Paris without a Sea, 2007 - 2008
13 min 07 s, Fichier numérique (fichier dvcp.mov) 4/3, couleur, son
While studying art in Amsterdam, Mounira Al Solh visited her family in Beirut, where she filmed her father and his friends during their early morning swimming ritual. The sea in this city is heavily polluted, and much of the coastline is often reserved for private beaches. Only a few spots remain accessible to the public, and these are almost exclusively frequented by men. She decided to document the members of this group, who each day escaped their professional and family obligations as if embarking on a brief exile.
She began with long interviews, but eventually arrived at the concept that shaped the final edit: filming the men speaking slowly, then preserving their words while replacing their voices with her own. This act of dubbing becomes a form of identity exchange, in which the artist partially steps into masculinity. By appropriating words that are not hers, she crosses the rigid boundaries defining gender roles in Lebanese daily life. In 1993, Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila employed a similar ventriloquist device in her video installation Me/We, Okay, Gray, where the voice and speech of a father are transferred to the mouths of his wife and children as they hang laundry. By contrast, Al Solh simply activates and documents the conversations. At once invisible and invasive, she slips her voice beneath the swimmers’ skin, creating an improbable hybrid: part mermaid, part alien.
Marie Muracciole, 2020
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz