02. LAMENT OF THE ABSENT WATERS

Athens Design Forum presents a selection from Greek-Lebanese artist Georges Salameh’s WHITE MIDDLE SEA (ongoing since 2010).

Salameh discerns: “The Mediterranean Sea (المتوسط الأبيض البحر - the White Middle Sea in Arabic) is the geological and intangible heritage of all identity sedimentations. Open basin or cosmopolitan diversity, graveyard to three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe.”

Across five Mediterranean cities, Salameh traverses a lineage of cement throughout his first migration—fractured landscapes seen through near endings: corners, piers, edges, and trails of wetness marked by the plight of stilled movement. In sequence: ripe Sicilian figs are isolated in a black crate. Fishermen’s nets in Tyre, Lebanon, rest affixed to the wall, waiting for their owner. Five boys crouch over the pier’s bend, gazing toward their reward in Mytilene, Lesvos. A blue wooden stool found in an old café in Saida, Lebanon, reassures us that the veins of an impregnable sea continue to be found. The white chalk keeps score after a day of card games. With the subdued intensity of a pier, a broken lamp of aristocratic measure remains unlit in Piraeus, Greece. Drenched palms in Larnaca, Cyprus, are pressed downward following rainfall. One has found the desert’s water—a bright red sign, inconspicuous of location, closes the sequence. A shrine of the cistern. 

A conversation follows with Athens Design Forum founder, Katerina Papanikolopoulos and Georges Salameh.

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WHITE MIDDLE SEA ● GEORGES SALAMEH 

> On re-imaging your initial journey – childhood memory, reconstructed.
WHITE MIDDLE SEA takes its roots in the specific phenomenon of my first trip on a boat in late spring 1976, not knowing that this was my first time to migrate, from Beirut to Larnaca and then to Athens. In this body of work, I pretended to speak about my childhood, yet my real childhood had disappeared:

... No other memory remains of my childhood, and I have even forgotten my father's features. Of my mother, a floating figure, I only remember the smile that covered her face and a gold ring, set with a pearl, which she wore on her ring finger. But I have not forgotten the last chapter of my life there, the one that led me so far, under the sparkling sky of this "White Middle Sea." No matter what distance I travel on rough waves, nothing changes here. I can never escape this shore. I have not forgotten that chapter, but I have rejected it, fearful for my sanity. Now, I know that the day I walked on that sand, my memory, everything I once experienced, has become a book that forgets its pages. No sooner does a precise memory emerge on the surface of a page than it vanishes into an abyss. My life is written on sheets that no binding can assemble, and the wind disperses when I brush them. (Extract from the unfinished poem "LET US STOP AND WEEP")

> On Water’s Edge – How is water, as an imagined and physical body, represented in your work? What are the powers that mitigate this?
On the edge of the sea, like a crab, or on a boat in fugue, under the Mediterranean sun and sky, I stare at the continuous flow of waves in wonderment. This is a foundational icon of my childhood memory. While growing up, or during our brief migration to the islands of Cyprus and Greece due to civil war in Lebanon, I learned about this state of being on the water’s edge. Both land and sea, for my boyhood vision, formed a fluid border between the possible and the impossible, the known and the trail-able. I also started imagining what was in the abyss of the sea and ended up looking for marks of the immemorial abyss of slowness that reveal themselves in erosion and geology. I mainly found them in the verticality of metropolises, sinking into the chaos of urban space, running away through narrow trails on islands, on erupting mountains, on lethargic lakes, finding home in solitary ports and Fayum portraits of familiar faces in foreign lands.

In the gesture of me as a child, of every child throwing a stone toward the horizon, lies his query about the unknown dark blue sea and his secret knowledge that this stone will go and settle at its bottom. Years later, when I started working as an artist, the notion of sedimentation (in the Mediterranean) came to complete an artistic language of composing this body of work. Sedimentations of songs, stories, myths, migrations, and longings leave a trace behind my path, some visible and some hidden. From shore to shore, alienation, immobility, raw fiction, the poetics of light, and humor all play their part in this narrative.

> On stillness – the absence and presence of human protagonists. How do you encounter yourself and those shown in these images?
Human figures in this body of work are mostly present even when absent in the frame. They are fleeting encounters, moments of stillness or pause. And if they are portraits, they always reflect on being away from home and the familiar, far from places of origin, as if all are in a state of self-exile or as travelers. But the images proposed are all the direct result of long walks, essentially without a predefined destination. A peripatetic practice that I cultivated throughout my life to my joy and health. Walking has become a form of defiance against speed and noise. It increases curiosity and encourages humility, sometimes leading to meditation. It invites us to contemplate, be silent, and listen better. What I call Peripatetics also revolves around experiential, direct, non-conceptual photography. It’s the quiet side of urban landscape or scenery contemplation during which attention is given primarily to the state of mind and not to the hunting of exceptional phenomena. This internalization of attention brings a more sober and poetic reading of reality. It’s a detached way of making more intimate images open to interpretations. You create or inhabit an unfamiliar space that, through the act of walking, metamorphoses into a home and opens it towards a political gesture and towards the sublime.

> On Perspective – what is found at the nexus of walls: How do you isolate and interrogate the components of an image at hand?
I try to avoid interrogation with my gesture of framing; I prefer presenting unanswered queries or scenes of a theater stage for possible answers. Images are revealed as a gift at the nexus of walls or under bridge arches. My quest for perspective resides in looking for and finding the ‘right’ distance from people, objects, or scenery. Sometimes this means approaching them and sometimes turning away, inward into myself.

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