Thursday, April 24, 2008

curiosity-to-survive FM beirut 3: living with the ghosts -portraits of the dead


























first image: rafik harriri everywhere (this time from saida)
second image: "signs of conflict" political poster archival exhibition
third image: rabi mroueh performance "how nancy wished that everything was an april fool's joke":

“How Nancy Wished that Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke” is Lebanese foremost playwright, director and actor Rabih Mroueh’s new production, which tackles the turbulent subject of memory and the official history of Lebanon’s civil war. Beirut’s walls were traditionally plastered with posters of its fallen “heroes”, namely fighters or political leaders. Well into the ‘post-war’, with the series of assassinations that began in 2004, and after the Israeli assault in the summer of 2006, portraits of the dead re-emerged on the city’s walls with renewed intensity, gazing at passers-by as if refusing to take leave of the city. The realms of the living and dead are so close that they intermingle, as if cemeteries overlapped homes. Mroueh’s performance asks point blank if there might be a way to induce Beirutis to lay their dead to rest, far from walls and living spaces, let those who have passed on to the beyond, repose in peace and quiet.

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