Sven Christian [SC]: If you were to rewind and give a broader historical context to Lebanon and the revolution — I’m not sure how far back you’d go, but for context?

Ramzi Mallat [RM]: Well I can’t go further than my own birth, at least not without the use of books or relying on what I’ve heard from my parents, but I can tell you that it’s a very murky, opaque history. There’s so much that is unknown. It becomes a task in its own right, to bring back all those narratives. I think a lot of artists from the post-civil war era, or even those practicing during the civil war, really struggled with that. There’s so much inconsistency that its difficult to narrate a history or create a collective memory. There’s this really interesting quote that says, ‘If you were in the civil war in Lebanon, and you knew what was going on, then you knew nothing.’ There was just so much happening, from regional to global players. Syria was involved, Israel was involved, Palestine was involved. Iran got involved. The US got involved, France got involved Italy got involved. Even within the country, you had many militias fighting. Strategies were re-organized on the basis of, ‘I’ll help you regain this space, you’ll help me…’ So nothing was really set in stone, and I think this translated into our present policies and politics. No-one really does want integral change, because they’re all war lords who got the chance to be in a position of power. They’ve destroyed everything they were trying to gain. You still have this separation between the Christians, the Muslims, and even between the Muslims — the Shias and the Sunnis. These religious relations also keep being reshaped and reformed. Tomorrow someone can be the friend of the same enemy they were fighting yesterday, but the day after they become completely neutral. So this is why I say, if you think you know what’s really going on then you don’t know anything at all. It’s really the best way to subsume a population.

SC: Keeping everyone in the dark?

RM: Exactly. It’s more interesting in relation to culture, though, because those same political influences are imbued in our cultures. For example, people from Lebanon no longer think of themselves as being Arab but Phoenicians, from Mesopotamian times. Which is ridiculous. You don’t have a sense of identity whatsoever — it’s so diluted that it becomes corroborative, as an act.

SC: So it’s a statement rather than a lived reality?

RM: Of course, there’s a huge narrative behind it, that of the Golden Age, it feels ridiculous to call it the ‘Golden Age,’ but that’s what has come to be defined as the period from after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire through the end of the French Mandate. For my parents and grandparents, that was the ‘Golden Age’ of Lebanon. In reality, it was just a kind of repose — in big times of reconstruction, following the realignment of causes, you believe that peace is in hand, but in reality it’s just a period of redistribution and stagnation. They didn’t realize that, because Lebanon didn’t have time to calm down. We’ve always had huge shifts in power. We’ve never been the power itself. Afterwards the country slipped into chaos with the Civil War. You had complete destruction and the revamping of a new order. After that was the biggest privatized reconstruction in world history — Beirut. None of it was rebuilt by the state. It was all through outside investors, which means that the country doesn’t belong to the people. Since the reconstruction, we’re in a huge amount of debt. Before that we had none. That’s why I wanted to bring the conversation with David Joselit back: it’s really interesting how, in a globalized world, every item produced becomes commodified. Even artists have to position themselves in relation to the market; no matter where you come from, you have to be aware of the extent to which you’re going to market yourself, and how. That factor, whether it’s debt towards modernism or a nation state, plays a big role.

SC: And where would you position your work, Not your Martyr, in relation to this, because it’s not the kind of work that I think of as a product — at least not in that sense — but I guess it still has to circulate in a world of audiences and gallery spaces?

RM: It’s very interesting that you should mention that work in relation to what I was discussing. I didn’t really think about it that way, but what sums it up is the idea of a migrating memorial; a memorial that does not belong to anyone. It has this gypsy aspect to it; not very national, but still relative to the socio-political and economic space in which it is represented. That’s one of its strengths. It doesn’t showcase a single narrative but is open to interpretation, to many narratives of loss. I think a lot of memorials tend to specify the cause they represent, the people they want to effect. They write that narrative and imbue themselves in it. I can’t do that, even though I’m asked to. And I think the same is asked of a lot of artists, in the biennales, for example — to represent the country. It’s laughable, because you don’t live that way. It’s very much a liberal arts, literally, so when I wanted to adapt my understanding of a memorial to this work I wanted to democratize the monument, to make it for the people themselves, and not for any other form of state representation. That’s why it’s very minute, something that can be held in the palm of your hand. It allows for that vagueness, and a certain degree of intimacy. It’s a loss in relation to my own experience or a more universal one, part of the human condition. When I wanted to make these pieces, I got different comments saying, ‘Oh, this reminds me of the glass you throw in the sea, that are discarded and then brought back to shore by the currents.’ It was really interesting, because it’s the same aspect of loss, be it environmental loss, human loss, the loss of times past — these pastries remind me of celebrations we’ve had with family, for example. There’s a sweet and sour taste to them, and I think the grief that comes with that experience is important. Of course, the reason I wanted to make them colorful was to not just dwell on that negative but allow for hope and light. So it’s not just about being respectful. Even though it represents the blast, it shouldn’t be solely encapsulated in that moment.

SC: Maybe it would help to describe the work, but the format is very different to your standard memorial. It’s not a statue, or a big flat wall with names inscribed on it…

RM: I thought about whether incorporating the names would be important, because there is a kind of tiptoeing aspect to it. I’ve had friends tell me that every single maamoul should have a name under it, but in my opinion it would be very insensitive to represent the life of a person lost to their family in that specific item. It’s too on the nose, too limiting. The memorial has to retain its vague element, this liminal space where you don’t really know what you’re looking at, but you know there’s an aspect of respect and loss, and how can you as an individual roaming through that work itself make that graspable? Or even have a phenomenological experience that can be translated through that?

SC: So what is the work itself (for the sake of those who aren’t familiar)?

RM: It consists of a variety of colorful, traditional Lebanese pastries, made of glass, which are called maamoul. They’re synonymous with Easter and Eid in the Levant. The work itself is a physical ode in remembrance to the intangible loss suffered by the people that were affected by this tragedy, and a celebration of the lives of the deceased victims. It’s still a work in progress, so the way it’s going to be installed still isn’t very clear to me. I was thinking of having each maamoul on different plinths of various sizes, and having a light source embedded inside. So it’s a dimly lit space with a shifting light, which might allow for an ethereal representation of the soul and the immeasurable loss — with the upmost respect. In a sense, if you shine a light slowly on each of them, then they’re all singularly important, but they’re also very much intertwined in this one event. But I’m still working on that, so don’t quote me fully on the installation.

SC: How are the actual glass pastries made? What’s your method for producing them?

RM: It shifts between being a very intimate, personal, and physical process to something that feels mass-produced. I have large pieces of glass that I have to crack and break into smaller and smaller shards. It reminds me of this kind of fragility and violence inherent to the material, and also the power of the explosion itself, because it has the same effect when breaking — the glass flying everywhere. Sometimes I get cut. Later on, when I have to make the moulds, it becomes very mass-produced, because making the moulds is very methodical and technical. I have to make around twenty to thirty moulds every time I make a set for the kiln. It becomes meditative, but also very much like I’m in a factory line, trying to get them all together.

SC: I’m imagining you putting these moulds into the kiln, which is like an oven. It’s kind of strange, given the fact that they’re pastries. Do you make the moulds from the actual food?

RM: It’s a bit ceremonial, isn’t it? And it’s also like cooking. There’s a lot that can be said there: you have those broken shards, but following the moulding process they soften — they become flat and round. And because the kiln is very big, it also reminds me of cremation in some way. I don’t know why. Maybe because of the time it takes, because they have to cool slowly, in order for the glass to get into every crevice of the mould. It takes around two to three days of slowly building up and then cooling down. And all of it is a bit like rigor mortis.

SC: So do the shards just melt into the mould and take its form, because the outcome is quite clear, liquid. They don’t look like shards?

RM: It’s because I have to individually clean all of the pieces before putting them in. Once they become liquid, they puddle inside the mould. It’s called a cold fractal glass mould, because it’s cold work. You’re not working with hot glass and then shaping it. You have cold glass that’s already been shaped, that’s broken up later on, and you have to weigh them specifically, and position them in a way that they fit, so that they can then fall perfectly into the mould. If they fall to the side you get little puddles that go outside, and that ruins the moulding process. I’m trying to make them as fast as I can, so cold-working them afterwards is a very daunting task. I have to slowly break away all the extra surfaces and then polish them, and I have to do that for over one-hundred every time. It’s a lot.

SC: How long does that take?

RM: The prepping takes the most time. Making the moulds, breaking the glass, and getting them set for the kiln takes about a month-and-a-half. When the moulds are being made, I have to make positives out of silicone using the wooden moulds, and then make negatives out of crystal cast. Each mould takes a few days to dry, because you have to get rid of all the water that’s inside the mix. So the more I make, the more time it takes for them to dry. After I’ve created all the small glass shards, I then have to be very precise; I have to gather all those shards and package them together without getting them mixed up, knowing which packet is for which mould, and then I have to align them correctly. That takes around two to three days in its own right, just aligning them and cleaning the pieces. So it’s very ceremonial, but it’s also tedious work, I enjoy it. It’s like prepping a meal, but I value it more, because I know that I’m not only doing this to fulfill my own creative desire. It’s more to fight against this whole erasure, and the resilience too. I believe resilience and amnesia come hand in hand, because the more you remember the less you’re able to continue.

SC: Let’s return briefly to this debate you mentioned — about whether to include the names on the bottom of each maamoul, and the feeling that it was insensitive, but also the idea that something can represent a life. Within my own context, naming has played an important role in remembering the lives of those who have been lost, particularly through gender-based violence, and so it’s interesting to hear you speak of it otherwise — as a kind of seal or stamp that can also prevent one from understanding the complexity of everything that exists behind the name, creating this false sense of knowing someone. Without the name you almost have to think harder about who that person might have been, but once the name is down everything gets packaged into it — it pretends to do the work for you.

RM: It reminds me of a work I once saw called Garden Speaks, by Tania El Khoury. It really touched me, in the best and worst of ways. She had little plots of land inside a room, with a speaker inside of it. She had tombstones and the name of a person on each, so that each tombstone represented someone who died during the Syrian war. Then you had spoken narratives from the family members inside a microphone, and you had to lie on the ground and put your ear into the microphone, which was deep down inside the plot of dirt. You had to place yourself in the position of a corpse so that you would be able to listen to the narrative. I felt like that was very traumatizing as an experience. I didn’t get to listen to all of the stories. You’re in a group of people and you have to choose a piece of paper from a raffle, and on it would be written the name of the person whose story you’ll get to listen to being recounted by their friends and family. It felt very limiting, because although I got to know this person, and although we were asked to write a letter to the family about the experience, you just have that one personal experience from the whole of the war. It felt biased, to an extent, because that was the only representation that you could access. Within the context of my own work, and the blast, you’ve had this explosion happen and the jury is still out — nobody has paid the price for this whole transgression. There are also many victims who didn’t die, but whose lives were changed — they have scars and life-long disabilities. So it felt like it was too limiting for me to just have those names, because it is also about the effects of this event on society as a whole, and not just those who lost their lives. I don’t even want to limit it to the people who were in Lebanon, but all of the people that were affected, the expats as well. When they received news of the explosion, when they saw the videos, they just thought everyone in the capital was dead, because it was such a huge blast. It was equally as traumatizing, if not more so, because you’re not even in it. You have to see it unfolding on a screen, helpless and incapable of doing anything. So it was hugely important for me to not limit it at all. Though I do have to admit that I had to limit the number of glass maamouls to the victims which lost their lives, simply because they’re not able to review what happened and reshape it and speak about it.

SC: I wanted to ask you about We Are What We Know, because there we’re dealing with a kind of residue, but it’s a very different working process to what you’ve just described — the laborious nature of making these maamouls. And there is of course labour involved, not just the way in which the mugs were displayed, but the process of sitting and having a conversation. Of your works, I view these two in a similar space, even though they’re quite significantly different, and I’m wondering why that is.

RM: I think there’s something about the coffee-cup work that, for me, was super charged. It didn’t come from wanting to make a work. It came from wanting to interact with society and the community that I’m in. I began thinking about it in 2017, and only began producing the work a year later, as an ongoing project. I realised that a lot of us artists are stuck in the studio thinking about work, trying to mend the bridge between daily life and the art world, which is a huge bubble. I thought, ‘What can I offer, that isn’t specifically just artworks, but an experience of its own?’ Coffee was the medium that I was most drawn to, because it translates relationships in a different way to say, food, which is an investment and often stems from a particular tradition — it’s specific to one’s locality, whereas coffee is global in reach, despite there being different ways to prepare it. People meet over coffee to socialize or even conduct business meetings, so there are many aspects of life that revolve around coffee. And coffee itself is inherently a very consumerist drink. It’s sold by franchises, it’s a globalized trade, so I wanted to bring it back to the personal. I knew about tasseography through my upbringing, the reading of a person’s future and the psychology that goes into that, so it only felt right to do that, because it’s more than just having a conversation — it’s adding a mystical and folkloric facet to the interaction, while empowering the community I’m in. I would never want to wish someone badly when I’m doing a reading. I want to get a more deep-seated understanding of their own struggles outside of the frame of reference of language. That was important to me, because mannerisms and energies go way beyond what someone is able to discuss, and I think tasseography plays on that, through this residual component. I also wanted to encapsulate that moment, in the sense that, it’s not about the conversation that arose during those meetings, but what stays, physically, like a fragment in some way. Preserving that fragment means preserving that conversation. It also means preserving that time in space where that person’s future was legible, and I think I came up with that title, We Are What We Know, because these mystical interpretations always surface in times of struggle. Culture itself is a big representation of struggle, and so I felt like making this work would allow me to play on many different aspects of daily life without being too literal, because it can also be about the patterns of creation, about what you as the viewer see… The whole ink blot test springs to mind; it’s your own psychological interpretation of what you see as well as what is being shown.

SC: But when it’s shown together like that, it’s not really just the psychology of the individual, but the collective. Perhaps that’s one of the links to Not Your Martyr. You can’t see the individual cup without seeing all the others, and the differences between them. Out of interest, was there a particular reason you chose those cups? They have particular colors?

RM: Those cups are very representative of Lebanese culture. They’re sold to tourists, and are meant to represent the country in some way. The patterns in them — the flowers and leaves — are quite decorative, but the colors are the same as those on the national flag: green, red, and white. I don’t know if they made them that way intentionally, because you do find them in different colours, but I chose these specific ones because I liked the subtlety. They’re very gimmicky but they also relate to national pride, so when you see them you remember Lebanon. At the same time, none of those cups are produced in Lebanon. They’re all made in China, and they’re all largely mass-produced, so to have your own cultural patrimony imported from China, and then to sell this to tourists, as a way of remembering the country — it was too ironic not to represent in the work. [Laughs]. We have this huge struggle in Lebanon because we don’t produce much, mostly food and cannabis. Mostly cannabis, actually, and that is not legal. Our biggest export doesn’t even go into the pockets of government, at least not legally. And people take pride in these cups. They put them in their house to say they’ve been to Lebanon, you understand? It was too sweet for me.

SC: And the coffee? Where was that made?

RM: The coffee I got from Lebanon, but the bean itself is Arabica, and imported from all over the world. There is this huge globalized chain behind the making of this work, but then you also have the very personal, because a person has touched this cup. A person’s lips have been on this cup. They’ve literally consumed what was in the cup, and what you see are the remnants, so there is a physical, tactile aspect to this huge, global chain of consumption and production.

SC: I assume that you would’ve had to, at some point, find a way to preserve the cups in that state, so they didn’t get moldy or so that bacteria doesn’t grow. You would’ve had to treat it. And there’s something about the clinical and corporeal that becomes quite interesting for me.

RM: Absolutely. After gathering all the cups, I come to my studio and put on this white shirt and gloves, like the ones you find in laboratories. I start cleaning the rims. It felt like taxidermy, but taxidermy for the cup, because I’m preserving whatever happened, and I have to do it that very same day. I can’t wait for more than three or four hours, otherwise the coffee starts to dry and crack. Between the offering of coffee, the reading of the future, and bringing it into the studio, drying it, cleaning it, and preserving it — it all happens in the space of one day. It felt like a real task, from start to finish, which I appreciate. It’s stopping the hand of time, in the same way that you’d pick a flower — how do you preserve it best in the small margin of time between it being picked and preserved? It also relates to all of these peoples’ narratives. Their stories are freshest at the time of interaction, that same day, but they become much more opaque — your own understanding and all of your own biases get in the way. As time progresses their story starts to fade. That’s why the whole reading of the future was important; trying to preserve it in that state, before it mutates.

SC: Did you choose who you had these conversations with? Were they all in one place, at the same coffee shop, or did you go to different peoples’ homes?

RM: It was a free-for-all. There were moments when I would just go onto the street, set up a little stand, and give people coffee — whoever was willing to sit and have a conversation, or even just have coffee with me, and that was it. Sometimes I would move from Beirut to the South or North, taking my coffee cups around the country and caffeinating people, and that aspect is interesting, because a caffeinated individual will do things they’re not willing to do otherwise. Their senses are heightened in some way. They’re able to be in the present, with you. At the same time, I like that there is this removal when audiences engage with the work, because it’s also up to you to make sense of it all. So it’s really about: to what extent can all of these stories shine through the work? And how much do they need to, in order for the work itself to speak? Hence the title, We Are What We Know. It’s similar perhaps to how, in psychology, you’re recognised as a multitude of different personalities that you’ve shown to thousands of people at different moments in your life, and they’re different from the person you think you are. Narratives work the same way.

SC: It also looks like there were a series of very particular choices that went into the work’s display. Can you talk about the concave shape of the stand used to display the cups, the scale, and why you chose to display the cups on their side, rather than face-up?

RM: The first work I wanted to make was on a wall. It included 1000 cups. I wanted it to be an immersive experience, in the sense that it takes up your field of vision. Because there’s this overwhelming aspect to all these narratives — so many patterns together. They kind of take over. You’re not focusing on one or the other, but the collective. At the same time, you can chose to move closer and have one or other experience. So I think, because the experience was so intimate, I didn’t want people to just walk away from it.

SC: Like they would if it were just a single cup, say? I imagine people might even mistake that in a gallery space as something that was just left there by an overworked curator. They may even try to clean it.

RM: Exactly. At least when it’s too big to fathom, it still grabs your attention. The grid shape imposes some semblance of order on an otherwise messy process, but it also means not establishing any hierarchy between them. It’s about equal distribution — something we don’t have much of in Lebanon. Nobody should be more important than anyone else, so it was a way of leveling the playing field. I then shifted from that grid structure, making works that are smaller (We Are What We Know is around three-and-a-half meters wide by two meters high). With these small works, it was about being meticulous and looking through these patterns. There’s a shapeliness to them, so the narratives intertwine. So where We Are What We Know feels like a showcase, these have different narratives to them. I wanted to see how far I could take this, to see if I could make it about more than just the person, but the collective or situation. And patterns are very important. They’re how we perceive the world.

SC: In the patterned works, the cups almost change — they become, as you say, interlinked, pixellated. They also seem to lead elsewhere. There’s more movement in them.

RM: That’s interesting, because I’m developing a series now that uses Arabic calligraphy, wanting to play with the idea of patterns that you read in the cups versus the calligraphy, so there are two readings at once. Does the writing overcompensate for the amount of information contained in the cups, or do they play around with one another? Can you shape-shift or transpose their meaning from one to the other? This whole business of pattern recognition feeds into language. Of course, there’s a linearity to it as well, a geometry. I was trying to do justice to these patterns, but there’s a numbering that’s important to them. At the end of the day, they are, as you say, pixels. They have to fit into some kind of grid, even when they do make these patterns. These works were very mathematical. The placement of each cup is not just correct to the centimeter but to the millimeter, because any deviation shifts the whole image. I feel like it also plays into the process of narrative construction; it’s the tiny shifts that really effect the larger narrative. One out-of-place cup would ruin the whole flow.

SC: Do you find that same meticulous or mathematical process at play in most of your work?

RM: Patterns are very important. They define how we read the work. No matter what the pattern is, whether it’s geometric and concise or chaotic. I think it’s a big factor in how I decide to make work. I’m always battling between the organic and the mass-produced, in some way, and I kind of like blurring them. With Not Your Martyr, the patterns that are important are those of the maamouls. Because these are objects in their own right and work individually too, it’s important not to showcase them in a neatly packaged way — as I did with We Are What We Know — but as a collective they do begin to register in a similar way. With the coffee cups it’s clearly arranged — they are preserved. They are as is. That same shape — but Not Your Martyr is ever-growing. It’s not bound by traditional methods of display. It’s a migrating memorial, which entails being specific to every single location that you’re in. You can’t precondition a cookie-cutter shape into it, but the patterns are in the work. The maamouls themselves have flowers, petals, sunbursts, circles… They’re geometric but they’re organic at the same time, even in their shapes. They’re very reminiscent of nature blooming, because as I said, these are given during Easter and Ramadan, as a token for your fasting. They represent rebirth or regeneration, so that is another aspect to the work. That through loss can come something hopeful, joyful, but of course, I don’t want to prescribe too much because those patterns have their own meaning to other people. Some have told me they look like small architectural maquettes, which I found very interesting. To think about these as miniature versions of something larger. There’s also something about them as objects that are consumed that I wanted to preserve. It’s a big link to the coffee cups. The other is showing the fragility of consumption, because they’re made of glass. There’s an ephemeral strength to glass. It shows the same inherent fragility one finds in times of peace, and how easily that can shift.

SC: Yes, because they’re very beautiful. But you can’t actually bite into them.

RM: It would be a very painful act, biting into one of them. A lot of people want to put them in their mouths, thinking they’re like jellies. So their shape and scale is very important. They’re not untouchable, but are quite corporeal. They can be worn, held, consumed. It allows for a shift in how people relate to them, so as a migrating memorial, I’m interested to see how people interact with the work. Because it can go both ways. You can very much respect this piece but you can also very much disrespect it, because of its scale. It doesn’t demand the same amount of attention as, say, We Are What We Know. It’s not monumental, but it is a monument.