Structured by octopus-like extensions, this installation relates to the distillation
of impurities or “waste,” more precisely, the wastefulness of
tears. Tears are not romanticized, although they form the main essence of
the somewhat monstrous device, without which it would not operate. The fluid
subtlety of tears in their ephemeral nature and transparency is juxtaposed
against the solidity of corrugated metal and coloured cables. Invisible alchemy
is combined with the material stuff of architecture.
Playing on the byproducts of man’s relationship to nature and the sociopolitical
environment with recycling and scientifically preventive cures, different
categories of tears related to the Lebanese condition(s) are reprocessed by
this biomechanical contraption to produce the National Unity Vaccine Solution,
a provocative jab at the continuous quest for a unified Lebanese government.
The injunction on this manmade machine: “Waste not your tears (fellow
Lebanese) for they are the Solution,” becomes mocking and provocative,
to say the least.
Conceived and constructed by Christophe Katrib and Yasmina Raffoul, the apparatus
was built during a time of limited mobility,
soon after escalating tensions led to a siege of the airport and violent
clashes between opposing Lebanese parties and militias, which began on May
7th 2008. And yet it is an instrument that reaches out with ten tentacles,
its body comprising discarded components from garbage dumps. These appendages
are enclosed and bounded by plastic bottles, water containers, glass jars,
and perfume bottles converging into tubes of the primary colours red, blue,
and yellow, as well as the more neutral tones of grey and transparency.
Each shade is represented twice, and yet none of the extremities are the same
in size or composition, with the “Tears of Civil War,” labeled
on a mere, empty perfume bottle, as if to designate the evaporation, or amnesiac
disappearing of that history, tears that dried too quickly, and insignificant
in size in comparison to a larger water container labeled as “Tears
of SSBTA (semi-seasonal burnt tire allergy),” a scathingly humorous
remark about the constant strikes, burning of tires, and closing of roads
plaguing the country. All the bottles and jars are in vertical position except
for the one representing “Tears of July 2006,” when the Israeli
army launched its brutal attack, whereby the bottle juts out at an angle,
like a rocket-propelled missile.
Despite the sharpness and sarcasm of these markers, not to mention the forbidding
nature of the actual creature-like installation, there is something to be
said for the melancholy, and hope it evokes, for a “solution,”
that all the different colored tubes of discharging tears, or positions/standpoints
of suffering lead to, even if it is cynically named the “National Unity
Vaccine Solution.” This chemical remedy, encapsulated in an olive oil
jar, emerges from a green pipe, almost like the missing cedar from the central
body of the installation, a cylindrical military barrel, painted in the form
of a bleeding Lebanese flag
. With descriptions ranging from the amusing to the forlorn, from tears of “SDiMi (socio-demographically induced marriage
impossibility),” “occasional and apolitical joy,” “tears of mother nature,” “tears of miscellaneous origins,” to “tears of collateral and original attack victims (bombs, bullets, heart attack and more), “tears of socio-political and national frustration,” and “tears of airport (closing down, re-opening, farewells, separation, reunion, exile, emigration,” there is hope and there are dreams when tearful residues are represented as the only aftermath of violence.
Text by Nadine Khalil.
Photography by Christophe Katrib.
