 Welcome to this latest episode or issue number of live eight and a half. And I'm my name is Suzanne Kota. I'm director of Mudam Luxembourg and I'm delighted to be here this evening. I'm speaking with Akram Zatari, who is going to talk with us from his apartment and particularly his kitchen in Beirut. I'd just like to say a few words of introduction about Akram. And Akram is an artist who I think many of those who are listening may already know through his work that's been presented in museums and galleries throughout the world and is also present in a number of very important museum collections, such as the The High Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Surales Foundation in Porto. And Akram was born in 1966 in Lebanon and he earned a Bachelor of Architecture in the late 80s from the American University of Beirut and a Master of Arts in Media Studies from the New School in New York in 1995. Since that time he's produced more than 50 films and videos, all that share an interest in writing history, and which pursue a range of interconnected themes for relating to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, and the circulation of images in times of war. So the Akram has played a critical role in the formal intellectual and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. I myself had the pleasure of first meeting Akram in 2005, and of working with him in an exhibition which we presented in Oxford in 2006 called Out of Beirut, which was a group exhibition presenting the work of Akram and his contemporaries from Beirut. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation in 1997, Akram has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation, in particular photography and archival practice. In 2011 he was the fourth laureate of the Yangon Prize. In 2004 he received the grand prize from the Associação Cultural de Vídeo Brasil, and his work has been presented at the Venice Biennial where Akram represented Lebanon in 2013 with his film Letitural Refusing Pilot. His work was also included in Documenter 13 curated by Carolyn Kristoff-Pakaviev in 2012. So Akram, hello, you're there in your kitchen. Hi, welcome to my kitchen. So tell us, I mean a very interesting way of thinking about how we might have this exchange, which was about cooking and drawing during confinement. I think it's because of all the pictures that I put on Instagram, all of a sudden people associate me with cooking, which is great. Your studio is also there in your apartment, right? I don't have a studio space like a proper studio space. I have a desk and a living room and a reception space and I work everywhere. Yeah. Well, I wanted to, I'd like to come, we'll come to the cooking and the confinement, but I just maybe wanted to start off with a kind of statement and would love to hear your response to this. I mean, when I think of you and your work, I think of the photographer, the photograph and photography in general. I mentioned earlier this subject of the archive, which of course you've been actively involved in creating or founding. One of the most important photographic archives, if not the most important photographic archive in the Middle East, which is the Arab Image Foundation. But you also in the past at least used to talk a lot about field work and the archive and the field work come together. I just sort of point out some examples for those who are listening, who perhaps are less familiar with your work. Working with the studio Cherizard of Hashem el-Madani in the city of Saida, which is where you are from. You have been working with that, the archive of that studio of the famous portrait photographer for many years now. You have also created an important body of work around not only that archive, but around the studio of the photographer. The field work also comes in and perhaps here is where we move into the idea of excavation. You've made work about a house in Beirut in a buried letter in this house in 2005. But also about a school building in southern Lebanon that was refused to be bombed by the pilot during the period of the Civil Wars. And you talk about refusal as a constructive act. So I guess I wanted to ask you whether you're thinking about refusal has been further nuanced by the experience of confinement and the global pandemic. Oh, refusal and the pandemic. I don't know. Refusal is something that has a double sword. I mean, it's great to be able to refuse an order, but it's great at the same time to be able to bear the responsibility of one's refusal. I think this is by ethically is by far much more important because you can one can keep on refusing and refusing and refusing and running away from the circumstances of one's refusal. If refusal is a political position, then great. But if refusal is just for the wish of refusing and which I would respect as well because some people's being entire being is based on on refusal. And there was once we would call it in Lebanon, the refusal front would say no to any proposition. And they are it is the culture of refusal, which I wish, as I said, as I respect, but when it's about the political position, one needs to assume one's position one if it's refusal, therefore, bearing the consequences of refusal is very important. Well, if use it and confinement is is intense because under confinement, things come back to you things from your past. Therefore, the memory acts on your system in such a way that it brings back things feelings. The mere fact of being locked in one position with the impossibility of circulation as one used to circulate in the past is a violent change. It's like going. It's not like going to prison. It's similar to going to prison and the fact that you are stuck in a geography, not by choice, not by your personal choice. So this gives makes your imagination sometimes go wild. So whether refusal comes imposes itself or something else like seduction like emotional state that you might be in that you that makes you do things that you've never done before like calling your friends more intensely telling them things you never told them before things like that. But I mean, I think confinement has to do with some kind of between brackets nesting. You can you look inwards and you tend to produce in inwards, at least that's that's in my case. And if you were just if it's possible to project your mind into the future, despite everything that you've just said, how might you think about the archaeology of now. I met I'm just going to qualify that question because I think we could think of your practice as an ongoing archaeology of the present. And I know I mentioned earlier the work that you've done with archives such as with the archives of El Medani and his studio shows art, or the photographer, the Egyptian photographer Van Leo. And it's through this ongoing excavation of the archive and representation that you it's been recognized that you engage in a sort of rewriting or in a writing of history through the subjective lens, both of the photographers concerned but also of the photograph themselves. So it's a very, and we can talk a little bit more about other projects, you know that you're working on. Yeah. Have you had any thoughts as to how you might begin to imagine the archaeology of now from your in terms of the way that you work. It's irritating to think of the archaeology that the archaeology in the future that is going to deal with the subject of today. It's scary because it's going to be so advanced if it happens it's going to be so advanced technologically. And so open to data. So I mean, imagine people who look from the future till today will be able to look at our Facebook accounts, look at look at our Twitter accounts, look at our photographs and the comments that we get on our photographs on Facebook, Instagram or any other. They will be able to see what we bought. They will be able to have the log of our the transcript of our credit cards see how what we bought for how much etc where we traveled. So in a way I'm jealous of them because I'm working on a period where it's really really hard to get a piece of information about an individual. And that would be a king. So, so yeah, it's, it's frustrating. I don't want to think about it. I want to resolve the periods and the information I'm looking for. In a like 50 years ago or two centuries ago, because that's the earliest in the past that I'm, I have worked on is 500 BC that's my current research about two Phoenician kings and father and the son. And they are both in between 500 and 2400 BC and it's quite difficult to get access to information. Do you want to say a little bit more about that I mean that these are, or maybe I can just sort of add to that as I understand it. The research revolves around to suck off a guy that were excavated in the south of Lebanon, but you know, a century or more ago. And as you said of two successive generations of rulers of kings Phoenician kings and that one of the suck off guy is now in the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the other is in. I'm not sure which museum it in a museum in, in Germany. So, I know you're sort of asking a number of questions around that but could you say something about how you're beginning to approach that subject. And first of all, these are two artifacts that were found in my city inside up. So I reached them in the framework of an interest in the city's history from Hashim el Madani backwards. And very specifically my interest, like my curiosity actually led me to that because, okay, why one of them is at the Louvre and the second one is in Istanbul. And that raised a curiosity. Therefore, I started searching and realizing actually that there's an Ottoman law that somewhere in between the two dates of these two excavations did not allow anymore the sale of archaeological artifacts or the export of archaeological artifacts outside the Ottoman Empire, Sidon and Lebanon were part of the Ottoman Empire until the French mandate in the 20s and until the fall of the empire. So that raises questions. Okay. Therefore, if from a 19th century perspective, the one of them only has been exported because the second one was taken from a province into the capital, simply because Istanbul was the capital of the of the empire. And I'm interested in because of the Arab image Foundation because of my long history in taking photographs transporting photographs from a place to another, generating copies of them and studying them. I often compared the gestures, what what you called fieldwork I compared it with the fieldwork of archaeologists. I started getting interested in the artifact itself, not the data only that it carries so I'm interested in a photograph because it's an artifact not because it shows me something specific, not because it's a description, but because it's an object that was born in a certain era and reach me at a certain time. Similarly, a sarcophagus could be the use of the sarcophagus is is is to put a corpse in it to bury someone in a sarcophagus. But today we we exhibit sarcophagus not because of that we exhibit sarcophagus because there is a culture of making sarcophagi ornamenting them with sculptures and in the absence of sculptures from that time, maybe those artifacts are substitutes talking they're they're they're talking about the culture of making sculptures, let's say. I'm interested in all of this in the displacement of objects from within a function to serve another function in another time. I'm also interested in the idea of provenance and what links does it establish between the Louvre and Sidon and the Istanbul Museum and Sidon given that it's showing in its gallery objects from that place. So I'm interested. Yeah, in like in the theoretical framework that carries all of this that's it. I mean, it's a very big subject and I know that it's also part of your interest, sort of broader discussion and in museums in general, particularly in Europe around restitution. And, and I think it's interesting at this moment that you're thinking about that and if we take the term restitution we think I think back on on your work, such as the work you've done with Madani but for example the project you did inside. Now, quite a number of years ago, it was during the 2000s, where you took, you took portraits of shopkeepers and business owners insider, and you replaced them in those those shops, sometimes it was with the succeeding people from the same family who are running it sometimes with different people and I had the privilege of actually going on that visit. And it was a it was a tour through the old city of cider but it was also kind of a tour back in time. But there's something I think now thinking about what you're working on now is there's an act of restitution somehow in what you were doing there and through that act, generating various levels of reflection and certainly different questions. But it's an interesting time to be thinking about the subject of restitution, exactly at the same moment when monuments are being toppled. Don't you think if you think in many places parts of the world, particularly in sort of the, let's call it form a colonial world, certainly the Western world but in North Africa and in Europe, statues are being taken down and then the question is what happens to them. You know what you think about that in relation to it's more the sort of conceptual relationship between taking down statues and then restitution because what does. Yeah, I mean, taking down statues as as as an act of violence against political leaders or dictators are you talking about that or are you talking more about ISIS destroying sculptures in Palmyra in the Museum of Palmyra. I mean these are two different things and I don't know. Very different and interesting. Now more to do with, for example, in in England, there's a statue of the colonial project and slave and the slave trade, of course. Yeah, you have. And so there's a, there was a fantastically interesting article that just appeared in the last issue of Art Forum written by Paul B. Preciado, precisely about this question of the monuments and at one point in the text. He proposes well find a place or a site somewhere in the world where all of these toppled money monuments can be placed and people can just walk through them. So it's a, it's a different it's a restitution of a different height because in a way I think what the toppling of the monuments there is. You're right in bringing this up because both of them try to unmake to undo to undo colonial gestures. But in reality, neither one would succeed. You cannot undo rape. You cannot undo physical mutilation. Even if you say sorry, it's not undoing. Sorry is accepting the past. So let's put the term undo on the side. It helped me only explain what what what these phenomena are. But clearly, one of them is spectacular and the other one is less spectacular like destroying a monument that glorifies a colonial period. Whoever is doing it in England is doing it. Some kind of with a I see these are as like a little bit like populist people have the right to do them. They are they do not hurt. They do not hurt. They are only hurting as culture. They are not really undoing violence. This is why I'm saying there are there are like populist discourses or acts, but still people, I mean they want to invite your news or BBC or whatever to film it and therefore raise that discourse or the raise that position and put it forward. Restitution is less is less of an event. But its problem is that it claims that damage can be undone, which is only partial. I think damage could because damage is not only the possession of it's not about theft. It's not like I stole from you 100 euros and I will give you back the 100 euros with interest. A court would have resolved it that way. But when when you're only addressing only a part of the equation that is that has to do with creating museums and appropriating archaeology and moving it from colonized to colonizing capitals, you are only you're taking the easy way and you're addressing only a part of the of the damage that was caused by by colonialism and sometimes even if you send it back the problems of dealing get dealing with it at home sometimes there are of course it's the problem of that country but sometimes that issue is not really resolved. I mean in the sense that museums might not be prepared to have something of that scale, for example. This is why I think I would want to problematize restitution and complicated so it's not it's not the easy. Let's address all the issues of that that are related to restitution, and maybe restitution in the sense of moving this from Europe to Africa or Europe to the Middle East, maybe would not be the primary thing to do. Maybe there are other smarter ways, not smarter the idea is not to be smart. Maybe there are ways that have studied the complexity of the situation way in an advanced way and thought that it's healthier and more knowledge productive to resort to something else that is a big question mark and then that big question mark needs to be researched case by case problematized case by case. And therefore the project father and son about these two sake of a guy that were that each one took a different path and ended up in France and Turkey today. Maybe there is a more knowledge productive way that allows us today to serve better their provenance. Can you believe it. I mean we only have five minutes left. And we haven't talked about cooking and we haven't talked about drawing. That's fine. That's totally fine. But on that point. It's interesting and also in another recent essay I read by Hal Foster. He, because many are historians like everyone is trying to make sense of this very dynamic current uncertain moment. And I think that he in his essay he refers to more layer more layer right in one of the songs in 1846 and border using the term them memo technique, which is means a sort of transmission of memory. And I think your work and you know this thing to you talking about this new project with the two sake of a guy but all of your work with the archive and fieldwork is also, as you say a kind of exercise in resurrecting certain memories but as a result of that same what can we learn from this what can be transmitted and working from in Lebanon and within the broader Arab speaking world. It's an important role that you're playing in giving expression, making visible, and also giving expression to cultural memory, but also perhaps asking some questions that are so easily answered, but that's also part of the richness of what you're doing. I'm a product of the place, it's not me that is acting like a member I don't see myself as the person who's keeping the memory of a place I think my interests are actually the product of this place. It's problems. They are a mirror of its problems. It's, it's, it's pitfalls, it's lacking registers maybe. Yeah, and Bodler is, is great. Imagine they made us. I always say like they made us read Bodler at 16. I mean I want to read Bodler now. Thank you for bringing up this. I think I have to read it. Hey, you must. And well, though, just for we've got a few more minutes left, tell us about drawing. What's going on with the drawing. I mean, I picked up drawing a few years ago, maybe in 2015 I started doing pencil drawing. I mean, of course I have a drawing. Background. And education with it comes with architecture. You need to draw and yeah I took a lot of painting classes but I kind of started to take this seriously in 2015. And I was working on photographs on pornographic photographs that I did not want to repeat and I did not want to exhibit because I don't want, I did not want to circulate for pornography even as a, as a material of study so I decided to draw them. And I enjoyed it so much. I think drawing is a great meditation. Like swimming. We've done swimming me and you and that thank you. I cannot thank you enough for taking me swimming in New York. They are actually meditative. And now when the when the confinement started again in April, I picked drawing again. I did small paintings with acrylic. And I love it. I love it. It's exactly it's the feeling of creating feeling feeling of cooking like when you cook something you can't wait to taste it. You can try it's cooking but then later and next day you also try it try it because it changes taste. When you wake up next day after doing a painting you go taking it and just looking at it a fresh. And I love those videos. Video does it too. Yeah, video does it too. But it's different because video is already a time based. And so you need to switch it and wait and it's an experience in time. But the food is the smell of it the taste of it are immediate and the look of something still that dates from yesterday evening is also something so so so much you look for it. Yeah. So when do you think we might see some of those drawings I mean I think you have been showing. Some of them already were advertised on the on the mudam. Yeah, sites on the site. Those I made in April. So it's interesting that just from what you were saying at the beginning with you know this whole question of the archaeology of now. You know where everything's via you know the passage of social meat images via social media the connectivity of everything that you're actually really focusing in on these small intimate things such as drawings of just cooking and also swimming. So you're fortunate you can go to the ocean. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we are so I mean I'm like we are so literally humans even if we're surrounded by people. What what makes us who we are are very very specific traits that makes you an individual an individual meaning like you are not like him. Him is not like her. Her is not like her. So what adds to the traits of us is is is what we like to do what we like to do. Our time is up. So we can stay on a little bit more but I think we're going to be switched off. So I think just say thanks to everyone who joined us. And how he is going to switch us right now. Thank you. Thank you. I think we're still live. Well, we can keep talking until. Yeah, by the way, I did not mention that I'm the project I'm doing now has become my PhD project. So I'm a PhD candidate. I'm at the University of Sergey and at the in Berlin, Sergey is in Paris and then he was in Berlin and this is where the confusion might have come by the way that the other side of a guy is in Berlin.