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- j o c e l y n e s a a b
- strange games bridges
Jocelyne Saab’s mixed media installation was produced for an exhibition in March 2007 for the National Museum of Singapore, who carried out a series of exhibitions on the subject of war as thematic leitmotif.
This installation originates from video images accumulated in Lebanon throughout the multiple wars the region has suffered since 1975, including the last one in 2006. It fully immerses us in the conflict that, for more than 40 years, has devastated this country and one city in particular: Beirut.
The installation is set up, with its metallic walkway (either a constructed structure or scaffolding), to respond to the artist’s desire to absorb us into, although in the artificial setting of the exhibition space, the bowels of this city, Beirut and all its symbolism.
Beirut has for a long time been considered, due to its geographical and thus highly strategic emplacement, as a crossroads between three continents and a key access route to the East from the West (or vice versa). Throughout the piece Saab uses Beirut’s bridges as a symbol for confluence, transition and union amongst all these territories and their cultures. Bridges whose primordial function has been profoundly altered as we can see in the video excerpts presented to us, having been destroyed in July 2006 and becoming a symbol of the absence of communication amongst nations.“Having gone through such an emotional experience reinforces my feeling of belonging to this ancient land. For me it is like travelling in three dimensions through time. I have conceived this installation as an archaeological excavation, as the one the inhabitants of Beirut experienced. I try to make the audience feel what it is to walk through a city which is devastated by war. What is awoken in somebody who risks wandering through the garden of war?”
Why does Jocelyne Saab want to allude to the idea of a garden? Why talk about a garden in the context of war?
To enter into the concept of garden is in some way to touch upon the concepts of the artificial and the real. The garden is, above all, a constructed space, an attempt to analyse the relationship between man and nature within a limited space, constructed by his own hands, and which in its cultural variety simultaneously possesses several meanings. Thus, Saab forces and obliges the audience to enter and wander through an artificial garden, where simulacrum and reality are confused, sown with steel trees, bushes of rubble, dismembered statues and where, nevertheless, children play.
Into this destroyed idyllic image another theme is introduced, which will be omnipresent throughout the installation, the universe of childhood. More than half the videos touch the theme of childhood in some way, games, toys, and innocence gone fragile. Moreover, a game can be considered to be, as a garden can, another reinterpretation of reality. And what game are the children of this garden playing? The imaginary world of the child is invaded by the reality which surrounds him and he naturally imitates fictitiously the terrifying model which is imposed on him. Thus children after the Shabra and Chatila massacre recompose in a cathartic game the unbridled violence they have witnessed, fictitiously assassinating their friends, enveloped by the security of fiction. Children playing with wooden machine guns, music boxes with flesh and blood soldiers, teenage girls exploding with sensuality frustrated by the surrounding ruins, dolls used to trick the enemy, children’s bodies reduced to ashes. Games and war are confused, and the roles of each one, children and adults are superimposed, disorienting the spectator and forcing him to ask the questions: Who is who? Who plays what? It seems that what is being insinuated here is the conclusion that in a way, war is only a game of adults.
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© copyright - M A S A S A M · Espacios de creación. 2008