Lebanese artist building bridges to peace

After Israeli bombs punched holes through bridges and roads across Lebanon during a month-long war last year, Jocelyne Saab set out to rebuild them through art.

In the process, the film-maker and former war reporter has made a statement not only against 30 years of violence in her native Lebanon, but against conflicts everywhere.

Her installation, Strange Games Bridges, opened for the first time last month at the National Museum of Singapore and is on display until April 22.

"It's taken from my life experience in Beirut but it could be any war in the world," Saab told AFP in an interview at the museum.

She said she had tried to forget about war, but last year's conflict "brought back all my pain".

Living in Paris since 1985, Saab returned to Beirut about halfway through the July-August war that killed more than 1,200, mostly Lebanese. She arrived on a Jordanian relief flight as Israel battled the Hezbollah Shiite militia, severely damaging Lebanon's infrastructure in the process.

"I couldn't get it into my head: Why all the bridges? Why all the roads?" she recalled.

Saab photographed about 20 destroyed bridges and combined some of those images with other footage she has made since "Lebanon in Turmoil," her first documentary produced in 1975, the year civil war erupted.

"They were broken, but I tried by my work to reconstruct them," said the green-eyed Saab, who declined to give her age.

She stands only about five feet (1.5 metres) tall but radiates a powerful presence, accentuated by her bright red outfit.

Her installation is heard, before it is seen. A humming noise seeps into corridors that adjoin the 150 square metres (1,614 square feet) of space the museum has given her.

The noise represents an overhead drone, preparing to unleash its destruction on the bridges and people below.

The exhibit is reached by passing through a hanging screen that displays a photograph of a bridge. A hole the size of a car has been blasted through it, leaving metal cables dangling below.

Several other large screens can be viewed from the floor or by climbing an overhead walkway that leads visitors on a U-shaped path past pictures of more damaged roads and bridges. In another image, three young men, cigarettes in hand and rifles in their laps, repeatedly spin around on bar stools in time to the sound of a music box unwinding.

Above them is a video of a pulverised city with buildings pockmarked from battle. Nearby screens flash disturbing pictures of boys recreating a massacre. They carry wooden weapons, and one child pretends to sever the head of another.

Television monitors encased in rocks on the floor show a mannequin's head, an anti-aircraft weapon firing beside apartment blocks, and a street plagued by a sniper.

In the interview, Saab emphasises she is making a universal statement against war, and is not singling out any religious group or country for criticism.

"It's a way to say to people: War is at your door, at any minute," Saab says. "It's my city but could be any city."

Asked her religion, she says, "I was born Christian but I don't want to be related to religion when I talk as an artist."

The pictures are grim, but Saab's message is also one of renewal, that bridges can be crossed even if they are broken. She conveys this through a ghostly image of a "djinn," or genie, superimposed passing through the destruction.

The Arabic "djinn" is related to "jannat," or garden, she says.

"All this is my garden, but it's a sad garden," says Saab, who hopes to take the installation to other countries.

She says she spent six months developing her work after the Singapore museum invited her to contribute to a showcase of Arab culture. They gave her "carte blanche," she says.

Saab was already known in the city-state after her film "Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes" opened last year's Singapore International Film Festival.

Set in Egypt, the movie about feminine desire chronicles a young woman's struggle against social taboos as she pursues her love of poetry and belly dancing.

A scene showing a girl getting a clitoridectomy triggered a controversy when it opened in Cairo.

Saab said a "war" was waged against her over the film. That is one of the reasons - including the rise of fundamentalism, and unrest in Iraq and elsewhere in the region - that she thought about making an anti-war statement even before the conflict in Lebanon last year.

"At many levels, war is going on," she said.

The day before AFP interviewed Saab, Singaporean authorities banned local film-maker Martyn See's documentary about a former political detainee, saying it was distorted and misleading.

"These problems are everywhere," Saab said. "This is the contradiction of all systems."

Singaporeans who visited her exhibit thanked her for opening their eyes to a world that few in the peaceful city-state have ever encountered.

"This is real. It's quite powerful," said Chung Sen.

"It brings us closer," said his companion, Melina Wee. "People of our generation, we don't know war."

Saab knows it too well.

She crouches near the televisions on the floor of her installation. One broadcasts the sniper scene. Another shows the rubble of her own home, burned in Lebanon 25 years ago.

"All this on my head, all my life. I feel it," she says, pushing her hands onto her shoulders.

Her message is simple: "Stop it."

AFP