Lara Tabet

“The return of the old man to his vigor” project
“The return of the old man to his vigor” is an old ottoman book written in 903 (AD) by Ahmed Ben Suleimen Ben Kamal Pacha at the demand of Sultan Selim The First in order to reinvigorate the latter’s dwindling sexuality. The artist reconfigurates this book by executing the different recipes and creating visual interpretations through their reactions with photosensitive photographic paper, a method called chemigram, drawing a parallel between the figures of the healer and the photographer.

Based on “2666” by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, this photographic and video film project follows an imaginary serial killer in Beirut. In the novel, itself, Bolaño focuses on the murder of 112 women in a Mexican city and the fruitless police investigations into these murders, generating an impression of a city infested by a pervasive evil. This project shifts the geographical setting to Beirut and to the city’s suburbs and outskirts, in particular, and proposes an image of the city at nighttime, portrayed by means of a fictional narrative of unsolved murders.