The film derives from a performance first presented in 2021. What relationship does this new version maintain with the original work, and what transformations does it introduce?
Sanja: The performance itself went through numerous iterations, developing in an almost episodic nature from the first iteration. In 2021, when we performed the first iteration of Permanent Trespass at the Frankfurt Mousonturm, we were thinking about apocalypse as an artistic and literary genre: the end that never quite arrives, is almost optimistic. By the time we were performing in 2024, the script had become much more distilled. David Scott has a great book on the importance of considering revolutionary narratives through a tragic rather than romantic frame. That was a thematic concern that made its way into the text over the course of its re-writing.
In terms of what film allows that performance doesn’t: we shot all of the new footage across various Art Nouveau sites, including the Hôtel van Eetvelde and Horta Museum, allowing us to establish the link between imperialism, culture, extraction and domination. The relationship between Leopold II and Art Nouveau is well documented, and really draws into relation the extent to which artists too are historical actors. Debora L. Silverman provides an excellent excavation of the motifs in Art Nouveau: “The whiplash style provides visual equivalents of two foundational elements of the regime in the Congo Free State: the rugged, relentless, and sinuous colls of the Congo’s wild rubber vines, hailed as “vegetable boas” with “veins of gold,” and the imperial chicotte, the long flogging whip at the center of Leopold’s rule.”
Basyma: The link between historical white European colonialism, on the one hand, and present-day American imperialism and Israeli settler-colonialism, on the other, was crucial to us in making Permanent Trespass. Shooting at the Art Nouveau sites in Belgium allowed us to instantiate that link, effecting a kind of transhistorical echo that the eulogists come to inhabit. You’ll notice they’re not too pleased with where they’ve ended up.
How did you come across, and what drew you to, the figure of the eulogist—a professional role that flourished in antiquity but has gradually been marginalized in modern societies? Or has it simply taken on different forms?
S: The eulogists or “professional mourners” allowed us to enact a much needed separation from our biographies. Their namelessness is crucial: they act as ciphers or doubles. At times they resist talking about themselves at all, at others they speak to past experience directly and unsentimentally.
B: Ultimately, the eulogy contains its own limit. In my work, I try to think of mourning as a starting point: it is something that art can attempt to do. But what follows from there, which is to say the necessary political act, is beyond the remit of the artistic work. Politically speaking, mourning cannot be an end in itself.
It is also not just a question of who is allowed to be mourned: there is also the register of the mourning, and what sort of action it compels. To claim someone who is killed as a martyr is very different from simply grieving their loss as a person.
The film unfolds within a triple framework: that of your respective backgrounds (Lebanon and Bosnia), but also that of the displaced space inhabited by the eulogists—an Art Nouveau house somewhere in Europe. How do these three spaces relate to one another?
B: Our starting point for this work was the fleeting moment in time, in the early 1990s, when Sarajevo came to be called “Beirut of the Balkans.” The Lebanese civil war, as it is called, had just formally ended — even though Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon would continue for ten more years — and the Bosnian war had just begun. In mainstream narrations of these wars, we hear of “sectarian strife,” “religious conflicts,” and “civil violence.” What is often obscured is imperialist interventionism and maneuvering, which might be as direct as an invasion or as indirect as neoliberal restructuring. There is a reference in the film to the empire’s “absence-presence.”
S: I was recently reading Idris Robinson’s The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, and he talks about how in the ancient world, when a civil war was over, it was agreed to never talk about the past. “These agreements constitute a politicisation of the private sphere and a privatisation of the public sphere.” In Lebanon, The General Amnesty Law of 1991 enacted this almost literally. In Bosnia, the creation of the statelet Republika Srpska functions as a total political impasse to overcoming any of the structural inequalities forged by war.
We might also speak of a fourth space—or rather a vast off-screen presence: the United States and what is commonly referred to as “the American Century.” Does this occupy the same level as the other spaces?
S: The spectral voice enacts a kind of record keeping, a contradictory timeline. The organising principle behind the timeline can be interpreted from our respective biographies, but also stretches backward and acts as a reminder that there is no neutral ground. There’s a quote from Dante about Europe overcoming its state of war. Questions of time/temporality are very important for us individually and in this project, and the presence of a longue durée timeline or ruptures allows us to see macro-continuities of domination.
B: The “American century” is in many ways a misnomer. Rather than a period of time, the American century is perhaps more aptly thought of as a planetary infrastructure. Lua Vollaard, writing about an earlier work-in-progress presentation of Permanent Trespass, quotes David Harvey who reminds us that the term “disguised the territoriality of empire in the conceptual fog of a ‘century.’” We only seem to remember the military bases all over the planet when they are attacked by an enemy of the empire. Breaking out of such a “conceptual fog” is a precursor to resistance and liberation.
The conversation between the two eulogists reveals a certain disjunction, to the point that it often feels less like a dialogue than a superimposition of monologues. Another important element is the imposing voice-over that punctuates these exchanges, as well as the lapidary intertitles bearing statements that are at times contradictory. How did you approach the interplay between these different verbal registers?
S: The eulogists don’t really speak to one another: they almost inhabit different timelines. The way that language breaks down is certainly an ongoing interest—what is or isn’t a communicable experience? What are the imperfect ways we can narrate our pain, suffering or desire? Grief moves between passive and active states, and there is certainly some melancholy to the characters.
B: In my work, I’m very interested in the contrast between naturalism and realism. The dialogue taking place between the two characters always seems a little bit off, or even sometimes contrived. To the extent that it isn’t truly simulating a life-like conversation, it is anti-naturalist. Yet there is in the film an attempt at approaching something real about how history and truth are constructed by the hegemon. In that sense, I consider the work to be deeply realist. That tension between, on the one hand, the non-naturalism of the dialogue and even the surrealism of the film’s flow, and, on the other hand, the realism of its problematics, is very important to us.
The work has a distinctly tragicomic character: transitions from laughter to tears are abrupt, and the whole film is permeated by a certain melancholy. Why is this tonal register important to the film’s subject matter?
S: Generally speaking I think it can be useful for a work to feel jarring at times, for there to be a sense of discomfort. Humor is as important in the work as it is in life.
B: I personally really appreciate when a work of art or writing or music has its more melancholic elements cut with something else. Humor is not a luxury, and it is also much more than a coping mechanism. Humor exists for its own sake. People in their darkest hours, if allowed a moment of respite, can come up with the most stupefyingly funny, and possibly morbid, jokes.
Interviewed by Manuel Asín
