This January, theater director, performer, playwright, and visual artist Rabih Mroué presents new work for the stage and gallery in a three-part series at the Walker. Mroué, who originally hails from Beirut, makes work that often draws on his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), engaging with the contemporary politics of the Middle East and the enmeshed history of discord in the region, to ask larger questions about representation, the power of images, and the subjective nature of history. Theater, for Mroué is a means to present unfinished ideas and doubts about the state of humanity and, increasingly, that of his own physical body as it ages with the world. Mroué brings this same mindset to the visual work he makes for the gallery, and in both modalities he often examines the ways that images, particularly those of war and death, are constructed and disseminated to the public. Here, in an interview with curator Allie Tepper, Mroué discusses his upcoming Walker-commissioned performance Borborygmous, made in collaboration with artists Lina Majadalanie and Mazen Kerbaj, as well his latest cycle of artworks, Again we are defeated, and the “non-academic lecture” Sand in the Eyes, all premiering at the Walker this January 10 through 12.
Allie Tepper (AT)
I thought we could start with the digestive system. The title of your upcoming performance, Borborygmous, which will debut at the Walker this week, translates as the rumbling of the stomach or bowels—the often embarrassing, uncontrollable public announcement of your internal systems doing their work. I know the sound well, but had never heard the word. Could you tell me a bit about the growling gut, and what in the context of this piece, it might have to say?
Rabih Mroué (RM)
Maybe it’s that the stomach is the organ that actually reveals all of these uncontrollable things that happen to our body. You know, like today with all of the surgeries and so forth, one can play with the body—with everything. You can hide things, you can control things, or you can pretend you are controlling your body. But the belly does not allow this. The play is about our age actually, because Lina and I are over 50 years old now, and Mazen is almost 50, and we can feel that our bodies and movement have changed a lot. There a lot of things that we cannot do anymore, or that are preferable not to do [laughs]. So it’s about this. The other issue is the system that we are living in today that suggests we have to take care of our body. The thing is, taking care of your body in the globalized sense is actually oppressing your body. So it’s against oppression and for rebelling against the system in which we as consumers have to follow certain rules: play sports, fitness, take care of our eating habits, etc. There are models that we are supposed to identify with, but we always fail because they only exist in magazines and images. So it’s about oppression and how to get rid of this. In other words, to leave our body to do its borborygmous. To let it do whatever.
AT
It’s almost like the stomach rumbling is an anarchic expression. One of the things that also interests me about this idea of borborygmous, is that it is inherently illegible. It’s this sounding of discontent from your internal system, but you can never really make sense of what it’s saying. It’s just noise. I wanted to ask you, do you think your work is against representation? Historically, your work has been concerned with the politics of images and their influence on perception—resisting the presence of certain images in public life, by obscuring them and so forth. Then I was thinking about borborygmous and how it’s this unintelligible discourse. In reading the script of the piece, what I loved is its density of expression and of memories, while you can never really trace all the contours of it. It just this outpouring of human experience, though in this way it’s quite real…
RM
Yes, actually your questions are including the answers as well [laughs]. This is what I would love to say on the piece as well, but it is not against representation. Of course borborygmus by itself is something that is unrepresentable—you cannot control it, it comes unexpectedly. This is what is interesting, this unexpected thing that embarrasses or surprises us and is sometimes negative, sometimes positive. The script for this piece itself doesn’t even have a stable chronology; it consists of a series of monologues whose order of appearance can change. But the piece is not about being against representation, especially when we are talking about theater. Theater is representation. We cannot run away from it. Though maybe it is questioning what representation is and how to do it. For both Lina and I, the main question that drives our work is always how do we do representation today? With all of the technologies and social media, etc., how do we create a representation on stage? We don’t have an answer, but at least we know that the old ways of doing theater and representation are questionable now and cannot be applied. Or if they are being applied, then how they are being applied cannot be the same.
Borborygmous is a full collaboration between Lina Majdalanie, Mazen Kerbaj, and I. It’s also a collaboration with Thomas Köppel, the technical director who worked with Lina and I previously on 33 rpm and a few seconds (2011–2012), a theater piece without actors for Festival d’Avignon. In Borborygmous, we’ve done so much work on the sound and lighting, trying to create an alternative ways of doing it. Thomas is handling all of this and all technical and electronic components to the piece. Between Lina, Mazen, and I, each one of us has our own concerns, and the work was made by negotiating them, and through collaboration. There was only one “veto” rule. We decided that if there is something we have done before, we should not do it now in this piece. This was the only agreement that we had between us, and this is how we constructed the work. For Mazen, this is his first experience in theater, but he grew up in a house where both of his parents were artists. His mother is an artist, and his father, Antoine Kerbaj, is a well known theater man. As a director and especially as an actor, he is very well known in Lebanon and the Arab world. Mazen himself is also a musician and artist, he plays the trumpet and does comics, graphic novels, etc. We all have a background and long experience in art, theater, and music. So when we came to make Borborygmous we decided, okay, we have this behind us: now how can we do something that surprises us, like the rumbling of the belly?
AT
The stomach rumbling is a bodily act of disruption, like gas or something. So you are trying to provoke this in your own artistic practice, to surprise yourself and find new methods of working too?
RM
[Laughs] Right, right. Especially for me and Lina, because we have worked for many years in theater, there is a need for us to shift our practice and do something that surprises us. Of course, to say this desire, to think about it and wish for it, is different than actually doing it and actually making your practice change. It takes time and it needs courage. A lot of people, like curators, often want you to do the same thing over and over again. You have to say, no, I want to do something else. I know the old way is going to work but I don’t want it.
AT
And so you have never collaborated with Mazen before?
RM
No, we are just friends. But we’ve both lived in Beirut since we were born and moved to Berlin almost at the same time, a few years ago. He’s of a younger generation than Lina and I, but when we moved to Berlin we became very good friends. And because he comes from a theater home with his father, we always had this thought that we should do something together. So when I asked Lina to do this piece in Minneapolis, I thought, why not include Mazen as well? And so the work has become something totally else that what we had imagined.
AT
Right, so Mazen was in a sense the wild card. Going back to this idea of representation, I was also thinking about it in terms of the expectations that other people have of you, as a Lebanese artist or as someone who has lived through the civil war, to tell that history. I was wondering how you feel about that. Obviously it’s a part of your experience, and a part of your work, but I was wondering if you feel limited by it? Or if you are at all resisting the continual reading of your identity and history through your work?
RM
Most of my works deal with the history of Lebanon and the area where I’m from, simply because I know it very, very well. But this is not to say that all of my works are about the Middle East or Lebanon. I always try to resist being labeled as the person who is doing art about Lebanon or about the Middle East—like this is the Lebanese artist, so we have to put him in this box. I try to resist this as much as I can, but it’s not easy. At the same time, when I do a work, I don’t think about the audience. I don’t want to compromise with the audience, to please the audience, nor do I want to provoke the audience. Because if you start to imagine the audience, then you start to unconsciously think about them and the reactions your decisions will bring. If you take out the audience then you start to do your work, what you are interested in, to consider what are your concerns, what are your own questions. This is what I always try to do.
When I finish, I present my work everywhere. I don’t change anything. In Lebanon it’s the same, in Berlin it’s the same, in Minneapolis it’s the same—everywhere. There are no particular explanations for a Berlin audience or a Minneapolis audience. I am always sure that the audience is clever enough and intelligent enough and has its own unique ways to understand things. And they surprise you. This is what is nice, you surprise them and they surprise you. It’s about sharing. I don’t do work to teach, mobilize, agitate, or educate the audience. On the contrary, I come to share with the audience ideas, thoughts, and concerns, and this is what makes a dialogue. I don’t accept when someone invites me to do something because I’m from Lebanon. I accept if someone invites me because I’m a human being, because I deal with theater and art, and because they are interested in my art and not my nationality.
AT
I was listening to an interview with Mazen from a few years ago, and he was also talking about this problem of being read solely through a political lens or through the history of conflict. He was saying that because he is from Beirut, people would listen to his music and start to hear the sound of a helicopter or a bomb in it. But it’s like, what if this isn’t a bomb? What if this is just me and my body making a visceral, intense sound? I guess this is always the complication of encountering an audience. On a related note, I was also appreciating that Borborygmous is going to be performed in Arabic, and that you aren’t going to necessarily try to accommodate the audience by doing it in English.
RM
Ah, yes. It was actually an issue that we discussed a lot between the three of us. The text we wrote is really about the music of the language, and which word we are choosing to use is very intentional. It’s really about the language, and we thought that even if we have a very good translation, it will not be the same. It doesn’t really matter if the audience does or does not understand. I think it’s good to just listen to this language as it is. They can read the subtitles and it’s fine. Also, it’s not always so necessary to follow. Maybe you just get a sense of what it’s about, and then you can put your own text on the scenes. This is how we built it. We decided we have to keep it in Arabic, and we will not speak English or French or other languages.
AT
I was thinking about this piece in relation to Again we are defeated, the installation of your new visual artwork in the Walker galleries. I think they complement each other in a way. You’ve been calling Borborygmous a requiem for the living, and then the gallery piece we’ve been calling an homage to the dead. The gallery installation is quite somber; it reflects on all these images of the killed and your everyday encounters with them through the news. I haven’t seen Borborygmous yet, but it seems like this performance is much more irreverent and comedic—full of expression. It’s about life. I was wondering though how you see them together?
RM
Of course, there is part of me in Borborygmous, and there is part of me in Again we are defeated. To be honest, when I see Borborygmous and when I see the exhibition, I’m a bit surprised with myself that I am doing these kinds of works. Even with the exhibition, I don’t normally make drawings and collages. It’s not me, in a way. It doesn’t belong to my history and artwork, even as a visual artist. I usually deal a lot with videos. Even in theater I work a lot with images and with video. How to use the video, how to use the camera, what is the camera, it’s always this kind of questioning. Now in Borborygmous there is no video at all. In the exhibition, too, the video is really just minor. It’s not the main issue. It also shows drawing with the exception of an old work which is Old House (2006). Other than this, the exhibition is something new for me. It’s also about death and about our defeat in a way, both of them, even Borborygmous. It’s about our deceptions.
AT
And why drawing? Was it an impulse?
RM
Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s a reaction, but not reactionary—there’s a difference between them, right? I always work with my laptop and screen, and at some point I just thought I don’t want to do this anymore; I want to do something with my hands. It’s not nostalgic, not at all. I’m part of the generation that grew up with the internet, and in the digital age. I live with it. Maybe it’s just a phase of questioning what I’m doing? To resist doing the same thing. I’m not very good with my hands, but I want to try. I want to have this phase where I can shift my practice to somewhere else. I don’t know where it will lead me but I’m glad that I am doing this for myself.
AT
In some ways it seems that you’re still exploring the same ideas, just in a different form. Like in the exhibition, the two pieces Shade of a Man and One Shot include renderings of the killed and of the killer, respectively—of the person who is standing and the person who has fallen. To show these two works in the room, side-by-side, is in a way about relaying the connection between the two. It feels related to your previous work The Pixelated Revolution, which examined the eye contact made between Syrian protesters and their killers through the victims’ cellphone footage.
RM
Exactly. It’s also trying to place them together in a way that does not suggest a simple discourse, between black and white, good and evil, these binaries where there is nothing in between. I tried to put them in the same room and facing each other to create another dialogue—to skip the discourse that is always asking us to say yes or no, with me or against me. I have other answers, gradations between white and black.
AT
Right, and that is something you really see in the show, partly because you are working through accumulation as well. You are taking images of a subject and repeating them over and over again. Each one is slightly different and has a different expression, and the accumulation of that difference is what is interesting. I’m realizing that with a lot of your work, even with the performances, you’re trying to not simplify. With your scripts, you’re writing a lot, sentence after sentence after sentence describing a state of being, and with your drawings it’s like you draw it, then redraw it, and redraw it again.
RM
Exactly, exactly, and that brings you to something that you don’t expect. You go on making something, like, I know this, I know this, I know this, and then when you finish with what you think you know, something unexpected comes up for you. Of course it’s not just me, a lot of artists and writers have this strategy in their works.
AT
I feel like the piece Old House (2006) is so poignant in this regard. It’s this video of a house falling and being put back together, over and over again. It’s this repetitive visual expression, and then there’s your narration on top of it, which says you are oscillating between remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting, until death comes and you can see something new.
RM
Yes, exactly. I’ve used Old House in different exhibitions. It is a kind of key to open a door into my work. For me it’s not about telling the horrors of war. I’m not interested in this. It’s also not about remembering or memory, because memory also invents things. It’s about something else. It’s not about remembering or forgetting. It is about both together, and how they work together—how we remember, how we forget, what we invent, what we remember. There is this dialectical relationship between them. My hope is that when visitors see the works, they won’t interpret them as someone who is fixing or writing history. It’s not about writing history, and it’s not about remembering. It’s something else.
AT
Right, it’s also about unbinding yourself from history, not having to be beholden to it, or to what your experience was. On a separate note, you are simultaneously presenting one of your non-academic lectures at the Walker, called Sand in the Eyes. Could you tell me a bit about this work?
RM
Yes, Sand in the Eyes is a work that assembles reflections and questions about images of war, and how death in particular is represented inside these images. It’s part of a series of works that I started a long time ago, which includes The Pixelated Revolution, which was produced by the Walker Art Center, as well as The Inhabitants of Images, and On Three Posters. They are all covering the same topic, but from different angles and reflections; it’s an inquiry that is ongoing. I call them non-academic lectures. They are not performances, they are really lectures, but they are playful in a way. This is why I would prefer to call them non-academic.
AT
I’m curious how you feel about showing these three sides of your practice all in one weekend, and if there is one side in particular that you feel more connected to or driven by at this moment?
RM
It’s very nice trilogy, to show these three corners of my work. I think seeing them together will reveal a lot about how I work, and what my practice really is. So I’m very happy about this. Regarding the second question, no there’s not. All of my works, even when I do videos, come from my theatrical background. So in my head there is the theater all the time. So I don’t separate them, it’s just another way of saying things. I put them in one basket. We might need to find another title. Not theater, not art…
AT
Yes, categorization is a real problem. And theater, what does it mean for you?
RM
Theater for me is a platform where we present unfinished ideas, and some doubts with an audience that we don’t know, in order to open up a discussion. This is how I understand theater. There is also an element of pleasure to do it, and to watch it, as well.
AT
To close, would you say there is something pleasurable or celebratory in Borborygmous? How would you describe it in just a few words?
RM
[Laughs] I think I’ll have to use Mazen’s words, which is, “It’s about our life, our death, and our digestive system.” I like it a lot.
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