Mihnea Mircan About I Remember

 

 

 

 

A particular work - where the interviewee cannot remember what he should say - suggested the inception of a new strand in the artist's research. 'Forgetting one's lines' would in principle be a serious liability for a practice predicated on what is said and what is lost between interlocutors. But this particular video carried, in elliptical but eloquent fashion, a striking explanation for silence, for the inability to formulate memories: there is too much to remember, too many memories vie for expression at the same time, and surplus replaces erasure. I believe this could be key to profiling the practice more sharply against a sum of like-minded discourses in the art world. The distant voice is posited not as loss, curtailed echo, or dispossession. The distant voice was a carrier of a surplus, of a soft-spoken overabundance. In Halloubi's practice, this might indicate a transition from 'those who are not allowed to speak' to 'those who have too much to say' - so much so, that we might be unprepared to listen.