FFF5 | Unconformities

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: both born in Beirut in 1969, are filmmakers and visual artists, “researchers and dreamers” in their own words, that have lived and worked together since the late 1990s.

The installation “Unconformities” is composed of three parts: the “Time Capsules”, sculptures that fix the findings of the drills in a transparent resin specially developed by the artists, the film “Palimpsestes”, which documents the processes used in various Beirut excavations, and finally the frieze-like “Zig Ζag Over Time” that describes the cores using three artistic mediums: photography, drawing and text.

As the geologist and project scientific contributor Mania Benisi remarks, “the geomaterials displayed in Unconformities are borehole cores, i.e. products of drilling conducted in Athens, Beirut and Paris to test the subsoil, due to anticipated underground public works (e.g. the Athenian metro). In geological terms, these soil and rock samples can offer valuable data about the past before they are discarded. The geologists and archaeologists find in them information about natural phenomena (seismicity, tectonics, floods and erosion) as well as human intervention: remnants of ancient settlements, ancient underground constructions and contemporary foundations, demolition materials and attempts to bury urban waste. Based on evidence, experts construct a chronostratigraphic column/chart and file the “record” of every sample core. In the case of unconformities, i.e. when between layers of subsoil there exist stratigraphic gaps of an uncertain, hidden past that has left no trace behind, the interpretation “is derived from the contest or questions arise.”

The collaboration of the two artists with Onassis Stegi begun in 2012, when as part of the Meeting Points 6 festival, they presented the performance-speech “Aida”, “Save Me”, based on an unusual incident that occured during the premiere of their award winning film “Α Perfect Day”.

In 2013, Hadjithomas and Joreige were among the artists invited by the Onassis Stegi and The Cavafy Archive to draw inspiration from the Alexandrian poet’s life and oeuvre. Taking his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as a starting point, they produced an eponymous short film, as part of their series “I Stared at Beauty so Much” (2013).

Remarks on ”Unconformities”

“An archaeology of memory in the heart of a perennially troubled present” Bernard Blistène, President of the Marcel Duchamp Prix committee and director of Centre Pompidou.

With a poetic gesture, they equally embrace sculpture and painting, photography and video and attempt a convocation/caucus of various disciplines – archaeology, history, geology – while challenging the concepts of temporality and linearity.” Serge Lasvignes, president of Centre Pompidou.

“A major anthropocentric work that can be read from top to bottom, or from left to right depending on whether we want to go from “nature” to “civilization” or the other way around.” Bruno Latour, philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist.

“The work of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is a practice of revelation, not a spiritual revelation that would make a fetish out of historical remains, but a revelation of the latent and the invisible, similar to the process of developing photogrpahs. Here these contemporary “dust breedings” open up a breach in official history, trigger relationships in scale and collision in time and express the urgency in understanding today’s plurivocal world.” Clément Dirié