even crossing from one side of this
street with no traffic lights to the other while still looking
through the viewfinder. Then he gave the tape to his friend,
who taped over it the lecture he gave as a visiting artist at
Jalal’s Video Art class at Université Saint-Esprit
de Kaslik (USEK). “I now shoot two kinds of things: what
I intend to possibly use in a video; and what I shoot precisely
so as not to be exposed to the unsightly (shooting in film would
have also worked, since in cinema, especially if one is not
an excellent cameraman, vision happens truly only once the negative
footage is developed—it thus suffices not to develop the
negative. Unfortunately, shooting in film is too expensive).”
The wives of several of the artists who used the Blindfolds
service soon developed a fetish for that contrivance: “I
want you to fuck me with the Blindfold on; I get such a sexual
thrill when I see you in it.”
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