Walid Raad
On October 26 we had an Image&Word meeting in Hasselt. For that occasion I prepared a short presentation on Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group: an imaginary foundation whose objective is to research and document Lebanon’s contemporary history. In Raad’s own words:
“Our aim with this project has never been to fool viewers and listeners by presenting stories and documents about anything and anyone in order to see what we can ‘get away with’. (…) This project operates between what is sayable, believable and known (as true or false). (…) Hence we would urge you to approach these documents we present as we do, as ‘hysterical symptoms’ based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.”
(quoted from “Let’s Be Honest, the Rain helped // 2003” in Merewether, Charles. Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive. Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2006.)
The visuals of the presentation can be found here.