Last Saturday, the 15th of March, Akram Zaatari and Rana Zincir engaged on a very inspiring conversation around the prolific artistic production of Akram Zaatari. Rana Zincir wrote 6 words on postcards and let Zaatari choose among them and then talk about what they mean for him and his artistic production: Longing, peace, chronicle, resistance, artifacts and finally history were the words… But other words also came forward such as memory, archeology, conflict, identities, documentation and photography...
Here are some headlines:
LONGING: Me I try always to address the very emotional in a very scientific ways and when you are able to bring out emotional where people don’t expect it, it is only there that you are able to communicate this “longing”…
PEACE: My generation and the generation a bit older than me in Lebanon but also from the middle east , grow up in looking down to peace: peace is something that you should not easily accept because you should struggle for your right. We have been told that peace is always something that the weak will accept. So we grew up thinking that peace is not a solution, and I think with age, with experience, with failure after failure, you realize that it is important to free or liberate the term peace from the connotation that comes around it. I think peace is an essential mean in communicating with the other whoever this other is, even your enemy…
CHRONICLE: I think growing up in situation of war make us take notes: visual notes, written notes. I did this but my brother did it too, my cousins did it too… I think time is essential in healing or in cooling things. I need time to have distance on the subject of the argument, on the war, on the battle in order to understand what’s happening. I think that the war is like a tunnel; when you exit that tunnel you realize where you are. It is really important to have distance to things and some subjects you cannot touch without the element of time…
RESISTANCE: These things are quite complex to communicate: the state of mind of a young boy who believed in a cause, who was a member of a political party at the age of 16. How do you communicate this not in a pompous way but in a human way? Does History with a big H, care for these little lives? I don’t know, I think it does and I try to convince people that it is possible to communicate little emotions of little people, of insignificant people also...
ARTIFACTS: Sometimes artifacts are very very banal, but when you tell the story of the artifacts, the story of the object, then it is not banal at all; on the contrary it becomes an object that radiates with information…
HISTORY: I think a lot of objects may tell stories that are fascinating and that can tell us today when you look with an archeological, curious eye towards the past. We can try to write a history that was never actually written, because it is illustrated now with objects or with photographs. History becomes like more present…
The video recording of this talk will soon be online on our website.
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