Without even leaving, we are already no longer there

‘Rupture is the fate of the foreigner. He has left something permanently behind him, but this keeps haunting him and continues to determine his identity. Exile reduces the old body, the old language, to a corpse.’ (Kristeva) This phenomenon of ‘being haunted’ is ‘inherent to human life in that it comes back on its own, has to come back, because it is pursued by its “having been”. (Vande Veire) On the other hand, this phenomenon of ‘being haunted’ relates to our contemporary experience of history, which is defined by ‘the ambiguous influences and latent presence of the unresolved histories, the ghosts, of modernity’ (Verwoert) and therefore of revenants.

Without even leaving, we are already no longer there is a research project by Mekhitar Garabedian; collecting different stories and memories of his parents and other members of his family in Lebanon. Focusing on a particular memory of his mother, the project takes him and his mother (and grandmother) back to Beirut, and specifically to Bourdj Hamoud (the Armenian neighbourhood), where both his mother and grandmother were born and raised, but haven’t been back for more than 26 years, and haven’t seen certain people and places for over 30 years.

Mekhitar Garabedian is researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University College Ghent, KASK, Hogeschool Ghent).