Rabih Mroué, Make Me Stop Smoking

Performance

Samstag, 28. April 2004, 20 Uhr

Rabih Mroué rekonstruiert in seiner Performance "Make Me Stop Smoking" durch unzählige anonyme und persönliche Dokumente – Videos, Fotos, Zeitungsausschnitte und Augenzeugenberichte – die durch Krisen und Kriege zerstörte, radikal heterogene Alltagslandschaft des Libanon. Indem er sie zu einem komplexen System mäandernder Narrationen zusammenfügt, fragt er ebenso sehr nach der Beweiskraft der archivierten Dokumente, wie er die Wahrhaftigkeit der rekonstruierten „Realität“ zur Disposition stellt.

"I have been collecting worthless material for almost ten years now, taking good care arranging it, documenting it, indexing it, and preserving it from any possible damage. This material is constituted of cut outs from local newspapers, photographs, interviews, news stories, excerpts from television programs, objects and other things…
Today I possess what resembles an archive, or let’s say I possess a real archive that relates only to me: a kind of added memory that occupies different corners of my domestic space, despite the fact that I do not actually need. It is an invented memory that is exhausting me, and which I cannot liberate myself from.
For this reason, I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that -by making it public- I can get rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn’t know how to erase itself. " (Rabih Mroué)