Lina Hakim speaks to Ida Hajdari

Ida Hajdari: You seem to be fascinated with documenting 'reality'; in your website you state that you have been taking up to 600 photographs a day for the past 6 years. That is a lot of photographs! I am not surprised you have trouble coming up with a system for organizing this collection of images. First things first though: why this obsession with recording and documenting? Is it borne out of events that are part of your personal history or is it what one could call a more intellectual interest?

Lina Hakim: I haven't updated my website in a while, so this should probably read 7 or 8 years even by now. My tentative organizing system, if I dare call it that, is a very primitive folder based one on my computer: There is a main folder titled 'Photos/Videos' where everything goes; inside it, you'll find subfolder titled photos and followed by a Roman number (i.e. 'photos III'). After 'photos VIII' though, I've been titling them 'photox'... so they are still in order as they're arranged alphabetically in my computer. In each of those there are 99 folders, simply numbered with sometimes a few hints as to what they'll contain (i.e. SkyWalkRaouda) and sometimes even dates (i.e. 15/07/04). I am currently at folder 'photox XI', folder 34).

Anyway, to get back to your question, I would say that this obsessive documentation stems from a more intellectual interest, although I do sometimes excuse it, along with my obsessive collecting (verging on hoarding), with a romanticized war reflex of stocking "just in case". It could be that it's the 'intellectual' aspect that is the excuse... I think it really stems from a desire to keep bits of the world that I know I can go back to, a bit like a diary. The collecting reflex is tied to memory in that way: it provides it with leftover traces and with things that could help me reconstruct moments or spaces in which to find something forgotten. It also has to do with a sort of mission that I feel I have been pursuing: to give thorough critical attention to the little things or habits that are usually deemed unworthy of it.

I think the documenting/collecting only becomes an intellectual project (as opposed to a reflex) when it is contextualized, edited or formatted in a certain manner, because that is when it tells a specific story. An example of that would be the My room-a-day (Beirut) project. Devised as an ongoing work, it consists of photographs of/in my room, taken (almost) every day from Sunday 17 February 2008 until my move to London in September 2008 brought it to an end. With its 'plan' defined in this way, I like to think that this series forms a collection of jigsaw pieces that suggest a very specific space, time and emotion.

I don't know if I'm making much sense.

Perhaps it all boils down to an attempt at understanding/remembering through collecting and documenting?

I.H.: I understand your 'exercises' in ordering and cataloging as attempts both to uncover meaning as well as to exhaust meaning. On the one hand, in your work the objects in a particular series, i.e. the alphabetical list of the contents of your room, are usually already connected to each other, i.e. all of the objects in the above-mentioned series are in your room, prior to any attempt on your part to rearrange them according to a new principle. This connection, however, is usually quite tenuous and does not exhaust the meaning of these objects. (For instance, I cannot remember how half of the objects in my room got there in the first place. Needless to say, this gets in the way of my being able to see them as a coherent whole, i.e. my room.) Different ways of ordering and cataloging objects, even if this process takes place in the mind only and does not affect the place that these objects occupy in the world, will reveal previously hidden aspects of these objects and uncover hidden relations between them, thus producing different realities. In this sense then, you seem to be engaging directly with the question of history. However, your interest in cataloging objects in so many different ways is also a way of exhausting their meaning, which seems to me to be emphatically anti-historical. This tension between history and its impossibility if you will, is evident in other works of yours. I am thinking here of your 'empty diaries' where you attempt to reconstruct certain days in your life, seemingly chosen completely arbitrarily, through family photographs, newspapers and your mother's recollections. The exercise is, of course, doomed to fail: the intensely personal nature of diary entries is simply incompatible with the nature of the information one obtains through newspapers. One will never be able to fill in the former through the contents of the latter. In this particular work, the newspapers and their headlines would represent the stuff history is made out of, whereas the personal photographs and your mother's recollections would represent memory. How do you navigate/negotiate the tension between these two currents in your work?

L.H.: I actually see the 'empty diaries' project as very different from the ordering and cataloguing exercises. While the latter I find to be more connected with systems of thinking and recalling, I think of the former as a more historico-political questioning. It is related to my belief that the only way one can tell a 'true' story of a place or of events that are politically sensitive or controversial, is by showing an intimate part of it that one is familiar with which can then function as an instance of that place/event rather than as an exemplar.

The discovery of the ‘empty diaries’ in the video work in a top cupboard of my bedroom invoked a past that I could not remember and prompted a (hopeless) attempt at reconstructing it. In this project, the dates marked by the diaries structure the remembrance process. But these dates ranging from 1979 to 1993, and their context being Beirut, the video becomes a document of the war. The intimate events composing the narrated personal story (aided by family photos and newspaper front pages) are an attempt to sketch a public history that I could not have accessed by myself –being too young at the time of the events.

Again, I'm not very sure I'm answering your question properly. I think that, in a sense, I see what you call "the stuff history is made out of" and "the impossibility of history" as two, although contrary, completely inseparable aspects of a same current. I guess in that way it actually is more similar to the cataloguing exercises than I used to think. I've actually never considered it that way before, thanks for making me think about it!

I.H. My final question! For your installation Beirut Letters you cut up lines of text from Hanan Al-Shaykh's book 'Beirut Blues' and then proceeded to set them off in paper boats. I have yet to read Beirut Blues, however, I do know that the book is a collection of letters that the female protagonist writes during the Lebanese Civil War, fully aware that they might never reach their intended recepients. There are clearly parallellisms between your installation and Hanan Al-Shaykh's book, however, if the novel has a somewhat fragmented structure, in your installation this fragmentation is taken to an extreme level: the individual lines, chopped up and alone, lose all power to signify. You have experimented with this format in other works, creating beautiful sculptural pieces out of chopped up lines of text from books. My question is two-fold: firstly, why this fascination with language, or to be more precise, with the breaking down, the deconstruction if you will, of the written word? Secondly, how is this related to the juxtaposition you create between language, a formal system, and sculpture, a solid
structure?

L.H.: The best way I can think of to answer this question is to take you through the process that led to the various sculptural pieces. The first one I ever made is the one titled Reading, and that is the aspect of language I was specifically interested in at the time. The piece was arrived at after a year-long investigation (in the context of a Book Arts MA course) of the phenomenology of reading, especially in relation to its material manifestation in the book form. I addressed the usual questions, like the author-text-reader relationship, but focused most on the (admittedly unachievable) attempt to reconstruct what actually happens when one reads a text in the book form. The method was a sort of explore-link-develop one, intuitive ‘hunches’ and reshuffling of concepts that I would try to represent in order to understand them. An analysis of the process of reading made me consider it as a discursive and alternating evolution of sequence, of narrative, and of the reader’s self. 'Reading' stemmed from this thinking about how you start with a line of words on a page, get projected into a network of connections outside of both text and book, then come back to the story again, and so on, a bit like what happens in Jazz improvisations where the musicians keep returning to the melody that they are working from. I think this is what that piece was about, a sort of material interpretation of that process. Starting from a found red hardback book, I simultaneously read and cut the text in continuous lines. This led to a sculptural object that brought forward the physical qualities of the book: the color of the paper, its thickness, and the texture of the printed type that was now communicating something other than sense.

It is important for me to note that the project in this case was not the sculpture itself but the process that lead to it, amongst other things. This process is documented in the first of the 'some secrets of the universe' book series that I self-published the next year. Titled 'lines, light, flight...', it follows the thought process from its initial focus on the lines of the book as text and form, through the study of the light on the book's pages and of the shadow in its inner margins, different metaphoric and practical consequences, onto the projection from that typographic material, flight, that was literally performed in one instance.

The reason I separate this piece from the other sculptural bookworks is that, although very similar in appearance, they work quite differently. With Reading, the book used was just "a" book, which is not the case with the following ones (although Readin Munjid Altullab is arguably quite similar). The next pieces, although still essentially concerned with the process of reading, are about something else: the very specific story that each tells, and the socio-political statements that are related to their narratives.
The piece Beirut Letters for instance, is purposefully made out of a paperback English edition of Hanane Al-Shaykh's third novel that, as you said, takes the form of a series of letters from a woman in Beirut: to loved ones real and fictional, to Beirut, and to the war itself. It is a book that is opened up, its story unfolded into the space that it occupies. In this modified bookwork, the narrator’s letters are undone into lines of text that pour out of the book and are sent off in paper boats.

I like to think that, cut up in this way, the lines don't really lose all power to signify, but rather just signify differently: not anymore as continuous text, but as evocative form where fragments of text give you a sense of the content.

To answer the second part of your question, and although the process is different with the different pieces, I think of 'formal system' and 'solid structure' as also intimately connected. They are in a way two interdependent sides of representation: one is an abstract model of the material, and the other is a concrete model of the ideal.

With the Reading piece for instance, I like to think that the deconstruction of the book, disarticulation of its text, and dismantling of its structural whole, translates the experience of reading into physical presence and appearance.

If you want to know more about the lovely Lina and her work, check out her website here.

Images were provided by the artist. Using these without the persmission of Fox&Squirrel or Lina Hakim is strictly prohibited.