Spanning disciplines of theater, performance, music, and visual art, Rabih Mroué’s work engages with the contemporary politics of the Middle East and the enmeshed history of discord in the region, often drawing from his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Here, Mroué discusses a trio of projects presented at the Walker: Again we are defeated, a gallery presentation of visual works (on view through February 20, 2020); the lecture-performance Sand in the Eyes (presented on January 10, 2019), and Borborygmus, a theater work by Mroué, Lina Majdalanie, and Mazen Kerbaj, a Walker-commissioned work premiered in January 2019 as part of the Out There festival.
“Borborygmus is predicated on relentless narratives—personal, impersonal, fictional, true—of each actor’s lived experiences, memories, and mismemories. It is in these narratives that we can locate, actually, not merely the facts surrounding violent acts, but the effects of violence upon the entire social body, its nervous system.” With particular attention to affective and metabolic processes, scholar André Lepecki reviews Borborgymous, a new theater work about “life, death and the digestive system” by Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué, which premiered at the Walker in January.
Watch: Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué in Conversation with Allie Tepper
“It’s not about the particular experience of being from Beirut, and having experienced the war in Lebanon: it’s a history of humanity and mankind.” In a wide-ranging discussion with the performance’s co-curator, Allie Tepper, Berlin-based artists Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué discuss the perpetual failures of the living in the midst of global sociopolitical upheaval, absurdity and hope, and the collaborative process that went into the making of the Walker commission, Borborygmous, on the heels of its premiere.
Rabih Mroué: Life, Death, and the Digestive System
“It’s not about remembering or forgetting, it is about both together, and how they work together—how we remember, how we forget, what we invent, what we remember.” In conversation with Allie Tepper, theater-maker and visual artist Rabih Mroué discusses his three-part series for the stage and gallery, including his latest cycle of artworks Again we are defeated, the “non-academic lecture” Sand in the Eyes, and the Walker-commissioned world-premiere of Borborygmous, a work made in collaboration with Lina Majadalanie and Mazen Kerbaj that takes its title from the name for the rumbling of the stomach.
