Up to the South + Untitled, part 1

Talaeen a Junuub Libanon, USA 1993 Regi Jayce Salloum, Walid Raad 1t DCP Arabisk og fransk tale, englesk tekst Aldersgrense 15 år

Untitled, part 1: everything and nothing France, Canada 1999 Regi Jayce Salloum 41m DCP Arabisk og fransk tale, englesk tekst Aldersgrense 15 år

Up to the South (1993)

Walid Raad and Jayce Salloum's Up to the South (1993) is "ostensibly a documentary on the south of Lebanon exploring the conditions of the time it was shot, the issues behind those conditions and their representation both in the West and in Lebanon itself. Within this we were trying to tackle two other concerns. One being the terms (and positions) inherent in the discourse surrounding the issues, i.e. terrorism, colonialism, occupation, resistance, collaboration, experts, spokespeople, leadership, the land, etc., and the other being the history and structure of the documentary genre specifically in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in documentary, ethnography and anthropological practise and the problems/agenda involved from the perspective of the subjects viewed and the practitioners practising. Up to the South challenges traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a politicized practice. Up to the South [self-consciouscly] challenges traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a politicized practice.
Lebanon has been used as a metaphor, as a 'site' serving the real and imaginary for various ‘visitors’ throughout its history. It has been a ground for a history of claims, discursive texts and acts of 're-construction'. It has become an adjective for the nostalgia of our past and the fears of the future. We have come to understand so very little in spite of the massive amounts of ‘information’ we have received regarding Lebanon, the war and especially the situation in the south of the country that for one to even mention the name all sorts of images come to our minds."
— Jayce Salloum

From Video Data Bank's page on Up to the South:
"An oblique, albeit powerful documentary that examines the conditions, politics, and economics of South Lebanon [from the early 90's]. The tape focuses on the social, intellectual, and popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, as well as the imperiled identities of the Lebanese people."

Untitled, part 1: everything and nothing (1999)

This MiniDV tape is the first out of 9 Untitled works (in fact 10, with the third broken down into 3.a and 3.b) by artist Jayce Salloum.

"untitled, part 1: everything and nothing is an intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and subject with, *Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and loss, of what is left behind and what remains.
*Soha Bechara is a heroine in Lebanon, pictures of her are seen in many houses in the South and posters of her were seen all around downtown Beirut when I was working there in the early 90’s. She was captured in 1988 for trying to assassinate the general of the SLA, Antoine Lahad (the South Lebanese Army was a proxy militia set up & controlled by the Israeli forces to give a Lebanese façade to the occupation of South Lebanon)."
— Jayce Salloum

Salloum has written elaborately on this work in the essay sans titre/untitled, published in the first Fillip magazine issue, in summer 2005. Here are some excerpts:
"The archive is untitled, as memory is, as the accounts of the subjects who refuse to be reducible are. The individual parts follow this practise in content, construction, and packaging in their refusal of commodification.
untitled seeks to articulate the conditions of living and moving, subjectivity strewn between or through borders, nationalisms, ideologies, polarities of culture, geography, or histories.
untitled brings together the intensely personal space of the dialogue moment with the context of the intrinsic social and political site."

"We have no boundaries; our boundaries should be the love that continues forward. If we want to define that movement, it goes beyond acceptance, beyond tolerance; it is the capacity to reach an empathy with the other in a way that encompasses everyone, democratically, with liberty, equality and justice; and it’s the creating and maintaining of a system that asserts itself without attacking, and without assaulting the other on a daily basis."
— Soha Bechara