5 people; 1 experience: 5 different perceptions; Walid Raad and the experience of Beirut.

There is a videoart piece by Walid Raad (Lebanon, 1967) in the Collection of Video Art in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Atlas Group, entitled “Hostage: The Bachar Tapes”.

Crafted on a series of tapes as an audiovisual narrative of Lebanese citizen Souheil Bachar (low-level employee of the American embassy in Beirut), it describes Bachar’s experience as a hostage of Lebanese militants over a ten-year period (1983-1993).

As described on tapes 17 and 31, after Bachar was taken hostage, he was driven to a basement in the suburbs of Beirut, near the capital city airport. He was forced to live there alongside five American citizens who had also been kidnapped. They were kept in a 3 x 3.5 meter cell for 27 weeks.

Once they had all been freed, each of the five American hostages who had shared the cell with Bachar wrote a book describing the same experience. Each of these five books was totally different. But what really surprised Souheil was that “all five began their books talking about time. Time? Would that be because they wanted to show that what had befallen them had been something unpredictable and unnatural? Possibly…”.

This real experience shows us unequivocally that, despite sharing the same visual space, the same landscape, the bare architecture which was free of references to the outside world, in an inhuman cell of barely nine square meters, each of the six hostages had had a completely different experience. The perceptions described by each of the six men turn this common experience into something personal and non-transferable, despite an unbearable minimalism and stripping-away of individualism.

This reflection prepares us for the fact that struggling with perception and a sense of space-time in cyberspace is an extremely difficult and complex task, considering that it involves a personal and non-transferable experience. I am inspired by the conviction that what we have understood as space and time up to now—as reality—is nothing more than a panel made up of a collage of thoughts derived from individual and subjective experiences just like those I am using now.