ALI CHERRI

The multimedia work of Ali Cherri (1976, Lebanon) is a poetic reflection on visible and invisible forms of violence suffered by people, artifacts, and landscapes. It poses timely questions about the ways in which it is possible to represent anew such traumatic events and sustained hostilities. His practice addresses larger issues pertaining to the political, socio-economical, and cultural realms while opening up to the emancipatory potential of the imagination.

Set in Cyprus, the East Mediterranean island at the core of decades-long tensions between local Greek and Turkish communities, The Watchman sets out from the political history of this troubled territory and the personal stories of its inhabitants. The work proposes a wider reflection on the politics of the recognition of borders and their painful consequences with regard of sovereignty, identity, and ultimately peace.
The film is centered around the figure of a soldier whose job is to guard the border of the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This soldier, like many others along the dividing line, spends his prolonged and dull night shifts perched on a watchtower looking out for “the enemy,” who may or may not arrive down the hills of the recognized Republic of Cyprus under Greek-Cypriot rule. Sometimes, a robin crashes against the watchtower’s window, other times the changing of the guard is really all that happens. When he is off duty, the soldier wanders half-asleep the landscape waiting for the next shift to begin again. The streets of the rural village where he walks are bordered by dying cacti, ruined with abandoned buildings, and mostly emptied out of civilians, save for an old lady who invites him over to her house to rest. On the watchtower, his nights of motionless waiting for “the enemy” to arrive disjoint time and space, and trap the soldier in a physical and metaphorical threshold where the borders between alertness and sleepiness, reality and imagination, are constantly trespassed until, unarmed, he meets with his fantasies and reveries, unleashing unexpected events.
Through a speculative fictional approach typical of his filmic practice, Cherri cast two local, non-professional actors to re-enact their memories and experiences of loneliness, state abandonment, and death in war time, with their identities and feelings often fading into one another’s and additionally resonating with the artist’s own vicissitude. In fact, Cyprus was chosen by Cherri because of the historical relationships of migration between the island and his native Lebanon, as well as the geopolitical similarities between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and Beirut, which was also divided during the Lebanese Civil War.
The Watchman continues the artist’s critical investigation into conflicts of acknowledgement, the inheritance of historical trauma, and the radical potential of the imagination. At the same time, it pictures a fictional way out of a hostile present whereby the acquired meaning of a grand and collectively respected duty starts showing its untenable cracks. (Bianca Stoppani)