"(as if) beauty never ends..." and Other Video Works
Jayce Salloum, New York City, May 8, 2004
Jayce Salloum will present his "untitled" project, an ongoing videotape addressing social and political realities, representations, enunciations, and the conditions of living between polarities of culture, geography, history, and ideology. In part 1: "everything and nothing" (1999-2001, 40 mins.), Salloum, off-camera, talks with Soha Bechara, the ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter who was detained for 10 years in the notorious El-Khiam torture and interrogation center in South Lebanon. In a riveting and intimate conversation, Salloum inquires about home, being interviewed to death, resistance, survival, and the distance between Paris, where Bechara now lives, and Khiam.
In part 2: "beauty and the east" (1999–2002, 50 mins.), Salloum turns obliquely to the former Yugoslavia after the NATO bombing. In a kaleidoscope of interviews, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and cultural producers address topics ranging from identity and fascism to nationalism and monsters. In both anecdotal and theoretical recountings, they lay out the issues currently at stake in this region of displacement and redefinition; their words are located within images of cities and landscapes.
Also shown will be part 3: "(as if) beauty never ends..." (2003, 11 mins.), in which ambient footage including a montage of orchids blooming and material from the site of the 1982 massacres at Lebanon's Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps are juxtaposed with the voice Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine. The tape permeates into an essay on dystopia in contemporary times, and provides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession.
