An icon of the twentieth century the AK-47, or Kalashnikov is the most used and probably the most lethal machine gun ever.
In the recent clashes in Lebanon, we suffered from the destructive lethality of this weapon and the need for dismantling it has become urgent.
This project is a trial to take apart he AK-47 and degrade it from its terrible capacity to injure and kill by deconstructing it into pieces.
The body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. The death instinct: that is the name, and death is not without a model. For desire desired death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine.
The body without organs is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image.
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari
The city has lost its reference parameters, and gone into nothingness, the streets are leading nowhere, circling in a maze, it had become a labyrinth of endless steps and no matter how far you walk, it will always leave you with the feeling of being lost, not only in the city, but within yourself as well. The overwhelming presence of everything has finally transformed into pure nothingness. The continuing streets flowing around an entirely empty individual, is the city nothingness. A city that lacks relationships, and identity, and has become a no-place where millions of people meet in a mutual ignorance.
being lost in the city and within myself and living in the nothingness, in the non-place, being dizzy and turning in circles. It is about deconstructing my physical anatomy and creating a virtual circulation within myself.
Sonata op 49 #2 by Ludwig Van Beethoven. The keys SI 1st octave and DO 2nd octave were broken and the piano tuner Tony Mobarak was evacuated with the Canadian community in Lebanon due to the July Israeli aggressions.
Since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1992 we were living a transit period of reconstruction and rehabilitation, a period of a fragile peace so prosperous and promising it was and yet so unstable. Since then we lived the illusion of wellbeing that masked a fear of an upcoming dramatic collapse. We lived a harmonious sonata practicum abrupt by some broken piano keys.
a video that documents Beirut from a distance of another city, Amsterdam; the physical and social existence political and cultural clashes under circumstances of urban melancholy/solitude', in a city with a continuous heed about its 'image. It is an ever-changing space where the physical intersects with the social under new variable spatial and sectarian guidelines that exoticize the city in the eyes of its inhabitants. The Beiruties and the Amsterdammers are constantly trying to conceal themselves behind a façade in an attempt to reconstruct their image through deconstructing their corporal existence. Its when the city itself becomes a pothole, disseminated behind a façade image of history, culture and big ideological slogans.
The end of the Cold War marked the end of an era without bringing forth the beginning of a new one, we find ourselves in a moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of differences and identities, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. We find ourselves lost in the au- delà as Homi Bhabha likes to call it, or in the non-place as Marc Augé describes the transit places; for there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, we are living in the beyond.
Personally, I find myself Living in the in between interval, experiencing an exploratory, restless movement of discovering this void of nothingness. I have been experiencing this nothingness on several levels, first on the Local level; as Beirut is passing through a phase of physical and economical reconstruction after a devastating civil war. The second is on the Regional level; as the Middle East is passing through a transitional period and a major change in powers. The third is on the international level; as the world is passing through a metamorphosis of globalization that will redefine power distribution.
feeling lonely among a crowed in my post-war home city of Beirut, and in a temporal situation of detachment in Amsterdam as a peregrine stranger; I am currently surviving an urban solitude and civic nonchalance, feeling dizzy, numb, empty in a labyrinth of an overwhelming urban structure. I sometime find myself lost between the two cities, not knowing exactly where I am, mixing up aspects from both places while trying to reconstruct my memories, reconstruct my image, and even reconstruct my physical existence; my body becomes more of a burden to take care of, and maintain, hygienically, esthetically and culturally, to reconstruct a different image of myself according to the demands of the different entourage.
Living in the beyond, there is a lot of time to count seconds, in Amsterdam there is a lot of water but there is no sea, in Amsterdam time is bigger than memories. I wish I can build an additional memory for this same time.
A self presentation through the duality of representing the 'shiny image' or the 'angel', and the 'real' or the 'evil' side. It is a self presentation through 'destructing' or 'constructing' others, the way one can defend himself through hiding behind a fake 'image' that pleases others and then act in contradiction behind the scenes. It is the 'fear' of being 'wrong', the 'fear' to say what you think, the 'fear' of confronting the others who are waiting to destroy you.
The gel was blue / when I first met her / clear sky blue / she was so bright and so far away / it was so white like the horizon/ I looked back inside / the gel seemed yellow / like the light / I went out to the street / just any street / it was so cold, so empty, so green / I felt alone / I felt so lost / the city was green / bluish green / and the streets were green / vicious circles / I can't get out / it takes me in / a little city that turns around / and absorbs me in / so deep inside the streets that leads nowhere / inside of her / the yellow is red / a tempting red / invites me in / out of the city / time is passing / it was so harsh / she fades away / behind the gel / I was so warm / waiting for her / I was lost inside the city / the spiral streets that goes inwards / took me inside / to the blue inside / I feel the time / it passes slow / it is so fast / it is so cold inside the city / it is so cold inside of me / so many people / so big the void.