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My name is Rabih Mroué, I was born in Beirut. I am 43 years old. However, if I deduct the hours for sleeping, travelling and distraction, I am left with 17 years, 3 months and 5 days of living, awake, in Beirut. During this time when my eyes were open, I was not necessarily seeing what was going on around me in the city. I must have certainly missed out on a lot of things, even though they happened right before my eyes. It seems to me that there are two sorts of images: an image which affirms presence and another which confirms absence. If I use images in my work, it is indeed to prove our absence. And when I speak of our absence, I signify the exclusion of ordinary citizens of Lebanon from the official image, but also the impossibility of living as an individual in this part of the world. It is a kind of lost citizenship in an absent state. This is the reason I always attempt to speak for myself and to evade the trap of representing the Middle East, the Arab world, Lebanon, my city or their ilk…After the end of the war in Lebanon, and with the rise of discussions around the best manner in which to ‘reconstruct’ the destroyed city centre, most of the Lebanese went downtown to film it. This city centre used to be the heart of Beirut. During the war, it was deserted by its inhabitants and became an enormous empty space separating East from West. Out of love for this place, people began filming and photographing it, perhaps in the hope of resurrecting it. We all took so many photos there, unaware that with each frame a part of the centre was disappearing. The destroyed and deserted centre moved from its original location to dwell in these films and photographs. Just like the Beirut of the 60s and 70s, which disappeared longer ago and which we can only access through images. And today, we must still wait for long years before we can love our new city centre as it is going to be reconstructed, and to have the desire to take pictures of it and, perhaps unintentionally, to kill it. Between images of presence and images of absence, I have seen so many. Each day we are bombarded with images. The world has become a machine producing a flux of images, each one erasing its predecessor. We can no longer endure all these images. Is this the reason we no longer know how to see? Is it the incapacity to see the image as the continuity of a corporeal experience? Do eyes still retain their capacity to see? These days, the eye is the king of the senses, and I, I saw nothing in Beirut. Sometimes I wonder if I am an image myself, or a person dwelling among images.I sent a letter to some of my connections, in which I wrote: ‘If you were asked to choose one picture to give to the people who are close to you, for them to remember you after your death, which picture would you choose?’ I sent this letter to 50 people, who vary in age from 18 to 43. No one replied to my request, except for myself. I replied to my request not with a photo, but with a letter sent to myself, in which I wrote: Dear Rabih, With regard to your request: Wherever you go, in this world or the afterlife, you will find yourself killed. Please forgive me for not sending you the picture you requested, since I do not want my picture to be killed as well. Yours truly, Rabih MrouéRabih Mroué is an artist and playwright, based in Beirut. His exhibition I The undersigned is to be seen at BAK Utrecht, from 21 May until 1 August. On 17 June Mroué will present a performance/lecture in Utrecht.