Rabih Mroué: Make Me Stop Smoking

In his performance Make Me Stop Smoking, Mroué reconstructs the radically heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clippings and eyewitness reports, that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations. In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archived documents as much as he negotiates the validity of this reconstructed “reality”. What happens when a lost landscape is reappropriated through its archived representations?