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Filmmakers’ notes

Not a matter of if but when: brief records of a time in which expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or still to come

The piece was developed in 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria. This period of time was marked by momentous events: Rafiq Harriri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, was assassinated, the Syrians were pressured to withdraw from Lebanon after a 30-year occupation, the “Cedar Revolution” came and went, elections were held in Iraq and were followed by a descent into civil war, and Hezbollah strengthened its position in Southern Lebanon. These events reverberated in Syria and gave rise to widespread anxiety and anticipation around the potential for imminent change, regime change, internal reform, internal collapse, civil war and the increased power of fundamentalist Islam. Over a period of several months, we worked with Rami Farah to record short sequences in which he responded to a prompt or a written text. Through a combination of direct address and fantastical narrative, Rami’s improvisations speak to living in a condition of uncertainty, chaos and stasis. (Speculative Archive)

We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass

The structure of the piece is a sequence of five discrete “films.” Each section is conceived as a separate story with a distinct approach to the image, the text, and the music. And each section is conceived in relation to the others. The thread is that each section takes up a particular way that people imagine the future in the particular place called Syria. These “pictures” of the future are: one (the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus), everything remains as is-the prevailing sense of stasis will prevail; two (the recitation), a perfect leader will arrive to steer a proper course through the difficult times; three (an interview with a dissident intellectual), a space for democratic politics will open up further; four (a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls), God, through the faithful, will light the way; five (an imagining of the world made anew), the pressures from US policy in the region will bring greater chaos. These five pictures were the ones we most frequently encountered and discussed during our time in Damascus, and each became the focal point for a section of the film. (Speculative Archive)

Production notes

The first section of We will live… is based on interviews with architects, engineers, and urban historians. We developed a script for the narration from both the facts and the feelings of these interviews.

The text in the second section, with the horse jumping, is written as a kind of incantation or poem, with words drawn from what we might call the general repository of expressions that have to do with desire for a leader and from the rhetoric of propaganda. The text is delivered in Arabic by an older man and in English by a young boy.

The third section is an interview. The interviewee, Yassin Haj Saleh, a Syrian dissident intellectual, is not an actor, and we shot him in a very conventional documentary way. What hopefully shifts the ground of this section, and the impact of what the man says, is the way it is built into the whole piece.

The section in the Qur’an school is also approached in a very straightforward, almost vérité manner, visually speaking, but we structured the material as a story that focuses on the process through which children learn faith….

The final section is the most “invented,” but draws from the rhetoric of neoconservatism and the ways in which fantasy has been articulated as policy under the current US administration. Rather than being spoken by the source of the vision, the text is introduced through the voice of someone upon whom this vision has been imposed, a voice that has been forced to see according to someone else’s vision and to live with its effects.

The other work we produced out of this time in Syria is Not a matter of if but when, a series of monologues by Syrian performer Rami Farah. We originally thought we would mix this material in with everything else, but as we edited his monologues, it became clear that this was an entirely separate work, even if some of the motivating questions and ideas behind it are shared with We will live... Our main interest in all of these works has been to develop narratives about the difficulties of thinking about the future differently in a time when so much conflict and destruction stem, in part at least, from convictions that people hold about the future.

In all of our recent work, there are facts and fictions, but we call the work “documentary.” Not “experimental documentary,” not “mockumentary,” not “quasi-fictional documentary,” or any of the other new genres that point to some kind of crisis of the real. We went to Syria and we made some documents and we put them together to make a documentary – a record of a particular time in a particular place. For instance, we looked at the building in downtown Damascus and asked, “What is this building a record of? And what visions of the future are embodied in it?” It is not always possible, and maybe not even desirable, to separate fact from fiction when it comes to answering such questions.

[Excerpted from Bidoun, The Journal of Arts & Culture from the Middle East, “The Failure Issue,” Summer 2007]

Julia Meltzer is a media artist and director of Clockshop, a non-profit production company in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005–6. In 2007 she received an Art Matters grant.

David Thorne is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He is a 2007 recipient of an Art Matters grant, and a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. He completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. In spring 2006 David was a visiting artist at The Cooper Union in New York City. He recently collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for Documenta 12.

Recent projects of The Speculative Archive have been exhibited at the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach), Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery’s (London) traveling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival.

Visit www.speculativearchive.org for more information