You continue your investigation under the overarching title WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?. After previously focusing your research on different communities of women, you are now investigating Lebanon, with the central question of property. How did this chapter come about?
This chapter emerged from the previous ones, as well as from a long parallel research process. The communes and cooperatives I have worked with are themselves redefining the notion of property, either through feminist practices or through agricultural and other strategies. So this new chapter grew out of those encounters.
You focus on a specific place, a quarry. Why this location in particular?
It is a place I know well, since my father comes from that region. Although I did not grow up there myself, I have spent some time there and I am familiar with the social fabric. This helped in undertaking a fairly complex initiative that required a great deal of negotiation. It also requires building trust with the people involved in the communalization process. For this reason, and to facilitate the process, I thought it was best to begin in a familiar locality, where people would welcome me spontaneously. The whole idea of transforming private property into non-property is highly experimental, so we needed social support to create this precedent.
From there, you expand your research across different fields: history, law, biology… How did this take shape?
In fact, the project brings together these different forms of knowledge. We worked with the agricultural cooperative in Lebanon, “Soils Permaculture Association,” as well as with the lawyer Maya Dghaidi and the historian Wissam Saade, to gather multiple perspectives on the question of property. We were thinking at all these levels, both theoretically and practically, since it is a legal process and also an agricultural one in terms of land rehabilitation. You realize how much technical and philosophical knowledge intertwine, as do different categories of knowledge. It was necessary to develop a comprehensive understanding of the question of property.
You stage several figures, including a surveyor, and readers who form a community. How did this choice emerge?
It developed organically from long conversations I had with the historian Wissam Saade. In order to truly change our perception of and relationship to land, and to move beyond a paradigm that allows only a proprietary relationship, we needed to revisit the history of the different Land Codes during the Ottoman Empire. It was also necessary to trace a genealogy of private property from both a philosophical perspective and a historical one in the Mount Lebanon region. These inquiries partly took the form of dialogues, interviews, and conversations, so it made perfect sense to write the script in the same way. The idea that we always think collectively, as a group, and that there is a kind of collective intelligence that guides us and by which we are guided, is very important.
The film also addresses points of view and ways of seeing, toward places and toward nature, as suggested by what you say about the ghosts of beings who once inhabited this land. Is there a need to move beyond anthropocentrism? The “Reverse Shot” of the title?
Yes, as soon as we approach the soil, it seems that thousands of other underground layers reveal themselves to tell a new story. The soil and its sediments are witnesses to a history that has not yet been written or spoken. I think the “Reverse Shot,” which is a cinematic device, plays an essential role in the film. It guides us toward what has not been told and toward a rather silent history. But it is also an action—the act of going backward while moving forward. Thus, the movement of History becomes less fixed. We return to an Ottoman history in which the notion of property was different. We return to a history of soil and land, as well as to a legal history in which common property was most widespread. There is a need to recover another history that once existed.
At the heart of the film, we see a camera—a mechanical eye and an automatic machine. Likewise, the film opens and closes with landscapes rendered in computer-generated imagery. What do these sequences mean to you?
I think the entire cinematic apparatus becomes a protagonist in the film. Our contemporary relationship to land is a satellite-based one. The question of property would not be complete without reflecting on the apparatus as a means of appropriation—an apparatus that is not separate from the colonization of maps and conquest. I think it is a tool that lies at the heart of the question of property. The computer-generated images are part of that reflection. The earth as an object, but also as the site of a new possible imagination. Ultimately, this project reflects on the meaning of imagination: a legal, historical, agricultural, geological imagination, and finally an imagination through images.
Interview conducted by Nicolas Feodoroff
