Tayyib Rah Farjik Shighli (OK, I'll Show You My Work)

Abstract

In 1997, during the months of July and August, we presented at the Arab World Institute in Paris an exhibition of photographic installations, Beirut : Urban Fictions. In July 2000, we were asked by Jalal Toufic to write an article on our installation works, in specific Wonder Beirut , 1998. But three years have already passed since Beirut : Urban Fictions. We have tried to write this text in various forms: analysis, inquiry, documents, the visitors' book of the exhibition, false documents, review of the press, retroactive analysis of our work . . . After a month of attempts it's a failure: the text is either too descriptive, or too analytical, or too abstract, or too removed from our current preoccupations or by all means interesting but incapable of implicating the audience who had not seen the exhibition. deadline is approaching; the writer's bloc is intensifying. It is then that we remembered Pierre Menard. Pierre is a writer, a fan of Cervantes' Don Quixote , of which he wrote anew, in a version absolutely respectful of the original, chapters IX and XXXVIII of the first part, as well as a fragment of chapter XXII. He did not want to compose another Quixote which is easy but the Quixote itself. We have met this amateur of cinema and photography at the exhibition Beirut: Urban Fictions , where he was photographing the last installation, The Circle of Confusion: a large, 4m x 3m photograph representing an aerial view of Beirut that we had cut into 3800 fragments and stuck to a mirror. visitors were invited to