Words by Affan
Image and video courtesy of Randa Mirza and Lara Tabet
Project digitized by Hescham Karschan
This article is part of the “The Wawa Complex” issue
Content warning ⚠️ : This piece features nudity images.
This narrative is adapted from conversations with Lara Tabet and Randa Mirza in Winter 2022, on their work under the name of Jeanne et Moreau.
“Are you in a hotel?” asks Randa, as she notices the decor of the room behind me, whilst I briefly move off-screen to adjust my laptop charger.
“No,” I reply, laughing. “I’m in a spare room at my father’s house, and he’s done his best to make it look as neutral as possible for any guests.” This exchange resonated more and more with the topics we discussed over the next hour.
Randa and Lara are in France, albeit in different cities, taking part in artistic residencies. I am also in-between, having just returned from Istanbul and heading to Amsterdam shortly. It seems we shared the experience of permanent transience.
For Randa and Lara, the nuances of transience – and more importantly, the nuances of intimacy that exist within such forms of impermanence – greatly inform the work they’ve created together under the artistic alias of Jeanne et Moreau, with parts exhibited earlier for the Habibi.ti exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, France (September 2022 to March 2023). Both artists bring their respective expertise and disciplinary backgrounds – from clinical pathology, biotechnology, and politics to photography, video installation, and performance – into their work, shaping its foundation and texture. Drawing on themes of intimacy, distance, mutuality, publicity, and privacy, Jeanne et Moreau invite us into the complexities of memory and dream, distance and proximity, exile, and belonging.
Working together since 2017, it’s interesting to hear how their collaborative project began. Lara said, “I remember Randa exported all our chats and images and gave them to me one day and said, maybe we should do something with that. Then we started exhibiting in a queer space in Croatia, and we coined the name, Jeanne et Moreau. And we’ve been exhibiting since.” Their first work as this duo, “End-to-End Encrypted,”2018, Galerie Tanit, Beirut), dealt mostly with desire when operating as the photographer and the subject – and as lovers. “We explored how fantasies are built with distance through image-making. What’s public, what’s private, and how can you take over the representations of your own body through what you create and how you share it?” Lara continued.
Randa agreed, in that the joint practice started from a place of love, desire, and a long-distance relationship. It began before a constellation of crises changed the course of this practice: the revolution in Lebanon, economic collapse, the pandemic, the Beirut explosion, and thereafter, Randa and Lara’s personal exile from Lebanon. Through all of this, their work has diverged into a multiplicity of strands that include the “Nothing is Happening, Delete the Picture” series. Lara said that, in this series, “we re-worked our images in this piece, talking also about crises, whether economic, sanitary, ecological, political… We questioned the intersections of these crises and the status of the image within them. It became a more archive-based practice, reworking our images and considering what it means to talk about them and to navigate the precarity of them, and of exile, whilst also navigating domesticity in our relationship.”
Speaking on the notions of exile with Randa and Lara, I was particularly intrigued to hear how they chose to define the public vis-à-vis the private in their work as Jeanne et Moreau, and how they find harmony in displaying this as part of a large-scale exhibition like Habibi.ti in Paris. “For me, our methodology is this tension-filled space between the public and private,” said Lara, before Randa added, “It’s exactly like how any person negotiates the public and private by creating a persona on social media – we are all sharing personal space in which there are things that you would share and other stuff that you wouldn’t share. Some intimate things that you share, and others that you don’t.”
When exploring intimacy through imagery, Randa and Lara’s ideas as Jeanne et Moreau seem to emerge from how one can reappropriate an image from a space of consent and collaboration. This entails having control over what can even be defined as public and private in the first place, as well as what can be done with such definitions and/or ambiguities. What makes this conversation on consent particularly interesting is the very fact that they are partners. When using moving images and photography as mediums with which to archive memories and/or dreams, relationships of consent “don’t happen among one person, but between two,” as Lara put it, before adding that “it is a real exercise to find this common ground as a duo.” One would expect this when navigating such intimate topics.
So, how do we see these considerations manifested in creative and spatial formats at Habibi.ti in Paris? For their piece, Jeanne et Moreau set up a bed with a video piece that is projected on it. This video piece is called “Photography Lies, But I Have Other Romantic Ideas.” Lara said that “it is basically a collage of videos that we recorded and sent each other,” and Randa agreed, explaining that “they’re very short because they were recorded and sent immediately.” The soundtrack of this piece is an encrypted sonification of a WhatsApp chat.
Next to the bed, there is a bouquet of flowers that has the lifespan of the exhibition; the artists tell me that the flowers serve as a temporal allegory for the impermanence of space and context. The flowers are ‘fresh’ for the duration of the exhibition, after which they begin rotting in a way that metaphorically presents the ending of context, and thus of intimacy. When I ask further about the personal significance of the flowers, both Randa and Lara told me that having a presence of flora in the various rooms and spaces that they’ve navigated in their ongoing periods of transience has allowed them to experience some permanence or continuity in new and unfamiliar places. “It started a bit intuitively, we were doing a residency in Paris. The place we were staying wasn’t very comfortable, and without thinking much we began to gather bouquets. It was made of branches from streets and other places, as flowers are quite expensive in Paris. Then, we used them to inhabit the room we were staying in. The purpose was to make it homier, especially as we were only staying for two months so we were not going to renovate the room.” An opportunity to add intimacy to an otherwise soulless room.
Alongside the bouquet is an iPhone containing images from the time of the revolution in Lebanon (between October and December 2019). I asked Randa and Lara whether the audience knew that they could interact with the iPhone, particularly as it was glued down (per the choice of the exhibition space). They say that many actually did, to the point that even they were surprised. Randa said, “Many people even took selfies of themselves, whether individually, as couples, or as groups. There were many young people, many queer people, many people of colour.” It’s quite interesting to think about how one must’ve maneuvered to take a selfie on a phone that couldn’t be lifted up.
Perhaps audiences’ efforts were the result of experiencing the body of work in front of them, of it resonating with their own experiences of spatial, temporal, and emotional dissonance and proximity. As we make suppositions about this, Lara jumps in to bring attention back to another feature of the iPhone, its photomontage wallpaper. “We work a lot on the idea of negotiating between what is idyllic – as in, what is the ideal and what is the reality? There is a photo collage of Lac Leman in Switzerland as the wallpaper, with a sunset view of the lake. But it’s not actually a real image. Randa, in fact, added the idyllic elements to it. The swans were added, to exaggerate the idyllic presence of the photo too.” For Lara, this seems to tie into the notions of cognitive dissonance and of precarity. Two elements that feel very familiar to the questions of exile.
I ask if they’ve heard of Haifa’s Zangana book – called Through the Halls of Memory in the original Arabic text and Dreaming in Baghdad in its English translation – which speaks to this idea of dissonance in their work and that audiences in different places might find different meaning or significance in their work. Lara replied, “It’s very difficult to tackle this. Inner psyches always lose something when talking about trauma and traumatic experiences. It’s about negotiating these extremes. Strength and fragility in everyday life when faced with traumatic experiences.”
Take a virtual stroll into Jeanne et Moreau’s installation “Can You Feel My Pulse Through a Screen?” below, digitized by Hescham Karschan