Walid Raad

With Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut)_Solidere 1994-1997, Walid Raad adds another piece to his long-term project, Sweet Talk, centered on Beirut and inaugurated in the eighties. What started out as a photographic project about the city and its inhabitants, spaces, history and stories, as the war was ending, gradually shifts to explore the informational ambivalence of documents, just like in his famous series, The Atlas Group (1989-2004).

Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut)_Solidere 1994-1997 repurposes and recycles the bounty of a multitude of home movies shot by the despondent or furious inhabitants of the city center, as their homes were reduced to smoking rubble. The plan was to clear the way for reconstruction by a property consortium named, with phonetic irony, Solidere. Tapes and recordings as acts of resistance, derisory and indispensable, even though the city had already been largely destroyed during the civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. And then some more due to property speculation. In turn, the videos are engulfed, absorbed and transmuted into a gigantic frieze, whose silence is deafening. A kaleidoscope that feeds off the vestiges of crushed reality, that runs on a loop, like a final ornament by way of a memory, in which the buildings rise up and collapse in an incessant and infernal merry-go-round.

By combining images of ruins with virtual and digital technologies, Walid Raad achieves a result that is both stupefying and mild, seductive and terrifying, unreal and monumental. And tinged with melancholy. A game that consists of a nightmare beneath a shimmering façade, endlessly repeating new beginnings and destructions.

In partnership with Théâtre Garonne | Scène européenne.​