Like Ziffel and Kalle, the German Jewish refugees in Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations (1940), from which this project is inspired, Fadi and Rami also live in exile. They are however Syrian-Lebanese and live in 2021 in a European city on the shore of the Mediterranean. When they meet for the first time at the buffet of the ferry terminal, they engage in a conversation without introduction. What follows is a series of unexpected meetings and unforeseen discussions in which everyday life and political considerations, the individual and the general, are approached sometimes with irony mixed with melancholy, and other times with the play of paradox. On the backdrop of the so-called «migration crisis in Europe», Fadi and Rami freely discuss a variety of topics. Their off-the-cuff exchanges often come back tothe cause of their exile: the post-colonial war. Exile, as we know, sharpens the mind. With dialectic and humor, they chat about all kinds of things. Their spoken Arabic, especially their Lebanese dialect from Beirut, is particularly suitable for this, enabling a chiseled language, a whirlwind of words in a closed place, that of transit through strangers and open to all.
Eyal Sivan
