The Ascent of Man

Lebanese/Canadian artist Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker living in New York, have taken on our accumulated (mis)impressions of the Palestinian Intifada by tracing their genesis in film and television.

Up to the South is ostensibly a documentary on the south of Lebanon exploring the conditions of the time it was shot, the issues behind those conditions and their representation both in the West and in Lebanon itself. Within this we were trying to tackle two other concerns. One being the terms (and positions) inherent in the discourse surrounding the issues, i.e. terrorism, colonialism, occupation, resistance, collaboration, experts, spokespeople, leadership, the land, etc., and the other being the history and structure of the documentary genre specifically in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in documentary, ethnography and anthropological practise and the problems/agenda involved from the perspective of the subjects viewed and the practitioners practising. Up to the South challenges traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a politicized practice.

An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and subject with, *Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and the loss, of what is left behind and what remains.

The film focuses on fragments of history, pre-European contacts, interactions, and colonization of the Kelowna region (south-central British Columbia) through the stories of several N'Syilx'cen (Okanagan Nation) speakers. It traces the links and correlations between periods of extermination/disintegration, assimilation, and marginalization up to their present day and their context of belonging to First Nations. Sites of social and historical significance are juxtaposed with the current realities of the region's "landscape." An experiential video that lends itself not to an exhaustive study, but to a sifting through the layers of time and the present, to inconclusive but incisive speculation, in a history that has been lived and survived.

Part of a continuing series of works investigating social manifestations filling the gaps in our lives through media/corporate and government propagated images and idea(l)s. The videotapes present contextualized concepts/fragments of personal/emotional traumatic experiences and conflict. The influence of the media on the infliction, sustainment and interpretation of these conditions is studied while attempting to understand representations directed by the media, which affect personality and interpersonal relationships.

Excerpts from two conversations, one with Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (in Bourg al Barajinah refugee camp, near Beirut), and the other with Nameh Hussein Suleiman (in Baddawi refugee camp, near Tripoli, Lebanon), two elder Palestinians that have been living in the camps in Lebanon since they were children, forced to flee from their homes in Palestine in 1948. They discuss their displacement and the condition of their lives in a brutal permanent temporariness. Abdel Majid discusses issues of dispossession, and recites an eloquent poem told by the ruins of his house in Palestine where once he was allowed visit after his first 30 years of forced absence, and Nameh recounts her journey of exile and the present situation of her life.

Marefat high school morning assembly: the girls shift with a few boys, and faculty entering the school courtyard at 5:30 am, gathering, lining up while Sufi songs play in the background, then singing their school song, “the heat that has no love, pain, or generosity is not a heart” being one of the lyrics (this line of the song was used for the overall installation project title), then walking up the stairs to their classes. At Laisa-e-Maarifat (Marefat School), Dasht-e-Barchi, Kabul, Afghanistan. Video segment of "The Heart That Has No Love/Pain/Generosity is Not a Heart" art installation.

This film at the most fundamental level, a personal project; i) examining the use and production of images/representations of Lebanon and Beirut both in the West and in Lebanon itself, ii) recording the interactions and experiences while working in Lebanon, focusing on the undertaking of this representational process as a Lebanese and a westernized, foreign-born mediator with cultural connections and baggage of both the West and Lebanon and some of the disparities and disjunctions arising in each, and iii) situating the work between genres looking from the inside out at each and engaging critically at the assumptions imposed and thus broken in this site of complexity one’s identity is found and constructed in.

The second part of a series of attempts to give concrete form to the notion of intersticiality, this videotape addresses issues of nationalism and the nation-state, temporal polarities, alienation, the rejection and construction of political identities, ethnofascism, the body as object and metaphor, agents, monsters and abjection, subjective affinities, and the objectivity of trust. The material was recorded while leaving the family home, arriving in New York and Vienna, and then traveling through the former Yugoslavia (stopping in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Skopje) shortly after the NATO bombings.

From accumulated live footage recorded over a period of three years, this piece weaves itself in and out of experiences of differentiation and distance, closeness and otherness and questions of discourse and construction in the viewing and constitution of the subject.