Transcript

I woke up feeling lazy today. I knew that I had to address you, to speak my thoughts, but the only thing I was able to think of was jerking off. And I did.

I know that I’m expected to talk about our nation, and its future. Or in fact, where we failed. But before this, I would like to share some thoughts.

It’s very weird how complicated we made our sex life and our sexual desires. What I mostly mean by this is the link we created between sex and love. This constructed link between two huge and complex needs.

It is true that we all need to love and to be loved. Love! A feeling so intense and diverse that Arabs gave it fourteen different words to express it.

But aren’t our sexual desires independent from love? I jerk off, I fuck, I touch myself and other bodies, I watch my body in the mirror to fulfill my sexual desires, not to love someone.

And it is true that when I have sex with someone I love, sex might be better, but what is certainly augmented is the feeling of love. In sex with someone I love, love is better, not sex, because I feel closer to that person, touching, kissing, fucking them … makes me feel my love more towards that person.

…

Sorry I got distracted watching the sea from my window. I have the Mediterranean in front of me, and sometimes when I look at it, I try to recall all the dead bodies that tried to cross it, searching for freedom, dignity, and got killed by other human beings, and got swallowed by the sea.

So yeah, I was talking about sex and love. The problem is that over thousands of years we built a sacred link between the two. We told ourselves that we need to love the person in order to have sex with them. This link created more complex concepts like marriage, monogamy, cheating, gender, and sexual discrimination—stories we were told, and believed, and in turn transmitted to our kids.

Cheating became about having sex with a different person, though cheating is about breaking an agreement, an agreement with rules collectively decided on. Marriage is not sacred, marriage is a social construct that we created because we thought that it organized our societies better. Same for nations, they are also not real. They are built. All the nations that we are part of today are new ones created after the fall of older ones.

…

Sorry again, I was checking my Instagram.

So, borders, anthems, states, are all created stories. We tell different and new stories from the ones older nations told us. We decided that those borders and wars would improve our lives, societies, and economies. We forgot that we created them, so instead they became sacred.

Though improving our lives, societies, and economies should have led us to be happy people—are we happy? I am not. And happiness is a feeling that cannot be mistaken.

…

[Song clip: Cesária Évora, Sodade]

This is Cesária Évora singing “Sodade.” Sodade is a Portuguese word, it expresses a complex melancholic feeling, look it up if you don’t know what it means exactly. And yet when I hear the song, I feel happy. I can’t explain how, but I can assure you that feeling happy is a crystal-clear feeling, and now am not happy.

…

I might have got you lost between sexual desires, love, nations, and happiness. I am sorry. My brain feels like everything is connected in a way, and sometimes I just don’t find the words to explain it.

I think about all women and the world that we men have made you live in. I think about queer people, about immigrants, about Indigenous and colonized, and people living under occupation and dictatorships. And I look to the Mediterranean, this huge grave covered with water, and try to weep, but I can’t.

I’m most of the time not able to feel anything anymore, I feel numb. I stare into the void, where I know that under this thick air, and under this water there is a lot of pain, that I can’t hear anymore. We failed. We became monsters.

I’m scared. I’m fragile, weak, and scared.

We have been using the wrong tools. We should unlearn these engrained links as shared rules and values and try to find new ways of dealing with things. We need to be more creative, to change lenses, to admit that we are fragile, scared, and emotional. Why? Because we failed, and we need to try again in a different way. 

Anyway, I guess I need to think more about this. Have a good day.

“I’m scared. I’m fragile, weak, and scared.”

Roy Dib smokes, checks Instagram, and looks out onto the Mediterranean while delivering a pensive monologue on love, sex, nationhood, and migration. Between drags, Dib pries apart the norms that ostensibly unite societies (marriage, the nation-state, the pursuit of happiness), forging a critique embedded in his own entanglements and complicities.

Roy Dib (born in 1983) is an artist and filmmaker based in Beirut. On both formal and conceptual levels, Roy Dib challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day. 

His work has been presented at Studio la Città (2021), Loop Barcelona (2020), Galerie Tanit (2018), MAXXI Museum (2017), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), ALFILM (2017), JCC (2016), Forum Expanded - 64th and 65th Berlinale, Exposure 2015 - Beirut Art Center, Uppsala International Short Film Festival (2014), Queer Lisboa (2014), Images Festival (2016) - Toronto, Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2013, 2015 and 2017), Ashkal Alwan (2014), and Video Works (2011 - 2014). 

ASL Interpretation