MAZEN AND 'THE GUCCI REVOLUTION'

11 september / 11 september 2001 / 11 september 2007
"today i am celebrating 6 years of friendship with the customs of the civilised world airports" (credits: Mazen Kerbaj)

By Jessie Emkic

Humour and irony may make you laugh, but can a blog filled with political comics serve better as a source of information than traditional media? The Lebanese Mazen Kerbaj succeeded in creating such a blog.

It was last year during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that I encountered Mazen’s work for the first time. His blog drew my attention. He would regularly post cartoons depicting his impressions of the invasion, adding a good portion of self-irony to make his point clear. Throughout the entire invasion he would draw, make music and write everyday ceaselessly to “keep his sanity”, as he says. His work drew large international attention. “Sometimes I meet people after a gig in Europe. They come to me and say: ‘We spoke to you during the war’. I don’t know what I should answer. It was in fact quite a frenetic period back then, and I barely have any souvenir of all the people I spoke to.” Sometimes he would receive more than hundred of emails per day. A large majority of these were supportive, but there were some detractors too. Mazen takes it with humour: “In a way, I was more capable of answering these than totally cheesy comments of some supporters. Receiving a comment like: ‘I am with you from Costa Rica,’ while you are in a really incredible, but interesting state of mind as you hear bombs fall on your city, trying to cope with the situation and continue your ‘art’ - it brings you back to the real world. In a sense it shows you clearly what the reality is of support that you and the country and getting.”

Unfortunately, some people totally misunderstood the message he was conveying with his drawings. It made him appear a victim, although he was simply discharging his fear on paper. He was trying to protect himself from going insane. “I even got the greatest comment one day,” he says, “after a drawing where I’m vomiting because of too much whiskey: ‘You shouldn't drink alcohol, it is bad for your health, you know.’ Reading this while a bomb is falling 3 kilometers away from your house is pretty surreal.”
He spent his childhood in the Lebanese civil war until he turned fifteen. The food and medical aid the Lebanese would receive consisted of goods which had expired years earlier. This is customary with humanitarian aid regardless of the country it’s sent to. He says ‘divide and conquer’ seems to be working very well in his region. But not everything is dusky. Beirut is known as the “Paris of the Middle East” glowing with glamour. People are fashion conscious to such an extent that during the great riots in 2005 citizens of Beirut would refer to them as the ‘Gucci Revolution’.

Mazen started drawing at the age of three and hasn’t stopped since. Many of the comics he draws deal with politics and war, but he doesn’t want to do what many Occidental artists do, namely use war as a primary topic for a study. “In a sense, I wanted to prove - to myself - that it was possible to do interesting stuff without stressing your ‘difference’.” The assassination of the notable journalist Samir Kassir in 2005, his friend and mentor, left a deep scar. “I couldn't stop drawing during the week that followed. It was a sort of a therapy.” Mazen ended up printing 10.000 copies of these drawings with the help of some friends and donators. They were published under the title ‘UNE SEMAINE SANS LA VOIX DE SAMIR’ (Engl. A Week Without Samir’s Voice) and distributed with Le Monde - Edition Proche Orient.
Mazen explores his creativity also in music, engaging in international collaborations with other musicians. He’s regularly invited to play gigs in Europe, many in of them in Austria. With neighbouring countries it’s different. There’s no collaboration with Israel whatsoever. According to a Lebanese law one is not even allowed to speak to an Israeli. And yet, he received many supportive mails from Israeli musicians during the Israeli invasion and was astounded how many of them knew the Beirut music scene - a proof that art surpasses all borders.
Mazen performed live in Minoritenkirche in Krems, Austria on
October 5.

www.kerbaj.com
www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com

published in Art in Migration, November 2007

bey212 (credits: Mazen Kerbaj)