Hadjithomas & Joreige

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are artists and filmmakers who confront the contemporary history of Lebanon, investigating the impact and power of images that build the imaginary of the region. They have directed many award winning films among them, “I Want to See” (“Je veux voir”) and “The Lebanese Rocket Society”.

For over a decade, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have been collecting junk and spam email messages specifically, advance-fee frauds and scams. Read carefully, those surprisingly effective scams recount a history of our recent times: the conflicts, wars uprisings, shifts in the global economy, financial fluctuations, religious extremism, political changes, and even ecological disasters. As the narrative unfolds, these virtual archives outline not only a cartography of conflicts, a symptom of the state of the world, illustrating complex and often still colonial relationships between the North and the global South but also a space for singularly poetic encounters and experiences.

Spoken by 38 non-professional actors, the scams seem transformed into scenarios for monologues which become captivating and moving because they are told by what seems to be a “real” person. Complex layering of technological communication is echoed in the display, where one projection is ephemerally super-imposed upon another, creating a ghost like sensibility where the virtual and physical meet.