Wagons Libres – a Talk by Sandra Iché

As part of the exhibition, Space Between Our Fingers, curator Rachel Dedman invites you to Wagons Libres, a talk-fiction by Sandra Iché at The Hangar.

In 2000, Sandra Iché writes the story of L’Orient-Express, a Beirut-based francophone magazine from the 1990s, founded and directed by the historian and journalist Samir Kassir. 10 years later, Iché conducts a new series of interviews with the former contributors of L’Orient Express. This time, however, the interviewees follow a method designed to prevent speech from reproducing the real, a real doomed by the ‘Arab misfortune’. Rather, the protocol of the interviews lends itself to fiction: the interview takes place in 2030, where we stand today and remember the past.

Wagons Libres was written for the stage. It is a spatial and a deconstructed performance of the documentary apparatus where each element is deployed in single units: aural and visual archives, work notes, voice-over, testimony, framing and focus. In the context of Space Between Our Fingers, Sandra Iché will present an unravelled version of Wagons Libres, a talk-fiction prompting conversation around questions pervading the construction of history and acts of narration.

As part of Space Between Our Fingers, artworks by Ali Cherri and Khalil Joreige & Joana Hadjithomas are presented alongside primary material from UMAM Documentation & Research archives. Pipe Dreams and Golden Record are pieces that consider critically historiography and the fashioning of past and present in Lebanon and Syria, to which Iché’s work speaks powerfully.

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