01/16/2020
Mroué will give a workshop and a performative talk in the Dokbizia and Punto de Vista Labs sections of the festival.
Born in Beirut and resident in Berlin, Rabih Mroué is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. He is a co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC) and editor of the magazine TDR/ The Drama Review. He has performed and exhibited internationally in dOCUMENTA (13), MoMa and Centre Pompidou, among others. We would highlight his film collaborations with the artists Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, among others.
Mroué will carry out two activities in Punto de Vista: a workshop titled “Absent but Liable to Come Back” in Punto de Vista Labs and a non-academic talk “Make Me Stop Smoking” in the DOKBIZIA section.
The workshop will take place in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte on Friday 6 March. Registration will begin one month before at www.centrohuarte.es. “Absent but Liable to Come Back” focuses on the notion of absence, reflecting on it through questions on how to face up to disappearance, feelings of emptiness, memory, rumours, war and death. Absence as the possibility of playing with the notions of truthfulness and falsehood and reality and fiction in order to remove traces, going from one place to another, inverting signs, changing norms and revolutionizing certainties, which will allow us to discover the role of politics in the creation of a new ‘unreal’ or virtual reality. The participants will be invited to express their opinions and to work -either individually or in groups- on propositions that deal with absence and departing based on their own experiences and particular circumstances.
The non-academic talk “Make Me Stop Smoking” is a studio-based presentation of ideas in which Mroué reconstructs the enormously heterogenous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars. It brings together a large collection of anonymous and personal documents, videos, photographs, press clippings and testimonies to give form to a complex system of sinuous narratives. The veracity and categorical nature of archive documents are questioned, with the artist ‘negotiating’ the validity of reconstructing ‘reality’. What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representations? The session will take place on 7 March in Baluarte.
Punto de Vista Labs is a space for the exchange of knowledge and collective creation. It started in 2018 with the aim of developing a variety of training and creation laboratories to work on themes related to avant-garde cinema. In its previous editions it was able to call on contributions from key filmmakers such as Rick Prelinger, Luke Fowler, Carlos Casas or Xabi Erkizia, as well as groups like Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, centres such as the Echo Park Film Center of Los Angeles or itinerant initiatives like Museum of Clouds of the Tate Modern in London.
DOKBIZIA was born in 2018 as an interdisciplinary encounter that sets out to stimulate cross-fertilisation between languages and artists that work around reality. This programme, which covers documentary film on and off screen, puts forward an itinerary in different formats: screenings, performative talks, stage pieces and site-specific pieces or performances. It will feature filmmakers, visual artists, writers and performers.
