Ali Cherri

I grew up on the ninth floor of a high-rise in Beirut—where, in the eighties, you still had a real view not only of the city but of the mountains. I remember I could see both very distinctly. I could also see a mosque; we would hear every single morning prayer. But of course the mind stops hearing what it's used to. So it would also be true to say that I didn’t hear the prayers. I wouldn't be reminded of their presence until friends came over and said, “Wow, you have a loudspeaker right outside your window.” To this day, sound remains my starting point when I am thinking about how to represent a place.

The other important detail—but not only for you to get a sense of the soundscape, unfortunately—is that I was born around the beginning of the Civil War. So living in a high-rise also meant living in, you know…

A risky situation.

Yes, I spent all my school years there until I got to university. Then I moved to an apartment in Raouche, by the sea.

The sense that museums, among other "actants," could alter or interfere with the inner life of objects was present very early for me. I often mention my first experience in the museum, which took place in the early ‘90s. The National Museum had just opened following Lebanon's war years, just for a few months, before closing again for renovation. And all the large, heavy artifacts had been put in cement casing. This meant that the first exhibition consisted not of the artworks themselves but of bunkers with images on them saying, "This or that artwork lies inside this box."

My relation to objects was very marked by that memory. On the one hand, it made explicit the demands the museum implicitly makes on a public's trust when it does its work—which is to produce, through a constellation of objects, a certain historical narrative. But on the other hand, the sight also suggested that this had never been a one-way relationship: that objects, too, as violence intensified, could choose one after another to remove themselves—to escape, resist, or act upon the institution that was hosting them.

My interest in inanimate forms, I think, stems from this early dissonance. From there I kept asking myself how we position ourselves as conscious beings in the world alongside other forms of being. For me, it's really important to be open to the encounter with these non-human forms. Having a certain receptivity to their stories, their traumas, offers a way to grapple with our own. In Lebanon, we move from one trauma to the other. And our heightened sensitivity probably comes from our own personal vulnerability—as we could also be broken, we could also be crushed. The life of objects becomes a way of talking about our own life, in a situation of extreme violence.

A state of confinement and darkness was certainly one of the defining features of my childhood. In the first video I made in 2004, Un Cercle Autour du Soleil, I talk about how, growing up in Beirut, where so much of our time was spent hiding, I managed to create a sort of “alliance” with darkness. Because in darkness, things lose their connection with their names, such that everything becomes possible. You can say "a tree" and a tree will appear in front of you. You can think of a garden, and a garden will come.

This kind of dissociation between actual reality and the reality invented through a child's mind was a way to contour and navigate through war. Because, living in darkness, I could not know what Beirut “meant”; I could only experience it as part of an imaginary process. In such a context, objects, words, and images become infinite possibilities of creating narratives. And objects like us, which have been subject to violence and trauma, need narratives to be able to make sense of our lives.

These alliances and solidarities between different forms of being is really at the heart of what I seek in my practice, in the hope that we might become like a body amongst other bodies inhabiting this world, inhabiting the space of ruin.

No, it's not so simple. Like the ruin, the wound is a leitmotif that constantly recurs in my work. Most of my characters end up being wounded, or carrying a wound. What really fascinates me in the image of the wound is that it's essentially a possibility of permeability with the outside. The wound is a meeting point between exteriority and interiority. And in that sense, it becomes a space through which the outside might literally "enter" you: you can spill your guts out and through the opening.

So for me, wounds are actually a way of forming a connection between the interior and exterior worlds, even if this connection occurs through something that was hurt, or subject to violence, or subject to trauma. Wounds tell us very directly that we are not closed off. We take in and take out, we are in a continuous flow with what happens around us, not only as a metaphorical image but actually in a very literal way.

Yes. The broken objects I work with—when I speak of solidarity, it translates in a literal way. They come together the way plants do in grafting, in botany: you place two different species side by side, bind them, and wait for the sap to begin flowing between them, for the graft to take and eventually flourish.

I love this image because each organism arrives with its own history, its own wounds, fragilities and broken inner parts. And the two fragments just meet. There's no one that's overtaking the other. Just two bodies, two beings, each with their own wounds, coming together. And through this encounter, new narratives can emerge.

By drawing on the possibilities inherent in a natural process like this one, I find a way to speak about how, in moving toward the other, we might feel less alone, less isolated. By opening ourselves to others’ pain we can create something like a new life, and perhaps come to better understand our own sufferings and our own histories.

These kinds of contexts certainly form a connective thread in my work. Because it is precisely in these conditions that acts of fiction, imagination, and encounter become necessary—and that the possibility of solidarity emerges. When I go work on The Dam, which was shot during the revolution around a hydroelectric power project in northern Sudan, or when I go to Cyprus for The Watchman, in a buffer zone where the island has remained frozen in division since 1974, or to any other place, it is a way of saying that within all these different stories, these traumas, there is something still that can connect us. Something beautiful can come out of turning our attention to one another.

The forces creating the landscape of violence in each case are local, specific, political—but there is something shared about this condition. Not only for its existential resonance, but increasingly because, on a planetary scale, we face the shared horizon of climate catastrophe. So I deliberately play with these fragments, to try to make them connect. I try to make them stick to each other—literally stick to each other—and observe what might emerge from that closeness, which our contemporary conditions do everything to prevent. Which also projects onto human relationships, of course.

I'll let you pick any of them. I think they all are. As artists, the only image that we know, that we start from, is our own body. That's the point zero from which everything starts. I can only experience the world through this body I have. I cannot extract this fact and think outside my body. So the body truly is the point zero not only of any creative gesture, but also of any perception of the world I enter.

In that sense everything I make is an image of me—sometimes a distorted image, sometimes an unconscious image, sometimes a fabricated image. But it remains an image, just like when you wake up in the morning and decide what you're going to wear, how you're going to walk, what you're going to eat… I think my work engages in this same kind of process. It's a way of sharing this experience, which I've had through lived history, through my body, through language, through encounters with others.

Making art is ultimately a gesture towards others—a way of reaching out to other sensitivities and other receptivities. In my case, if you pick any sculpture, any character in my films, Sergeant Bulut, or Maher, or a dead bird, or the hand holding the dead bird… any of these are one portrait at a specific moment in time. And if you add them all up together, then maybe you start getting a full picture.

That is the big question. One of the defining characteristics of a catastrophe is that it entails, well, a collapse of language. A collapse of the possibility of representation. If you take the August 4th explosion in Beirut, for instance, people who survive such moments can tell you exactly what they were doing before, and what happened after. But when it comes to the thing itself, most will say "we have no words to describe it." And yet it happened.

So in a way, the catastrophe is always a before and after. Which makes it something like an empty black hole that neither language nor representation can give shape to. You can only contour it to try to understand it. Considering the odyssey and the dream that bites back, I wrote in a recent text about war titled G.U.E.R.R.E. about the mythological figure of Ulysses: “Ulysses returns from the war. But his return is no return. His path is made of detours and delays, as if he were endlessly circling an absent center.” If the circle is absent, if catastrophe is a collapse of language, then the question becomes: How can we talk about our traumas? How can we construct narratives about going through this catastrophe? That is really the question.

I think my answer to this "how," when it comes to our day-to-day life, is that ultimately we are doomed with hope. At that moment when everything collapses, the only thing you can continue doing is what you know how to do. We have no other choice than to continue. Because if we stop, it's unbearable. This is the ultimate survival instinct, so often talked about—the moment where you switch into survival mode—but it's real.

There is this romanticized image of the person retreating from the world after a trauma, going where they won't be seen anymore. But such a life would be unbearable. It is unbearable not to be surrounded by the people you love, not to continue making things. Lebanon has demonstrated this after each and every catastrophe—even in a frenetic, you might even say unhealthy, psychotic way.

It's very interesting to me that "surviving" is a superlative. Sur-vive. It's an extra living. And I think in Lebanon we're very good at surviving in the sense of super-living, not just living. We enter a third state, which, if it is not quite life itself, is still a place where possibilities can emerge, where people can help one another endure.

I am very struck by how presence often becomes maximized precisely at the moment when—and in the places where—it is most fragile. In my most recent film, The Sentinel, there is a bar called "les survivants" whose neon sign is constantly flickering, such that at times it is saying "survivants," and at other times only "sur" or only "vivants." On and off, like that. This is our introduction to this space where survivors meet and are able to be in one another's presence.

It's a film in which I wanted there to be a lot of tenderness and love—for beauty, places, people, faces. Because it is sometimes terrible to be a survivor. When you are a survivor, you are not quite living so much as "over-living," and, within this over-living, always inhabiting the knowledge that you are compensating for some part of you that has died.

The dream is absolutely one of the spaces where these connections can happen, where the living and the dead can move together in our shared uncertainty. In this place of passage, presences can return without needing to take on a fixed form.

In general the space where we re-encounter those we've lost, I think, will forever be mysterious… but it's there. There are also moments of consciousness where you see it. Sometimes you catch a glimpse, a smell, something that tells you: “Oh, we're meeting.” Sometimes it's in a dream. Sometimes the space is there still, but you don't pay attention. But I do think it's always present, even if we are only aware of it at certain moments.

Yes, a hospitality extended towards the absents. Ultimately I like to think that this world we inhabit … we are not alone in it. Things don't end. We can try to make possibilities for other things to emerge, other realities, other possible ways of being. Art can be the space where these things are most possible. We can create the conditions, through film, through music, through these sensorial experiences, for people to connect and to encounter one another.

Other modes of perception must be cultivated. In my work I often return to the idea of somniculus, or light sleep. What I love about that idea is that it imagines a kind of receptivity to the world that doesn’t go through the gaze, through looking. In light sleep, all our senses are still present. We are not disconnected from the world, from its smells or its sounds. But we are horizontal, in this posture of lassitude, instead of being upright, vigilant, vertical, engaged in a kind of hierarchy of the living. Instead we become a body among other bodies, and that shift can open up all kinds of possibilities.

I recently finished a series of watercolor drawings of sleeping soldiers. The figure of the guard keeps returning to me—the guard in a museum, at the entrance of a dam, in a military unit—as a way of considering how certain bodies inhabit the world. These are bodies that are trained to be alert, observant. And yet, over extended time, the body inevitably dozes off. That moment interests me. Because the guard’s sleep is never a total sleep; it is an attentive sleep. Any disturbance would wake him. In a museum, it’s actually the only body we are used to seeing dozing off. And yet this sleep is not negligence. It is another form of receptivity, another temporality of attention.

I think there's something for us to learn from this mode, about how we could be in the world. There is a will today to keep our eyes open at all times, and it's natural, because in the face of genocide, of war, we’re thinking: “The least I can do is look.” But this form of witnessing also exhausts our capacity for looking. Our eyes need moments to rest from the contemporary condition of being a non-stop witness. Otherwise we enter a kind of dreamless space, which is ultimately a space of death. Light sleep, I think, creates the possibility of something different—instead of a descent, a kind of elevation, towards the space where imagination and political possibility can re-emerge. These moments of rest, of sliding, as if on the surface of a river—of letting our bodies float—allow us to open ourselves to other worlds, other possibilities of being.

When we wake up, we can put the worlds we've dreamt up into political action. But if we never have such moments at all, we risk becoming exactly the kinds of 24/7 insomniac zombies that the extractive regimes of late capitalism and militarism are invested in turning us into.

Yes, a hospitality extended towards the absents. Ultimately I like to think that this world we inhabit … we are not alone in it. Things don't end. We can try to make possibilities for other things to emerge, other realities, other possible ways of being. Art can be the space where these things are most possible. We can create the conditions, through film, through music, through these sensorial experiences, for people to connect and to encounter one another.

That’s a spot-on observation, that many of my characters have a role. They are tasked with something, and often something that exceeds the explicit confines of their official or stated task. If we take the digger, for example, though he lives far from Abu Dhabi and Dubai and is stationed apparently on the margin of all this modernity, guarding a 5,000-year-old necropolis in the desert of Sharjah, the reality is that he is actually an essential cornerstone in building this modernity. Because young nations are built through the production of a history, a fiction, a “roman national.” Likewise figures like the soldier, the guard, the builder—they are all participating in the making of projects fraught with narrative, human, economic, heritage, or ecological stakes far beyond their perceptible tasks themselves.

But interestingly, my characters all find a way of contouring these tasks, of making them about something else. Maher, for instance, moves between two difficult temporalities—that of the Sudanese revolution, unfolding via news dispatches, and that of his daily labor in the brickyard, working within a system of exploitation to make a living. But later, in the desert, we see him making the very same gestures he’s been using to form mudbricks, only this time as a creative act, "creative" truly in the biblical sense of the word, evoking all kinds of creation myths—from the Book of Genesis to Sumerian, Hindu, or Yoruba cosmogonies—in which humankind is narrativized as originating from mud. So he is really creating a new life. Similarly, the watchman is asked to go up to a tower presumably meant to improve his ability to see—in the watchtower you can see further, you can see better—but every time he goes up to this tower he loses his sight. He has no irises at all. Instead, other kinds of vision—of a traumatic past, of the ghosts of the past—come to him as he considers the empty hills before him.

So I’m drawn to how these "normal" gestures of labor are twisted and shifted in order to make other human possibilities emerge. For me this becomes a way of speaking about resistance, and in particular of the resistance of bodies that fail to perform. The failed soldier, dozing off at his post, is a way of understanding how our bodies live through the imposition of dogmatic systems. Like hackers, my characters may begin with their assigned role or job, but then these "slits in the matrix" occur, these moments where the system falters so that other realities can suddenly emerge.

This really gets to the core of our discussion on catastrophe, and the way in which it both ruptures the present "system" and also pre-exists in it. In The Disquiet I tackle this tension, by drawing a parallel between the natural disaster and the man-made disaster. We live overground, but underground forces press upon our lives. We live in the present, but we are pulled constantly out of it—either compulsively toward past catastrophes, or anxiously toward future ones—as in two parallel but forever intertwined timelines. Just as I don't make a distinction between the inanimate objects and us—these bodies versus our bodies—I think that in the context of catastrophe, whether in natural or man-made forms, the way we experience it is the same. There is a unity to catastrophe. When you bring it down to how we experience trauma, there is something shared and human about the experience. That is really the crux of it.

One crucial implication of this, which redirects the pull toward fatalism into a movement toward solidarity, is that you don't need to have lived through a war to understand, to have empathy for what others are going through. More and more we have this tendency to say that we are unable to imagine ourselves in other people's lives. I think we can. We cannot live other people's experiences, but we can understand, whether it's an earthquake or a war, what that experience might signify. So many narratives today are premised on othering. Their death is not our death. Their suffering is not our suffering. Like it's impossible to express real empathy. But we can, and we do. It's a political obligation, in fact, to be able to understand what others go through. My work deliberately navigates along these division lines, and tries to blur them.

I often return to this quote by the philosopher Jacques Rancière: "Rupture is not to defeat the enemy, it is to cease living in the world the enemy has constructed for you." This is at the core of it. We must refuse these contingent worlds in which extreme injustice and violence are taken as givens. Is it possible to build another world instead? I think that yes—of course other worlds are possible. And, because you cannot win under capitalism, under militarism, under regimes of political and environmental violence, they are needed. We have to invent these modes of being. The health of our environments—both outer and inner; the health of our own inhabited worlds—depends on it. It's no coincidence that one of the defining attributes of authoritarian regimes is that they colonize the imagination to such an extent that the peoples subject to them are eventually no longer able to conceive of other possibilities. Freeing our imagination from the oppression of systems is an integral part of freeing ourselves from the systems themselves.

Go ahead.

I have no precise plans for my body. But I wish, I hope, that just as there are all these objects I've been taking care of, someone will want to take care of it. I don't want to leave a testament saying, "do this" or "do that." But I hope that the care and love I put out there will somehow come back to me. Because it was somebody's care and love. The same goes for my work. I'm not someone who is obsessed with things breaking or getting damaged. For me, our living resides in the deeds we do. You leave good, care, love out there in the world and you hope the universe will bring it back to you. So that's all I can really hope for, that the care I put into these objects will continue after I'm gone. That both my works and my body will find another person, somewhere in the world, to take care of them.