An Hour Spent by Sofi Naufal

Clinical space grey resistant to closeness or distance. The same departure happens many times over before it splinters; the constituent steps of going, and going on, once a monolith of routine, is now mosaic, and will be fractal for want of correspondence.

Mediating collective trauma means navigating its makeshift languages. In briefing me on her music video, Sofi introduces me to such attentions—tremors of a ‘smothered repertoire’—and how, in lieu of oral histories, rhythm is put to work. She puts it to me that rhythm extends the texture of a missing archive. Her mother left Beirut for London during the Lebanese War, and leaves many times inasmuch as innumerable perspectives are enfolded into this act: friends stay and see things differently, family members too, holding distance closely, and later selves rearrange the memory, opening ornate curtains onto the same other city. “Understandably, my family are reluctant to discuss their past but these unspoken biographies are still ingested.” Sofi explains, “Absorbed through the touch of our family’s bodies and words, we go on to communicate them in the pace of our movements, the rhythm of our speech, our breath, our art. Through their own suppression these stories do not end but only renew in new contexts.” And this rhythm finds refrain in often the most banal of phenomena—London variously beeping to itself, the quiet roar of delivery, a thingless syncope.

Sofi had wanted to attune her artwork to these elusive Lebanons when she watched the movie, Beirut the Encounter by Borhane Alaouié. The film was made during the war; it straddles coasts of rubble as East and West Beirut recuperate dialogue after the reestablishment of communications. A meeting is finally planned by a man and a woman on the eve of her departure to the U. S. Yet, despite the telephonic promise of presence, things get in the way—taxis, louder conversations, ultimately an airport. The man limps between bottlenecks and skeletal buildings, syncopating with the city’s rhythm. In our conversation, Sofi recounts how the film seemed to bear the rhythm of a song—‘An hour spent’—that she had written some months earlier; “I became fascinated with the mysterious parallels between our works. How emotional states might reflect through time as inherited trauma and emerge in the current of our artworks.” As fortuitous as it might seem, Sofi found that her song narrated this correspondence to her as she watched the missed encounter take place.

Her own cup, now abandoned, with its puddle of minutes earlier; the innards of a tape, strewn from record, that bristle in the middle of a road. Did you notice I’ve been here / at all? where, depending on how you hear it, the second line makes of hereness a scale—‘at all’ as opposed to ‘all along’, ‘ever’, ‘once’. In the video, original footage of Sofi shot by film maker Jonatan Omer Mizrahi, who collaborated with her on the project, is spliced between—and mirrors—episodes from Alaouié’s film. The relative slowness of these interpolated segments figures, not so much an extension of the film, but rather a tableau of its circling gestures (isn’t this how scenes from movies stay with us? we inhabit them retrospectively shorn of all trace of plot, slowed to the imagined motion of a photograph). Labouring with time, as such, bodies in these echoic films confound destination: we begin and end at the airport. The same footage of the Encounter’s female lead repeats, observing her frantic search in the architecture of her own departure, tomorrow. Departure will splinter in its things: we notice shadows of bystanders plumb dimensions from a tourist-board Rock of Raouché; we separate the aircon turbines that work from those that do not. When the woman enters the airport again, the moment will dilate, reeling further, allowing her the time to fall to her knees and alter the rhythm of what we have already seen. 

A friend explained to me the architecture of airports. Clinical space grey resistant to closeness or distance, punctuated only by the names of multinationals, warmly familiar in this gaseous state or state of exception where the passenger accedes to [their] anonymity only when [they have] given proof of [their] identity. This airport is modelled upon the next one, so when the passenger enters departure, they have—it is hoped—begun arriving and begun enjoying, too, in some exclusive, far-off resort. The airport’s distances are measured in time or, more accurately, minutes taken by some ideal body—yours—spraying a maelstrom of fragrances into the surprise of accidental physical contact in a dimensionless globe. 

These are the myths my friend dispelled. Each airport’s strategic featurelessness conceals a more complicated architecture perceptible to those who stop there, including, for example, those who work there—the baggage handlers, the customs officials, etc. Airports are sites of leave-taking, where ‘leave’ means a permission to go—a document at a threshold—and ‘leave’ is also the relinquishable quality in shared presence; relinquished by executing a ritual of farewell, whose only condition is that this may be the last embrace of such a combination, such proportions, for certain arms leave their touches on the passenger’s back, my friend explained, without mechanism for retrieval. This second, physical leave plumbs the slippery, dimensionless surfaces for a keepsake—feet digging into relentless pearl panelling, eye floaters raining over blank walls. The architectural fallacy is that these gestures leave no physical mark, as baggage handlers insist, my friend said, visibly emotional, exhibiting the friction scars their hands over, whether as metaphor or example.

i.   le douanier, Marc Augé

list           to me   

this premise

of departure 

as having

arrived 

already yet 

dwelling is

hereby

this moving

same there’s 

no weight 

to touch 

until inter

dicted my

feet leave 

root on 

pearl

panel 

flooring

I’m not

flying

to fly