Nights Enclosed in Marble (21012-2014) is a series of book-like marble boxes. Each box is said to hold a cubic centimetre of moonless night collected by the artist from a specific place. The very title of the series Night Cartography emphasizes the artist’s view. Night Cartography #3 is a sleep mask transformed into a cryptic object by the dripping of a stolen votive candle. In another ongoing series, the twenty-four day is represented as a sheet of paper, its timeline of hour intervals disrupted by the blackened hours in which the artist was asleep.
In this interview, Boutros discusses his practice of sculpting invisibility as if a material as tangible, as expressive, as marble.
—Eva Heisler
I think art, in general, tends towards direct or oblique autobiographical undertones. It is essential that a work first starts with a lived intimate experience—a personal geography—and then opens up and unfurls wider political, geographical, and historical layers. This is how I proceed; I try to function with a sort of telescopage of narratives . . . a bit like this left teardrop that mingles with the globalized territory of the Atlantic Ocean.
You do surprising things with materials. Night Cartography #3 is created by dripping wax from a votive candle onto a sleeping mask that you had used for several months. Can you tell us about this work? What is the significance of the votive candle having been stolen from a church in Lebanon? Do you see the work as the artefact of a performance?
The work is part of the series Night Cartography that I initiated in 2011 during my stay in São Paulo. In Night Cartography #3, I try to capture and map the elusiveness of the nights we sleep . . .
Sleeping masks are collected in airplanes during flights, when our bodies are levitating thousand meters above ground level—the origins of the material is fundamental for me.
Later, this mask is used to cover my eyes during sleep for several nights; the fabric becomes haunted with my own dreams and charged with sweat and body heat. Those fleeting materials are then fixed with wax—wax from votive candles stolen from a church situated in my native village in Mount Lebanon. The wax contains the wishes of an unknown, an energy that aims to topple reality.
When pouring this wax on the mask, my own dreams intersect with the wishes of a stranger; two transformative energies function by synergy. Wax, a material used for conservation, is adequate to capture and seal dreams.
The act of stealing the votive candles triggers a deviation in the original wish’s direction but won’t prevent it from being realized. Instead, the wish is inserted in a new geography and meets new dreams and wishes.
I don't really see my work as an artefact of a performance; the work is more performance, but not in an “orthodox” way.
I am fascinated by the relationship between solid physical fact in your work and allusions to the imperceptible. Can you talk about your interest in the imperceptible?
At the core of my work lays the notion of “charged invisibility,” a pivotal and very salient topic in my practice.
Invisibility is used as matter that I charge with intimate geographical, political, and historical narratives; it is a tool to escape speculation, to hide from a reality over-saturated by spectacle mechanisms. This is really the essence of my work, sculpting invisibility and using it as a material. It is something very new in approaching sculpture, and in decrypting a political situation, a stance very different from an overtly prosaic political discourse, quite present nowadays. Obviously, the viewer has a big part in activating and unfolding this hidden landscape: when we’re dealing with the invisible, faith becomes the medium.
An intimate and sentimental bind is established between the work and the viewer, similar to how the mechanism of love functions: you have everything but the essential is ungraspable. In my current show The Sun Is My Only Ally, at S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent, Belgium, curated by Philippe van Cauteren, this notion of faith and trust was pivotal in architecturing the exhibition.
One work consists of a marble cube that you carried around for a month, displayed next to an identical cube. There is no visible difference between the cubes except that you had been in daily contact with one—so the familiarity and intimacy of one cube is registered only in the telling. There’s no visible difference except the words that make it so. How important is the language you use in your titles or your descriptions? What is the relationship, for you, between the words and the object?
I use language to narrate the performances that happened. I intentionally avoid showing any sort of documentation or proofs, to keep the work in a blurred zone between reality and speculation. Hence, language becomes omnipresent, in titles and captions; a receptacle that is filled with narration.
My works can seem hermetic if one doesn’t take the time to decipher the information that dwells in titles or captions.
Sometimes the titles and description of the works read like poetry to me. By that, I mean the description hints at a story or a charged moment, and the transformative possibilities of feeling and metaphor. Are you a reader of poetry? Has literature influenced your work at all?
Poetry is essential. I see it as a major dynamic that keeps humanity dreaming and going further. What would art become if not haunted by poetry? It is the substance that is the most difficult to produce in an artwork.
Many of your works allude to an interiority but the content remains invisible. Night Enclosed in Marble is a marvellous and mysterious example. Can you tell us how you went about making Night Enclosed in Marble?
This work started with a childhood souvenir, playing with my friends in a forest late at night, close to the family house, I remember those black nights that were so dark that one could barely find the way back home. It was then that I perceived the night as a volume, a black immaterial volume that one penetrates.
Years later, I started a collection of nights: Nights Enclosed in Marble. I wanted to capture 1cm3 of nights, from different parts of the world. The night as a witness of our time, a material that is charged silently with all this density that produces a day, an abstract archive of our present, but at the same time an experience that links us to both antique and future spheres.
In Night Enclosed in Marble, a white marble block opens like a book. In each of its interior massive parts, 0.5 cm3 of void is carved. So, when it’s closed, it contains 1cm3 of void at its center of gravity. I transported this block, on a night without a moon, inside a forest. The white marble block was opened, night infiltrated inside, then it was closed, enclosing 1cm3 of this specific night.
What is your relationship to the history of sculpture? Do you see work such as Night Enclosed in Marble as engaging with the traditions of sculpture? (I ask because you are using a traditional material, marble, and you seem to be playing with the dichotomies of inside/outside, surface/interiority.)
Yes. Some of my works establish a dialogue with the history of sculpture and engage with this traditional medium. However, as I mentioned previously, those works open new gates in contemporary art since they create a new paradigm, a complementary opposition between a physicality that is containing something intangible, and this intangible treated as a material.
Many of your works—in their conception and execution—move across borders, and register place and time quite specifically, sometimes in a very personal way, as in I Stood in the Middle of the Strait of Gibraltar and Dropped My Left Tear in the Atlantic Ocean and My Right Tear in the Mediterranean Sea, and sometimes in a way that seems more overtly political, as in Drink Europa. How did growing up in Lebanon shape your identity as an artist and inform your artistic practice?
Well, I guess that growing up in Lebanon during the Lebanese conflict was not a normal situation, but that was normal for us at that time. Years later, I noticed this abnormality, this crisis hidden within us, is fuelling what I would call a crisis practice. Nevertheless, it is important for me to smudge and dilute those feelings and let the work of art appear on its own. The context is there in undertones, an emanation, but not exposed as a speculative product.
A political situation should never take over the complex structures that erect an artwork. Weaving historical, political, and geographical layers is essential in a work, but with a subtle balance. This is the challenge: talking about a geography without becoming obedient to it.
