WHO SAID THAT
SOMETHING HAPPENED?

(installation)

Disconnected thoughts
in time of crisis

Nayla Dabaji
& Ziad Bitar

2006-2007

Ssamzie Space
Seoul, Korea

 

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Nayla Dabaji & Ziad Bitar | Who said that something happened?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Installation view: Ssamzie Space, Open studio, 2006, Seoul, South Korea
14 photographs and newspapers on the wall and disposed as a pile
to be taken freely by visitors

 

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Project: books

Number: 33

Production: handmade

Materials: tracing paper, acetate, glue, scotch tape, thread

Dimensions: 14.2 x 9.2 cm

Pages: 22

Content: sentences

Language: English and Korean

Location: bookstores, Seoul, Korea

Status of the books: lost

The work consists of making books that contain remembered conversations with friends, people and information from the media. All the sentences are related to post or still in crisis situations. The books are then deliberately left in bookstores.
"Who Said That Something Happened?" intends to simulate the individual/collective recourse to forgetfulness after a period of crisis. As if nothing happened.

 

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Detail, book number 7, 14.2 x 9.2 cm, 2006

 

The sentences are echoes of remembered conversations with friends, people and informations from the media. They are all related to post or still in crisis situations.
The sentences are influenced by past and recent events that took place in Lebanon but also in Korea. We believe these similarities can exist for one moment out of time; somewhere between past and present; between amnesia and memory; in a possible zone where the past of one could strangely be reflected in the present of the other and vice versa.
Although this work is based on our efforts of re-writing sentences from memory, we have chosen to alter them by omitting details that can lead them back to their sources, origin and identity; they could be written by anyone, anywhere, in any period of crisis.
All these sentences are then gathered, translated and put randomly in books. Each book varies in the order and choice of the sentences which makes each one of them unique.

 

 

Detail, book number 2, 14.2 x 9.2 cm, 2006

 

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Gestures/ interventions
The failure concept

If making books was a kind of recalling exercise, then simulating forgetfulness could be a game where winning would be to reach zero point. So we decided to leave these unsigned books on the shelves of different topics in known and famous bookstores. In each book an email address is present, creating a possible but not needed connection with the books.

 

 

Book number 5, Bandi and Luni's bookstore,
photography of the intervention, 2006

 

Book number 11, Kyobo bookstore,
photography of the intervention, 2006

 

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“Who Said That Something Happened?”
Documentation, 39x27 cm, 12 pages, texts and images,
1000 copies, 2006

 

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Ssamzie Space, Open Studio, 2006, Seoul, South Korea

 

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Ssamzie Space, Artist Talk, 2006, Seoul, South Korea

 

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