Here you stand surrounded by concrete and glass.
A woman slides her hands across your back.
The pleasure seeps right through your bones.
Despite the intimacy and care of her touch
You will never see her face
These hands are for hire
You just paid to be placed naked
In a cubicle of concrete and glass
To have a strangers hands slide across your body
There is one thing the body knows
It carries its mortal weight with apprehension
There is no fear
Just the lingering sadness
Of a body that no longer feels the weightlessness of youth
And what the body feels the mind knows
It is this accumulated weight of memories
Experiences of joy and sorrow
Of what has been lived and what is yet to be lived
All contained in a body suspended in a box of concrete and glass
The body rests
A living repository of memories and experiences
In Manilla
My body shivers every time it hears a deaf sound.
A door slams, a window opens, my body shivers
Every sound coming from the dense urban city my ear cannot clearly identify is suspect
In Beirut these deaf noises signal death
They are the buffered sounds of explosions provoked by American bombs across the Lebanese landscape
In Manila the reflex to react to these sounds with fear and apprehension follows me
I know I am the only one shivering
But in Manila deaf noises are not life threatening
I have to let go
Surrender my body to the hands sucking the stress out of my pores out of my muscles
How to delete spasms born out of fear
In Manila I have to dissociate history from my body
I hence surrender my body to the city
Let us walk
In the streets at every opportunity the people break into song
In the slums
In 5 star hotels
In Manila people sing
Songs of joy but what resonates the most are sad songs
Songs of broken hearts
On Smokey Mountain people sing
In the dumpsite of Happilan people sing
Once, they were fishermen
Then as the metropolis grew its trash built mountains on the sea
The sea grew dark and polluted
The fishermen became scavengers
In Manila I searched for culture and pride in making
But the city wieghs heavy, concrete and glass competing to capture the flow of men
I thought of Amsterdam
Of dutch Masters
Still lives
Portraits
The halls of the Rijksmuseum, a celebration of Dutch culture and history across centuries
In Beirut we have two art museums
The National Museum with artifacts unearthed from the very ground
The Sursock Museum with a collection of modern and contemporary art
In between these two moments, between antiquity and modernity what stands?
Where is our history?
I dreamt of a museum in Beirut celebrating our culture and history
The central piece is my father, now deceased, my father the craftsman hammering copper, carving wood
In June 2024, the fruit of many years of lobbying paid off
I was approached to propose an exhibition for the opening of the annex of the National Museum in Beirut
We made drawings, and after three months of hard labour, in early September the structure stood tall.
As the museum was scheduled to open, war.
Throughout the war, I was writing, finalizing texts meant to reconcile objects and memories
In the middle of this process we went to Manila
Prince Claus Fund says Culture is a basic need
Imperialism and Zionism just razed 300 building in Beirut alone
They destroyed towns and villages
They buried souls in fire and dirt
Here is culture obliterated
Destroyed irretrievably
Is culture a basic need?
Culture is a basic need for survival
How can one survive without culture?
Back to Manila
Walking from one mall to another i ended up in a graveyard
A repository of dead American soldiers
The 30000 brave men who won WW2 in the Pacific
A large plot of land is dedicated to these dead men
Their bones in the ground consecrating American hegemony.
Here, between highways, malls and towers, a green spot with marble crosses
Culture is a basic need
Culture is a basic need
A repeating mantra
A guide for survival
In a year I spent time with ten fellow artists
They extended to me their geographies, their histories, their struggles
Every geography is a budding manifesto
Every one of you is a revolution in the making
Right now, the ruins across my country pose an impossible weight
How to carry all this violence
How to mourn all these dead
Every effort I make in this country that could lead to a celebration
Is a funeral
Yet, there you are, my fellows
A year of encounters with your struggles, your geographies has given me strenght
It has given me the purpose that I will and I must do everything I can
To save as much as I can
For the day you will visit is soon
And you will discover Beirut
And walk the streets of Damascus
And pray in Jerusalem
Thank you