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Reviews, Events, Festivals // Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane, by Rabih Mroué, at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, as part of the Festival d'Automne à Paris

Nov 23, 2024 |
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ƒƒƒ article from Nicolas Thevenot

There is no coincidence. That Rabih Mroué's non-academic conference is held in an art venue is not a coincidence. That Olga de Amaral's wire works hang above our heads, like poetic and menacing clouds tracing their lines of flight from top to bottom, is no coincidence either. This is how we will be able to bear witness to this evening. By blurring the lines between reality and fiction, by making the invisible borders that separate them porous, the spectacular forms that Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué develop reveal themselves entirely ready to welcome and give meaning to what is incidentally offered to the spectator.

Before Falling (shortened title) is a lesson that continues to resonate in the minds of its listeners long after it has been delivered. Surtitled in French, it is presented in English, the language of Shakespeare but which it would be more relevant here to refer to as the dominant language of world geopolitics. Rabih Mroué is seated at a table on the platform, a microphone also placed just like the computer which is used to project the slides. The format could not be more classic and academic. But it is the content of this conference that is less so, subtly and explicitly linking the question of art to that of war and vice versa. Rabih Mroué will be able to preach the false to bring about the true in the manner of a performative action. It properly stages a theater of ideas, carried by forms. Like a history of art revisited through a minor element of military art, our speaker is interested in the leaflets dropped from the sky on towns, villages, territories, subjected to siege, to attacks by belligerents. The list of the world's woes is long. In the manner of Aby Warburg, the conference brings into resonance different periods through this leaflet falling from the sky. Continuum of cruelty and survival of forms. Hidden angles, reduced elements of the “theater of operation”, Rabih Mroué zooms with us on these pieces of paper, which synthetically reproduce the design of a bomb, and which, in the language of the attacked, instructs civilians to leave this place without further delay, to save their skin, and take the path of exile, under penalty of being considered an enemy. Dismantling all the hypocrisy of such a process, which no longer really deceives anyone in view of what is taking place and continues in Gaza and Lebanon, Before Falling pulls the threads of terror into every corner of Western good conscience. This conference, even though it falls from the sky, is not above ground: Rabih Mroué, like many other Lebanese people, one day had this type of leaflet in his hands in a similar situation. History is also that of affects and traumas. There is nothing dry in this semiological and structuralist study (does it not conclude with the myth of the crocodile swallowing the sun, like a final nod to Lévi-Strauss). No, no aridity, the articulations of this thought vibrate with life and restrained emotion, with a sensitive intelligence which embraces us and accompanies us in a gesture of apprehension of the worst in man.