“It would be preaching to the choir, to the converted!”: Lina Majdalanie in conversation with Jule Köpke
Lina Majdalanie in conversation with Jule Köpke
One figure, rarely more, stands upon a stage and speaks. She is one of these bodies in conversation with the audience.
I interviewed the artist Lina Majdalanie online in early summer 2022. Some semesters ago she had taught the seminar “Yet-to-be-developed” with Rabih Mroué at HfG Karlsruhe, and we had often met in its corridors.
While reflecting on the body on stage, and especially the performative body, her works allow for a new understanding of the exposed body in front of an audience. What should it perform? How can the position of the performer be politically translated? The simplified actions of what she terms the “lazy body on stage” feel like a resistance against the common understanding of the spectacular or the ever-demanding. Our conversation centered around two of her works, Appendice (2002) and Biokhraphia (2007), in order to not only understand her use of the political body on stage but also how the body is politically instrumentalized by state power and warfare. In reflecting on the ephemeral, the audience–performer relationship, and the especially the power dynamics inherent within our society, we ended up questioning the whole state of the body and the political as separate things.
Jule Köpke: The body on stage is inevitably political, as it plays with or is ultimately part of representational politics. At the same time your body is also your work. Before we go into your specific works, I first want to ask: what does your body—as a political and/or a working tool—mean to you? How would you describe the notion of the political body as a tool?
Lina Majdalanie: First I have to explain that I will say “we,” because my work and my husband’s work—Rabih Mroué—is often done in collaboration. And even when not, our work is built on reflections and discussions we have had since we have known each other. When we studied theater at the university, the courses focused on the beginning of the twentieth century until the seventies. The practical work focused very much on a physical theater wherein the body is the main tool on stage: dancing, singing, doing acrobatics, expressing itself, and showing a lot of virtuosity based on good technique and on the capacity to do difficult things without ever being tired. This is exactly how we started working in the beginning. We finished our studies almost at the same time as the “official” end of the Civil War in Lebanon. I say “official” as we were not so convinced that it really was the end of the war and the beginning of peace; and also, because it is part of our work to always question dates, especially official dates that mark the beginning and end of any event.
Our first works were quite successfully received by the audience in Lebanon, but after some time we started questioning ourselves. What is this strong, flexible, virtuous body that we are trying to show? We were coming out of a civil war in which none of us was a hero—but we were not victims either, we refuse the notion of victim. We were just people who, when there were bombardments, were afraid and hiding like everybody else. You walk in the street and there is a militia guy who stops you and asks you for your ID—and you freak out from fear. The question was, why are we showing this kind of “heroic” body on stage that does not correspond to our real life? Moreover, we started to question this body of the actor or dancer that is asked to be strong, flexible, ready, mobilized, able to do everything perfectly and to endure difficult tasks and situations. Isn’t that in fact the same body that soldiers are asked to have, whether militia soldiers or official army soldiers? Isn’t that a fascist body? It is also the body we see in commercials, in Hollywood, or any mainstream cinema. A representative body that all the systems, mainly the capitalist, but also the communist and others, show you: a body that is always fresh, young, never tired, and happy to continue working. Although they have kids, family, work, etc. they still have time to look beautiful, relaxed, healthy, chic, elegant, and smiling. Bodies that never seem to sweat, whose mouths never smell bad even when they have just woken up. It was important and urgent for us to refuse and to question all these aspects; to say that we are tired, so tired, and the system we live in is unbearable.
Let me also return to something that is more particular to Lebanon and the Middle-East. This is an area that has witnessed many wars, losing one after the other, but which has always pretended that we are winners. Nobody accepts that we have lost this or that war, or even a battle or whatever. We felt that it was time to stop this bullshit and to reflect on our errors. Not in order to win future wars, but to stop them. To accept the defeat, and think about how to deal differently with problems in the future. We wanted to say, for once: Hey! We are losers and we are not ashamed of it. We are defeated. As a group, as a people, as a person—especially as a person, I am defeated. Also more particularly, as leftists, we are defeated. Not only in Lebanon, but all over the world. And it is our error, not only the error or the fault of others.
Add to that, the fact that in Lebanon and the surrounding area we do not have a real democracy. Even in countries that pretend to be secular, like Iraq or Syria, while they are not—Lebanon doesn’t even pretend to be secular—, we are in fact still under religious rule. We are obliged to follow the rules of religion, even if you’re an atheist and you say it clearly and openly. Religion controls politics in Lebanon, and also our personal life. It interferes with our economic life, family life, body, with everything. For example, inheritance will be decided according to religion, which favors men over women in some religions. If there is a divorce in any religion, the man is favored over the woman. If two persons from different religions get married and one of them dies, the other cannot inherit. There is no civil marriage. As a woman, you don’t have the right to abort. In some countries they are directly imposing rules on how women should dress. One more example, and the list is so long, if somebody dies and this person would have liked to be incinerated instead of buried it’s not possible because they decided that this is contrary to the religions. They are constantly controlling our lives and our bodies.
We started questioning what kind of illusion this performative body is on stage. Performative—not as in Performance Art—but as in being able to do great, difficult, extraordinary things on stage, as if we control our own body, as if we are the masters of our own lives, and as if we are free to decide on what and on how we want to be. This is how we arrived at the necessity to talk about our defeat and about us being none of those things. It was a big shift in our work when we abandoned spectacular mise-en-scène, scenography, etc. We opted for simply being on stage, mainly talking, with a very minimal set. Talking, talking, and talking. It is a return to the text—not the literary text, but a political one, through which we are questioning our errors. Not necessarily errors we have committed personally, but each person is responsible in one way or another. Because each one of us, even the most moderate, closed our eyes at some point, pretended not to know about some violent acts or relativized their impact. In Germany, until today, each person feels responsible for the Shoah, even if they were not yet born at that time. We are responsible even when we are not guilty. This is exactly what we wanted to talk about. Let me clarify one more thing: we don’t question acts, but discourses. Speeches which, in our opinions, led to these acts. We deconstruct these discourses, some of their foundations, concepts, formulations, rhetorical figures. We look to their contradictions, blurriness, repetitions, deviations. How they have been produced by those in power, of course, but mainly how they are consciously or unconsciously reproduced by each one of us.
This is also one of the reasons why we are not playing fictional roles anymore. We go on stage as Lina, as Rabih. We pretend to be ourselves on stage. We talk politically in our name, through a very lazy body that is not doing anything, not showing any virtuosity. I say “we pretend to be ourselves on stage” because every time you are on stage, it is you and at the same time it is not you, and the limits between presentation or representation are never clear. We don’t believe in this kind of clear dichotomy, for us it is always mixed.
This lazy body that is speaking is a political body, to come back to your question. Hannah Arendt says that political action is not necessarily about doing something, but that it is a speech that makes you understand who you are. I am my action, which is mainly my speech, which is what I think, and how my discourse differentiates itself from the global discourse, from the global beliefs that we have inherited from the community. Any kind of community, family, religion, nation, tribe, whatever. It seems to us that, in our area, it is important to make individuals visible, not in the bad sense of the individual, i.e. each one for herself and not taking care of the others, but to say “I don’t necessarily belong to a community like a sheep.” I might belong to this family, but I have perhaps a completely different political opinion. Or I might belong to this religious community or this national community but I have different opinions and ideas on this or that topic. It is about bringing back the importance of every individual person, his or her right, of being different, of being unique. Again, I’m paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, that the unicity of each one of us is the base of plurality 1. For that, I have to distance myself from whom I am very similar to, and get closer, or find what links me to those who seem to be very different, or strangers to me. This is the political body for us, that seems to be particularly important in such a situation as the current one in Lebanon. Now, of course the situation could change and then we would need another kind of body. But for the moment, and concerning Lebanon, this is how we, Rabih and me, see the political body, and how it manifests itself on stage in our work.
JK: You already mentioned the Lebanese law stipulating that someone’s body cannot be cremated after death. Concerning this topic, you made a work titled Appendice 2. In this lecture performance and the follow-up project Lina Saneh Body pArts 3 you open up a thought experiment on how best to circumvent this law. Going through a process of trying to get body parts removed by surgery, you end up letting artists who want to participate decide on a body part of yours to sign—your body becomes a gallery, in a way. You then offer the signed body parts to institutions to buy. The control placed on you through politics, you reclaim by selling your body and making it a public space. Can you describe your thought process and how this self-institutionalization is a way of combating politics?
LM: In Appendice I am talking about this particular issue: that I would like to be incinerated after my death, which is forbidden in Lebanon. As in most of our work we try to start from something related to our life. But it is not about “poor Lina, she has a problem, she wants to be incinerated, she is a victim of religious fanaticism.” When you start with your own real experience, you know, and you understand, the complexity of the subject from the inside. It is not an abstract theorization of a problem. Instead, you situate yourself as part of the problem, an active part. What is also very important, is that it is not really about me. If my story or experience does not have a collective dimension or resonance, I won’t talk about myself just out of narcissism. In Appendice for example, the incineration problem is just a pretext to talk about how politics and religion are affecting our lives, bodies, and even our deaths—in a different manner and from a new angle. Instead of talking about it from the very known same angle—women mistreated by men—I wanted to emphasize that this is about everyone. And that in order to liberate women, and men as well, we have to start liberating politics from religion, separating them from each other. Moreover, through the topic of the forbidden incineration, I’m questioning many other things at the same time. What is the definition of a human being? What are its limits: the body itself? What is the definition of a body? What are the limits of a body? What are the limits of personal freedom?
Working on Appendice, I began developing ideas on how to cheat the laws. I asked a doctor what they do with the organs they remove from a body for medical reasons. She told me that they burn them. So, I started constructing this scenario: I would undergo a series of operations to remove as many organs and body parts as possible, keeping only the necessary parts so as not to die. I don’t really need my hand, or my kidney, for example.
With this, I was also questioning the Body Art scene in the sixties and seventies, mainly present in Europe, Canada, and the US. We were both, Rabih and me, fascinated by the Body Art scene and we were asking ourselves: How is it possible that we studied theater and art history, but we never heard about Body Art? How is it possible that we learned about Antonin Artaud 4, but nobody drew any connection to Body Artists? Why was there never any Lebanese or Arab artist doing Body Art performance? In Appendice I was kind of imitating or pretending to do Body Art. But my plan soon reached a dead end. As I explain in the performance, the problem is not only religion—even doctors won’t accept removing an organ if you don’t have a real medical problem with it. Not only in Lebanon, but everywhere on earth, you cannot do whatever you want with your own body. Even secular democratic laws, and even scientific and medical ethics, won’t allow you to do things like that. I am questioning what the limit and the definition of a body is, and the limits to your rights on your body. And there is no answer. Each domain will give a different answer: law, religion, science, philosophy, psychology, etc. Not only each domain, but also each person, each philosopher, each psychologist, each whatever, will give you a different opinion about the definition of what a human being is, what a body is, what the limits of your freedom could be. And you will never find a definition that will satisfy you, that will correspond to how you live, feel, and think about your body and your humanity. Of course, it will never be a complete, full freedom! It will always be a negotiation. Again, it is not about “poor Lina who cannot incinerate herself,” but it is a subject that has several dimensions.
When my plan of incinerating my body parts progressively reached a dead end, I started building other plans. But all my plans reached a dead end. Every time I tried a new idea, I reached a dead end, for different reasons. Finally, I made a last plan in which I counted on art to help me. Why? Because some of these artists—the Body Art ones—did some extreme things that were in principle prohibited by law, nevertheless they were not arrested. And they were not arrested because it was art. So, I thought that perhaps art could be my last chance. This last “plan” involved inviting artists to sign any part or organ of my body, in order to make it an artwork. Once my little finger, for example, has been signed by an artist declaring it their artwork, it can be exhibited in galleries, art fairs, wherever, and I can sell it to collectors, museums… The new owners of these pieces of art need to wait until my death to receive the parts they have bought. Because only at my death, can each body part that has been signed by an artist be cut out and sent to the person who bought it. I bet on art institutions and art professionals to defend the project: as it is an art project and as my body has become multiple art objects, it should be protected and preserved, and cannot be buried and left to decomposition, since that would be vandalism.
I keep this last plan open—open, in the sense that it is a long process to be achieved in the future, and it is mainly virtual as it continues on a website—but also open as in that I don’t explain in the performance how and why it is impossible to undertake this plan. I think it is quite obvious that this is also an impossible project, and again a dead end. In an indirect way, it opens questions on the role of art institutions, galleries, museums; their power, their relationship to artists and vice versa, to art and money and to the stock market; to money traffics, goods traffic, body parts traffic, human trafficking, and the whole suspicious capitalist market and the system that sustains it. “Traffic” being used in both its legal and illegal dimensions. Nobody can fight the system alone, you need others and organizations, which means you are again at the core of the system you want to fight. This is not defeatism; it is just being aware of the complexity of reality. But as I said, all this is only implied—I count on the audience to think about it. I only set the scene by explaining that I had to work with many lawyers just to get the contracts for how to sign my body, how to buy a signed part of my body and what to do with it after my death.
JK: Your plays and texts are often about different structures of power and violence and the relationship between those two. You mention that we all have violent tendencies within us; shaped by memory, history, and the way we are socialized. You don’t exempt yourself from this responsibility. Your work, yours and Rabih’s, come in large parts from criticizing yourselves. Why is this so important for you, not to take the position of the artist who is merely criticizing the ‘others’, but to see the audience as individuals, and not one mass of bodies? How does it change the relationship you have to the audience?
LM: When we started working, we were doing theater as we learned it at university and, as I said before, it was well received and applauded in Lebanon. But then, we started asking ourselves who our audience is. The big majority are people like us: mainly middle class, well educated, leftist, and secular people. What is the interest in such a case to criticize politics and deconstruct mechanisms we all know very well, and we already agree on? What is the interest in repeating who is wrong and who is right, and why, and how bad the right-wingers are, and how and why the Lebanese political system is catastrophic, etc.? It would be preaching to the choir, to the converted! Besides the fact is that we don’t like propaganda, nor do we like this kind of teaching the audience—as if we are the ones who know the truth. Bertolt Brecht said that we have to divide the audience into classes. Well, there are not many different classes in our audience in Beirut, it’s a very similar class and milieu. How do you divide them in such a case? Based on what? For which purpose? Having chosen to rethink the politics and beliefs that we had inherited, this wasn’t an easy task! Not only theoretically difficult, but also emotionally. You must shake yourself, perturb what has seemed evident and obvious and certain for you for a long time. You hesitate, you doubt, you refuse, you resist, you are stubborn, you admit… It is a long and difficult process. We were aware that it would be just as difficult for the audience in Lebanon. And it was. Not that no one else had had these kinds of questions, doubts, and critiques before, but it was still limited to discussions between small groups of friends, with even fewer writers and journalists writing about it. But to put these questions in this kind of public space, in the theater, and loudly, has a different impact than in an essay, book, or a newspaper article. I’m not saying stronger, but it nevertheless has a different impact. It is not by chance that censorship functions differently with books, newspapers, theater, cinema, etc. Each medium has its own different quality of impact.
Indeed, the audience was shaken by the new forms and approaches we started proposing, provoked. But this was a provocation that Rabih and I assumed and accepted, because we were as much provoked and shaken ourselves. And also, because our work doesn’t just provoke emotions, or at least not only, but most importantly, it also provokes thought and discussion. Everyone for themselves, with friends, with us, no matter with who, but it provokes speeches. Speeches against, for, uncertainty, taking time to think further, whatever kind of speeches. It was nevertheless dividing the audience—the relatively homogenous audience—into individuals. This was very important for us, because in our countries, religions and dictatorships don’t make a difference between one person and another. You are a mass, or a community, and you are there to sacrifice yourself for the sake of God, the leader, the nation, the cause, the whatever. As a human being, you are not important, you are just a number. A number to use for their own propaganda and interests, as to say for example that the “enemy” killed 1000 of our people! But none of these 1000 people is really important to them. It was important for us to give weight to the individual and to the fact that each one of us, again paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, is unique, singular, able to bring something new, and therefore is irreplaceable, a treasure that has to be recognized as such and to be cared for and respected. This is also why we don’t give answers, we only raise questions. Most of the time we don’t have answers anyway, but even if we do have a particular answer or conviction, we don’t give it on stage—to leave the discussion and the space for reflection open, to generate something that is not a single mass, but [a group of] individuals.
JK: I think at the moment a lot of people especially on the political left side feel like they need to have solutions for everything, or they need to have an answer to everything, which a lot of the time I think is obviously impossible—simply through the broad range and depth of issues we currently have to tackle. Do you think it would be good to take that as a general approach—to question, rather than directly jump to conclusions?
LM: I think sometimes you do need some answers. You need some solutions to try them out. But I think that in theater I cannot pretend to give answers because I am already in a position of power being on stage, and I cannot abuse this position by giving others lessons as if I knew the answers. If we are discussing one on one, having a drink or a dinner or walking together and discussing, I can tell you: “Jule, I think that this is a good solution, let’s try it.” But you could have another proposition. I would then say: “Okay, you try this, I try that and let’s talk after one year and exchange experiences.” Why not? The problem is when we don’t recognize that we were wrong. In theater it is not interesting to give answers, solutions, messages, like a political leader. We sincerely don’t have ready-made answers, and even if I did have any, I wouldn’t take advantage of my position of power—whatever this power of the artist on stage is, let’s also not exaggerate it— because it is not interesting, it is even ridiculous, disrespectful to the audience, to their intelligence. And on top of that, it would be a kind of catharsis!
JK: In your work Biokhraphia 5, you play with different versions of interviewing yourself, and your biography—or at least what you present as your biography—becomes essential for this. After projecting your face on an aquarium full of water you fill it with small bottles which the audience can then buy. It thereby goes against the very common notion of a performance being specific to its duration, and it becomes object-based. I find it very interesting how the ephemerality of the performance is stretched—is your intention in this linked to making it durable or in a way accessible, beyond the event itself?
LM: Biokhraphia questions the modernist traditions of theater and mainly the kind of theater-making we learned at the university, and which we became used to in the sixties and seventies in Lebanon. For example, it questions virtuosity, spectacle, and a certain bizarre (mis)understanding of the didactic theater of Brecht which reduced it to giving lessons about what and who is good and what and who is bad, and some other characteristics of modern traditions of theater in general and in Lebanon particularly. Biokhraphia is built on constructing a seemingly coherent logic about some aspect or topic related to theater, and then contradicting it with a new logic and its new strong arguments, and then again destroying it with a third logic, etc. It continuously shows how clear, absolute answers, beliefs, or strong certitudes are in fact irrelevant. For example, at some point in the performance, my recorded voice asks me if what I’m doing in theater is not too easy, to which I agree by replying that it is true and that anybody could do it. My recorded voice then asks why the audience would pay money just to see somebody do what anybody could do. Here I reply that in reality, they (i.e., the audience) are not paying enough. “Let them pay and we’ll show them whatever they want to see. We will sing, we will dance, we will emote, we will express, we will cry, we will jump around like chimpanzees, we will go ape-shit for them. But let them pay first for it.” And my recorded voice asks me: “Really? If they pay enough, you would do anything they ask for?” And here I retort: “What do you think I am, a slut?” We follow the same logic to also deconstruct labels like psychological theater, political theater, post-traumatic theater or post-war, etc.
At the end of the performance, my image takes over my place. We all know that an image is a construction and therefore can be deconstructed. Biokhraphia also questions how every artist builds their own image, creating their own star image. The media is doing it, and artists are—consciously or otherwise, voluntarily or not—accomplices in it. We cannot escape it 100% but we can deconstruct it, we can shake this star image. I construct this image in front of the audience and I also deconstruct it. In the end, when I sell these little bottles on which my image appeared, the price is so high that it is supposed to discourage people from buying it, and therefore raises questions about, for example, how we can put a price on any artwork, or on any work at all. Questions about the whole art market, its distribution, production, subvention, its establishment, favoritism, and many other problems embedded in the system… Of course, artists are working, and they need a salary or a fee like everybody else; but there is something really wrong going on with art. We all know it, but it should be clearly recognized and questioned. Selling these bottles at a very high price makes people understand that I am merely pretending to sell, and that there is something else at stake here. Sometimes, very rarely, people come up to buy the bottles, but when they see the price—they reconsider. Sometimes they try to negotiate like in a souk or a bazaar, which is very interesting and important. Very rarely, somebody comes and puts down the amount! Then of course I refuse it and I offer the bottle for free, because I feel so embarrassed, and I have no choice. I am also embarrassed because I can’t offer a bottle to everyone because there are not enough. There will again be the excluded ones. Excluded either because they didn’t dare to argue, or to approach me, or because they don’t have the luxury to put the amount, or because they misunderstood the idea, or, or, or… We are again in the capitalist system and logic of competition, of winners, etc.
The interview took place on May 26, 2022. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Footnotes
cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). ↑
Appendice is a performance work first shown in Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut, Lebanon in 2007. See: https://www.linasaneh-body-p-arts.com/appendice.html. ↑
Antonin Artaud (1896 - 1948) was a French actor, dramatist, writer and director. ↑
Biokhraphia is a performance work, first shown 2002 in Beirut, Lebanon. ↑