It is an invented memory that is exhausting me, and which I cannot liberate myself from. For this reason, I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that by making it public – I can get rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn’t know how to erase itself. [1]
Rabih Mroue is a performance artist that works around the concept of an archive, national identity and media. The performance ‘Make me stop Smoking’ is a performative lecture and a video installation where Mroue questions the contingency of national narratives by trying to find a threshold between national and personal memory in relation to the Lebanese Civil War.[2] History is contested as various histories are presented and the impossibility of a single narrative is evoked by the overpowering projections on the walls. The performance begins with subtitles on the screens, both in Arabic and English. The audience is told that the narrator is unreliable and therefore the accuracy and authority of a single narrative is challenged from the very beginning. The material appears to be constantly contradicting itself, through contradictory posters, news clippings and video footage.
The immense power of a historical archive and the impossibility of a single narrative as presented in Mroue’s work links directly to my project and the notion of ‘Struggling Museums’. Through overpowering video and incoherent narratives Mroue allows for the conventional meanings to be overturned and destabilised to indicate how memory is but an approximation of what happened. I have been using the same montage technique to show the intersections of narratives and address how they are formed. In my project, I have been exploring the ways I have been asked to remember by re-reading testimonies of war I was asked to memorise along with contrasting testimonies I discovered way too late. Mroue’s performance mode of a performative lecture has helped me to clarify the mode of performance that I will adopt when reciting these passages as he uses a didactic tone, only to render it meaningless as the archive constantly struggles against itself. Mroue’s use of Arabic in performance has been useful for me to consider my approach to translation in my work. Considering the need for subtitles at certain moments and the lack of need for them at others exposes images acting beyond language. Moreover, the act of the performer forcing themselves to physically and visually to enter historical documents has been particularly useful for me as an act of reclamation and the right of an individual to narrate their own history, while it precisely addresses the impossibility of a homogenised narrative. The overall aesthetic of the performance with the overflow of images allows for an almost Brechtian moment of reflection and alienation. Through this alienation the audience is made aware of the constructiveness of what they are viewing, something that I want to achieve through the superimposition of contrasting narratives in the projections that I am going to use.
[1] Rabih Mroue, Text for the performance ‘Make Me Stop Smoking’ (2006) Memory Ed. Ian Farr (London: Whitechapel Gallery: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2012) pp. 184