Make Me Stop Smoking, Rabih Mroué
Friday 20 Sep 2024 from 7:30pm to 8:45pm
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Non-academic lecture, in english.
'Make Me Stop Smoking' will not free you from any addiction. Rather, for the lecturer, it is a matter of freeing himself from a personal cerebral tension factor, constituted by a pile of documents accumulated over the years, as a potential subject for artistic creations.
The memory of contemporary Lebanon, as well as very personal whims, make up the material of this heady collection, a pretext for questioning, between facetiousness and emotion, the process of weaving our intimate or collective memory through the archive.
The idea behind Rabih Mroué's "non-academic lectures" is to hijack the principle of the lecture, by imitating its structure, with a view to performance. The idea is not to deride the principle of the lecture, but rather to exploit the power of the exercise as a public address, through a deliberate shift in ambiguity, from presentation to representation, from the real to the imaginary. The illusion is unsettling, the tone is neutral, the expertise seems proven, the supporting documents suggest authenticity: this is the aim of the game, by turns mischievous, moving and intellectually stimulating.
* Words collected by Tony Abdo-Hanna for the Festival d'Automne 2024 / Portrait Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué
Rabih Mroué is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York) and a co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin from 2013 -2014.
He has been working as a theatre-director (metteur en scène) at Münchner Kammerspiele from 2015 -2019.
His works include: Hartakāt (2023), Sunny Sunday (2020), Borborygmus (2019), So Little time (2016), Ode à la joie (2015), Riding on a cloud (2013), 33 RPM and a Few Seconds (2012), The Inhabitants of images (2008), Who's Afraid of Representation (2005), looking for a missing employee (2003) and others...
He has performed and exhibited internationally including dOCUMENTA (13) - Kassel, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo - Madrid, Reina Sofia Museum /Madrid, The ICP Triennial and MoMa - New York, Centre Pompidou – Paris, SALT – Istanbul, among others…