artć + societate / arts + society #38, 2011 20 lei / 11 €, 14 USD - idea

Farid Comes (Disney), photo-collage by Farid Fairuz, credit: NCDB
Farid Fairuz in Mogoøoaia, on top of the discarded Lenin’s statue, photo: Luigi Obreja
scena
myself, which were real, I like very much Lebanese kitchen,
the music from that area, which I have listened to for years,
I even made a show in 2000, Hammam, Prisoner in the
Thoracic Box, based on an author from Morocco, Tahar Ben
Jelloun, I could say my interest in this area dates ever since.
On the other hand I insist on the fact that Farid Fairuz is a mix,
if someone who comes from Lebanon meets him, one might
even be offended. Farid is situated in a zone of delirium and
maximum freedom of fusion.
From the biography that Mihalcea sketched to Farid Fairuz, he is
shaped as a crisis character and at the same time immutable, hard to
fit into one pattern but perfectly mixing different patterns’ contradictions,
at the fluid borders between assumed exoticism, globalist post-
9–11 news-story, reinvented urban shamanism, social satire and never
fully vanished ancestral beliefs. His biography explains his accent,
partially his looks and eccentricity. At least for those who believe that
any uncommon behavior needs an external cause, preferably geographically
and temporally remote. For them, Beirut, the origin place
of Farid, as well as his apparent immemorial age are enough warranties
that he cannot truly disturb their daily drive in their own life,
that he is just one image – albeit a moving one – from the register of
the spectacle, who will stay there, who, no matter how many scenography
tricks takes out of his sleeve, he will not manage to dislocate
their comfortable position in the spectators’ seats.
I work a lot with the accidental, and this from Stars High in
Amnesia Sky, when I provoked a situation and asked the others
to react to it. I have a blind faith in what comes next, although
I am completely lost, however I madly enjoy this state of being
lost, in which I don’t know what I am to do, and the actions
have an effect on me after they happened, when I re-live the
show and understand the movements I made.
I find it essential for an artist this crisis moment in which you
don’t know what to do next, which is the next step, the pressure
is so bad that it makes you take out of the pocket something
that you know it works. That moment incites me to the maximum,
when you’re swinging between yourself and something
else, between the handy clichés and something completely new.
I think that if you are resilient, then you discover things which
are not in themselves new (I find it a bit arrogant to pretend for
originality), but they are new as a situation for oneself. Still, it is
tough, this state of having your carpet sliding from under your
feet, when you’re pedaling in vain, but if you live with that
mood, then things come out, otherwise you quickly fill in something
that you have and you keep going, repeating yourself.
For the others however, those who bring their own anguishes to the
show and leave with them doubled by those of the artists, those who
all of a sudden encountered this unpredictable and unmanageable,
often troubling, character, symbolically relegating Farid Fairuz back
to the cloudland wherefrom he came is not so simple.
Especially he is not hiding himself in the protective half-shade of the
theater hall. He performs in front of the video-camera, with the menacing
tone of Bin Laden and the apocalyptic worries of Wikileaks,
which he then releases online. In such a performance, Farid recites
the poem published in 1894 by Romanian poet George Coøbuc,
“Our Land We Want”, which message of social rebellion can be
appropriated by the contemporary artists, chased away from the
spaces (already scarce) they are occupying, employed only when
needed for representational reasons.
Another time, Farid Fairuz goes to the mall, the biggest and most
polyvalent mall in Bucharest. Here he dances on the cheesy pop
music heard from the speakers, he interpellates the visitors upon
their reasons for being there, he skates by himself on the artificial
skate-ring, he uses all the mall props and reveals them to be as
absurd as the ones in the show directed by Farid at NCDB, Farewell!
(or About the Discrete Oversights of the Limbic System). Here however,
on the private and guarded territory which came to be the substi-
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