— Rabih Mroué: In the preceding years, I started doing performances in which I doubted theater as I had practiced it before. I started raising fundamental questions such as: how do I define theater? And how could I do theater today, after 15 years of civil war? How do I present our bodies on stage? Do I need to play a character in the classical sense or are there alternative ways? How do we represent war in theater? What is theater? Actually, the last question seems to be very simple, but when I tried to answer it, I realized that it wasn’t easy at all. Moreover, in trying to answer the other questions, I found out that they are indeed complicated and complex issues but that it is worth facing them instead of running away. Coming back to your question, for me, I don’t really differentiate between the words theater and performance; for me theater is related to performance and performance is related to theater. In other words, they both deal with space and time and both try to question them. As for the “lecture” form, it does not question the space because it usually takes the relation between the audience and the lecturer for granted. Some people call my lectures “lecture-performances”, but I do not agree with this term, because I prefer not to use the word “performance” when I am not questioning the space and the relation between the audience and the stage. In this sense, The Pixelated Revolution is not a performance. It takes on the form of a lecture but at the same time not academically so: there is a desk, a chair and a laptop, there is a lecturer who reads a paper and an audience that listens, and at the end, there might be a Q&A. As I mentioned, this relation between both the audience and the lecturer is not questioned at all. However, I agree that The Pixelated Revolution–like any lecture–has a performative aspect, but for me, it is important not to mix up what I do as theater performances with my series of non-academic lectures. At the same time, I do not want to be so pretentious to say I am doing lectures in the academic sense, as I consider myself as an artist and not as a scientist; so maybe it is out of my shyness that I call these lectures “non-academic”, but it’s also because I don’t use references, and if I quote, I sometimes don’t say whom I am quoting. In addition, these non-academic lectures involve playing with the facts, so sometimes the latter are not reliable.  

— Daniela Hahn:  You said that your works aim at questioning theater as a medium. But they also explore the images as media form and how they can represent violence and death.  

— Daniela Hahn:  In The Pixelated Revolution, in Double Shooting and in the flipbook Thicker Than Water, you analyze videos uploaded on online platforms like YouTube. However, this process of dissecting seems to be connected to the photographic technique. Is this an attempt to understand the digital video through the analog?  

— Rabih Mroué: I have thought a lot about this, but I don’t have a concrete answer to it. Actually, in my work Eye vs. Eye, the Super 16 mm film looping is a mixture between the grainy images of the analog film and the pixels of the digital ones. I blow up the image of the victim, going into the pupil of his eye, till it reaches only one pixel, where we see the face of the sniper and so on and so forth. It is a mise en abyme of the two images. There are two ideas behind this mixture of the analog and the digital. One is related to optography–a technique used in the 19th century’s attempts to extract and develop the final image captured by the retina of a killed person. And the second idea relates to the difference of tools between the Syrian regime and the protesters. In order to oppress the revolution, the regime’s men were using tools belonging to a past time, the time of the analog image, while the Syrian protesters, in order to ignite a revolution, were using tools from our present time: digital cameras, the internet and social networks, etc. It was as if it were a war between two different ages, between analog and digital. This is why I tried to combine the two ages of images, using the digital and the analog at the same time in a conflicting mode.  

— Daniela Hahn:  In the case of The Pixelated Revolution, my impression as a spectator was that it makes a difference whether I see you live on stage giving the lecture or watch the video version of The Pixelated Revolution. In the video, you seem to speak to each spectator, turning the video into something like a testimony, whereas in the lecture, you seem to address a much broader audience. Do you concur with this observation? 

— Rabih Mroué: It is an interesting impression. Your feeling is correct, because it comes from the difference of the two mediums, theater and video–in other words, between being present here and now, watching things "live," and being absent and mediated through images and videos, or watching things "recorded" in the past. But for me, both forms could be addressed to a single spectator or to an audience of many. What makes the difference is the approach of the work itself and how it deals with the spectator, whether it is presented in a big theater or in a small room. For me, the relation between work and the spectators is always an essential matter. My main concern is how to present the work to individuals rather than to a community of people and regardless of the medium itself, whether the work is a video, a performance or even a painting.  

— Daniela Hahn: In The Pixelated Revolution, you juxtapose the official narrative of the tripod and the videos made by using mobile phones. Can The Pixelated Revolution be understood as a comment on whether and how a revolution can be documented? 

— Rabih Mroué: In reality, one of my starting points was the idea of how to record a demonstration in Syria in a secure manner. When the Syrian protesters were recording their struggle against the regime through their mobile phones and uploading these videos and photos on the internet, they were trying to play the role of journalists, who were absent from the scene of events. They were filling this gap. But over time, the recording went beyond journalism and documenting. It started to play another role. What I find to be more interesting is the fact that the daily videos became a new way of writing diaries. And there is a big difference between documenting and writing a diary. In diaries, it is the intimate and the personal that counts, and that is absent in documenting. Nevertheless, both cases are important, as they can both be potentially used as an imperative source for historians in writing an alternative history that differs from the one written by those who are in power.  

— Daniela Hahn: But The Pixelated Revolution is a political comment on the situation in Syria; you are clearly taking sides with the protesters.  

— Rabih Mroué: Yes, I take a very clear position against the Syrian regime. I don’t see why I should hide my political position. But at the same time, it is very clear that in my work I am not playing the role of an activist; the work itself doesn’t ask the spectators to either sympathize with the protesters or to support or to take part in their revolution. In fact, the work invites the spectators to think with its questions, ideas, and doubts. Taking the time to doubt, to ask and to think, however, might appear as if it is against the urgency of the revolution and its demands, because it is said that when a revolution is going on, there is no time to sit and play the role of the intellectual. I personally disagree with this idea, because if people are fighting for their freedom of speech, for their freedom of thinking, for a better future, then I believe it is everyone’s right to think and have the time to express her/his thoughts, questions, and doubts. This is why I insist that art shouldn’t be activist and aim at convincing the audience to take a certain political position. I don’t hide my position, but I don’t use it to shape the opinion of the spectators. Anyway, what does neutrality mean? After all, being neutral is a political position, and most of the time neutrality is for the benefit of those who are in power. So in this sense, no one is neutral, no one is innocent. And artists should be aware of this. In my opinion, interesting artists are those who betray their beliefs and provoke their own ideas and share their uncertainties with their spectators. 

— Daniela Hahn: The concept of the archive and the relationship between remembering and forgetting seems to play a crucial role in this context. 

— Rabih Mroué: For me, there is a dialectical relationship between forgetting and remembering, between presence and absence. The relationship is not a dichotomy, not a duality, like black or white. Remembering and forgetting are always tied together and complementary to each other. I did some works attempting to reflect upon the tension between remembering and forgetting, and how the people in power use the two for their political aims and goals. The idea of the institutional archive is an interesting topic to reflect on. Such institutions, whether they are private or associated with the state, always decide which material, documents and even narratives should be saved in the archive. According to their ideologies and their own aims, each institution determines what is worth keeping and what should be thrown away, what images or witness accounts should be collected and which should be neglected, etc. For them, any image, document, or story that doesn’t fit their purposes will be excluded from the collection, from the archive. I perceive this exclusion as a very violent act, because they decide on what should be remembered. In a way, it is a manipulation and reconstruction of the memories and the history of others. And then, there are some hidden and classified documents that are not accessible to everybody. Why? It is also about the idea of democracy.  

— Daniela Hahn: According to a common understanding, a document stands for truthful evidence, but this assumption has also been called into question by hinting at the constructedness of documents. Are you interested in this ambivalence of the document?  

— Rabih Mroué: Of course, a lot of my works deal with the idea of documents, for example, the piece Looking for a Missing Employee, which I showed in Ljubljana in 2005. It was about documents that I had cut out and collected from newspapers. There, you could see how documents function and how they can contradict each other. The same applies to history books. There is this assumption that when you read a history book, it provides facts, but one should be aware that it only represents one point of view. Ahmad Beydoun, a Lebanese scholar and sociologist, wrote a very interesting book. He took a specific period from the history of Lebanon and showed different versions of the same period written by different historians. His aim was to highlight the socio-economic and political conflicts between the different points of view. He analyzed the ideological context behind each version. The purpose of the book was not to make any judgments about which version is correct and which is not; rather than reveal what was twisted or what is fabricated, etc., he studied all the versions seriously and equally and consequently accepted the idea that each version has its own reality and its own “truth”. Actually, what mattered to him was to understand why a certain group/community/party was adopting a certain account. His attempts were to comprehend the socio-political position behind each version. So rather than writing a history as a series of events, historians study the power relations in a certain community/society and try to find the roots of the conflicts and the tension and then, accordingly, they start to understand why such events have happened and what such a myth means or how that version of history has become dominant, etc.  

At the least, this method would broaden our perspective and make us aware of the impossibility of finding an absolute “truth”, because it is impossible to cover all points of view. Thus, history will always be a matter of both subjectivity and objectivity. 

— Daniela Hahn: With regard to different narratives of historical events, are you also interested in biographical accounts?  

— Rabih Mroué: I use my own biography in my artistic works and I play with it, I invent it sometimes. I take fragments from my life, from my biography, broken fragments. My partner Lina and I did a work called Biokhraphia in 2002, a word that we coined and that contains different senses: “bio” of course means life, “kraphia” means myth, deliria, senile and myth. And if you cut “kraphia” into two parts, “khara” (meaning: shit) and “phia” (meaning: in it), then in the end, it becomes a shitty biography. Biokhraphia is not a completed story, it is not a model; it is non-linear; it is full of failures, of fictional and non-fictional things, of facts and rumors.  

— Daniela Hahn: Documentary practices also play with the blurry relation between fake and fact, reality and fiction. Would you consider your work as documentary?  

— Rabih Mroué: Not at all, because what I am proposing is neither documentary nor semi-documentary, as some people would like to call it. Rather, I would like to propose “theater” without any labels. It doesn’t need any labels.