Reviewed by:

• Make Me Stop Smoking by Rabih Mroué
• Matthew Randle-Bent

Lola Arias’s “My Documents,” which started in Buenos Aires in 2012, is a program through which artists produce live performances based upon their personal archives: idiosyncratic obsessions, unused research, or otherwise unrealizable projects. These works are usually performed in a theatre, with the artist sitting in front of their laptop, sharing its contents via projection. In 2020, Arias transformed this project into an online series of live works for the time of quarantine. With theatres closed, she offered a renewed space for spectators and artists to think and feel, socially, in the presence of others. Mroué’s work, which has been performed live in a theatre several times in the past, addresses his personal archive of images. Like so many of his “non-academic lectures,” this piece highlights the relationship between viewer and viewed, particularly in the consumption of digital media. Adapting the work to an online form made the politics of this relation even more pronounced. Through this performance of Make Me Stop Smoking, Mroué brought theatrical mediation to bear on the dramaturgy of ubiquitous digital media.

Like all works in the My Documents series, the performance began in a shared “lobby.” This online gathering offered a chance for spectators to see themselves among strangers; no doubt, for many, for the first time in some time: a public. Speaking directly to the camera, Mroué discussed his obsession with interesting, “attractive” titles, that bring their own, distinct meaning to a work—Make Me Stop Smoking, for instance. Much of Mroué’s archive consists of unused materials relating to past performances, like the videos produced by fighters on suicide missions in the Lebanese civil wars that were used in the making of Three Posters (2000). Other images would likely find no other future home, such as his numerous and varied photographs of manhole covers. Mroué divides his archive between those pieces that relate to the past—documentation and press for previous performance works—those [End Page 95] that relate to the future; his proposals for upcoming or unfinished projects; and “a general, non-personal archive related to the public.” In Make Me Stop Smoking, Mroué aims to move many of those pieces relating to the future, an impossibly large library of material it would take several lifetimes to engage, to the past, through their engagement in performance.

Collected photographs of people missing from the Lebanese civil wars, as shown in Make Me Stop Smoking. (Photo: Rabih Mroué.)

In his performing voice, Mroué expressed both an existential angst (why should I collect this material when I won’t have time to use it all?), and a compulsion to use or consume as much as possible in the face of fleeting time. He reflects a temporal dilemma of lockdown: the empty time of unemployment, the consignment of future ambitions to a certain past. Yet, he also reflects the global political atemporality that characterizes life under neoliberal governance; and, more specifically, the political and economic stagnation faced by the vast majority in contemporary Lebanon. A curtailed future, and the past—particularly the wars and their unanswered questions—must remain past.

A recurring formal technique of Mroué’s work is to make visible the spectator’s complicity in the production and consumption of images in a digitally mediated society. This is a particular politics of the theatrical relation, in which the spectator’s role in the production of contemporary social reality—and with it, the political availability of particular historical truths—is laid bare in co-present performance time. In Mroué’s work, this becomes a relation to another through the image: the political and ethical imperative embedded in the photograph produced under a state of emergency. In Make Me Stop Smoking, Mroué describes his work collecting images of people lost during the civil wars. He has collected photographs of missing people printed in newspapers: 17,000 people went missing between 1975 and 1990 in Lebanon. This work is a recuperation and demonstrates the transgressive political force of a quotidian...

审核人：

• 让我停止吸烟RabihMroué
• 马修·兰德·本特

罗拉·阿里亚斯（Lola Arias）于2012年在布宜诺斯艾利斯（Buenos Aires）发起的“我的文档”（My Documents）是一项计划，通过该计划，艺术家可以根据自己的个人档案制作现场表演：特质痴迷，未使用的研究或其他无法实现的项目。这些作品通常在剧院里表演，艺术家坐在笔记本电脑前，通过投影分享其内容。2020年，阿里亚斯（Arias）将这个项目转变为在线隔离期间的在线现场作品。由于剧院关闭，她为观众和艺术家提供了一个新的空间，让他们在其他人在场的情况下进行社交思考和感受。莫洛的作品过去曾在剧院里进行过多次演出，涉及他个人的影像档案。就像他的许多“非学术讲座”一样，这篇文章强调了观看者和观看者之间的关系，特别是在数字媒体消费方面。将工作改编成在线形式会使这种关系的政治化更加明显。通过这种表现《让我停止吸烟》让Mroué带来了戏剧调解，以应对无处不在的数字媒体的戏剧性。

就像“我的文档”系列中的所有作品一样，表演是从一个共享的“大厅”开始的。这次在线聚会为观众提供了一个在陌生人中看到自己的机会。毫无疑问，这是许多时间以来的第一次：公众。穆埃直接对着镜头讲话，讨论了他对有趣，有趣的标题的痴迷，这些标题为作品带来了自己独特的含义，例如“让我戒烟”。Mroué的大部分档案都包含与过去表演有关的未使用材料，例如战斗人员在黎巴嫩内战中执行自杀任务制作的录像带，用于制作“三张海报”（2000）。其他图像可能找不到其他未来的住所，例如他为沙井盖拍摄的众多照片。Mroué将档案保存在与过去有关的部分（文献和媒体对以前的表演作品的重视）与与未来有关的那些部分（[第95页]）中。他对即将到来或未完成的项目的建议；和“与公众有关的普通非个人档案”。在“让我停止吸烟”一书中，Mroué的目标是将许多与未来有关的作品转移到一个无法想象的庞大的资料库中，通过参与演出，需要花费数生的时间才能融入过去。

收集了黎巴嫩内战失踪人员的照片，如“让我停止吸烟”中所示。（照片：RabihMroué。）

Mroué用他的表演声音表达了一种存在的焦虑（当我没有时间使用所有这些材料时，为什么我应该收集这些材料？），以及面对转瞬即逝的使用或消耗尽可能多的强迫。他反映出锁定的暂时困境：失业的空虚时期，对某些过去的未来抱负。然而，他也反映了新自由主义治理下生活特征的全球政治临时性。更具体地说，是当代黎巴嫩绝大多数人面临的政治和经济停滞。缩减的未来和过去，尤其是战争及其悬而未决的问题，必须仍然过去。

Mroué工作的一种循环形式技术是使观众在数字媒介社会中图像的生产和消费中的同谋可见。这是戏剧关系的一种特殊政治，在共同演出时间中，观众在当代社会现实的产生中的作用以及特定历史真相的政治可用性被暴露出来。在Mroué的作品中，这通过图像变成了与另一种关系：在紧急状态下拍摄的照片中所包含的政治和道德要求。在让我戒烟，莫洛（Mroué）描述了他的工作，以收集内战期间丧生的人的画像。他收集了报纸上失踪人员的照片：1975年至1990年之间，黎巴嫩有17,000人失踪。这项工作是一种休养生息，并展示了一个quotidian的侵略性政治力量。