EUROPE, EUROPE, EUROPE: Chant Avedissian with Sadia Shirazi
Interview, Jadaliyya, June 22, 2015.
Chant Avedissian, Ernestito (The Young Che Guevara), 1994.
It is lunchtime and I am meeting Chant Avedissian again, after an awkward initial encounter. We first met in the childhood apartment he now shares with his sister, amid cigarette butts and vertically-hung scrolls in downtown Cairo. After making coffee, we began a conversation in which all my attempts to talk about Avedissian’s artwork were sidelined. We spoke, instead, about my work, interests and intentions. I was then shown around Avedissian’s room and studio, a 3x4 m. room with a built-in loft. It was a tight, spare, wood lined space with standing room on the bottom floor near a computer and dais. Narrow steps led to the top floor where you could sit, stoop, or lie down but not stand. This is where Avedissian sleeps, works and stores his files, with a twin bed on one end, books piled beside it and within crawling distance a meter away, a work space under the room’s only “window,” which at 15 sq. cm. and with a fan fitted snugly into it, is more of a ventilation aperture. The attic-like space makes it easy to understand the scale of Avedissian’s works and the economy of his scrolls. It has been two days and we are meeting again for a formal interview at the restaurant Filfilah, a popular downtown establishment.
Sadia Shirazi: How did you find living and studying in Canada in the 70s? Weren’t there many people emigrating there from Egypt at the time?
Chant Avedissian: I went to art school there, it was post-Woodstock in the 70s and I didn’t even know what Woodstock was. [Laughter] This is like going somewhere after a nuclear war and you don’t know what happened in the war. I couldn’t cope with post-Woodstock. The concept of immigration to Canada I don’t like but I discovered this there. Everyone was immigrating. My family was immigrating; my uncles were there; then my mother died, so I immigrated alone. All the communities live in restaurants there; I cannot connect my identity to a restaurant. I can’t live in a cafeteria. We go to an Egyptian restaurant; we go to a Chinese restaurant; we go to a Greek restaurant: a restaurant is not a country. In New York people love other countries as long as it’s in a restaurant. It’s too early to go into this, but this is what happened in Canada. People had identity as long as it remained in a restaurant; this bourgeoisie who went to Canada in the 70s just to ameliorate their financial situation, this part of Canada I couldn’t stand, not the other side. Not other things.
SS: After leaving Canada you moved back to Cairo then left again to study in Paris. What made you decide to return to Cairo after Paris?
CA: I came back to Cairo because to stay in Paris I had to become French. Because you can’t survive France if you’re not French. And I thought: I can’t be Egyptian-Armenian-French. It was too much. I was lost, between Egypt and Armenia my name is Armenian but I am from Egypt-and then I was going to become French. That was just too much.
SS: Do you mean becoming French by taking citizenship?
CA: Taking the identity, the blood cells. It’s about blood cells, about assimilation; they call it intégration. We are all supposed to have this beautiful culture of France because they are the most sophisticated, have the most beautiful fashion, the most beautiful museums, the most beautiful city in the world-which is Paris—which is incredible, incredible. I mean it is beyond. And then they have these fantastic values of liberty, fraternity, and equality, which you cannot even discuss, I mean you go to jail if we discuss this; these are universal values. So Paris is universal. You just say the word Paris and you can sell it on a postcard; you can make a lot of money.
So the reason, yes, that I left. I thought I don’t deserve Paris, so I left. I met people who told me, ‘Change your name, you have now to behave like this, there are rules in France,’ and I saw people living there who said they are Armenian, and I was very young and I was very shocked. I couldn’t cope with the idea of becoming an Armenian living in France; I can’t cope with this idea, until today. I am born in Egypt and there is a reason- this might be very naïve—but there is a reason my destiny made it that I’m born in this country. Of course, if they kill me or if they put me out, I’ll go out, but there must be a reason, so I wanted to come back to discover this reason. I even wonder today how come other people are born outside Paris. How come we are not all born in Paris? This is very important. I mean, it’s very strange that there are other places in the world than Paris.
SS: When you went to study in Paris did you also feel you were going to the center of the art world?
CA: Yes, because I grew up until the age of eighteen with Paris as the center of culture: in the house, in school, in my surroundings, in the French cultural institute in Cairo, in Egyptian cinema. I mean if you see Egyptian movies, everyone goes to Europe- the doctor is coming from Europe; they go to Europe to bring the machines. I mean the guy thinks his wife is having an affair with another man, he takes the child and he goes to Europe. This is in a famous Egyptian film. The wife goes to the villa of her husband and his mother says, the guy is not here and your son is not here and tomorrow morning they are going to Europe this is a very big event- the guy goes to Europe. He doesn’t go to Sudan, he doesn’t go to Afghanistan, he goes to Europe. So we grew up thinking Europe is the center. You walk in the street and the birds sing that, ‘Europe, Europe, Europe’. Where you were born and raised, was it like that, ‘Europe, Europe, Europe’?
SS: No, not really.
CA: Yes, in Paris I saw it on my skin, the police would stop me and check my ID, this was twenty-five years ago, and tell me, ‘You’re lucky you’re in France because in your country you can’t survive.’ And once in school I said something critical and my colleagues, students, told me, ‘Then go back to your country.’ All this adds up, all this made it clear that Paris is too good for me; I am not good enough for Paris, so I left. Paris is beautiful, this is passé, it’s out of fashion now. They live in two periods, the French, in the Revolution and ’68. There are beautiful streets in Bukhara I wouldn’t exchange for the whole of Paris because it has history and contemporaneity and the people are today and you are in 2007, and there is still something magical there. The French think they have taste, well I also have taste, we all have taste, and my taste says that Paris is old, it’s old-fashioned, it’s not hip. Bukhara is hip.
You don’t go to a movie with someone if he says I like Paris, once a person says I love Paris, finished, it’s out, you cannot trust him, because that is bad taste. And people have bad taste, in general, sorry. If they say ‘I like Kabul,’ then you say, aah, there is something there... I studied in Paris just to be accepted by society.
SS: Did it work?
CA: It still works. Whenever you are in good society, in the sense of thieves, crooks, liars- I don’t know how else to put it- and you speak a little bit of French, your level goes up. In pretentious society, it goes up, but it doesn’t work everywhere, because the majority of people I now know, they know that France is the passé. Anyways we’ve said enough about Paris, but I wish them well and I wish the Armenians in France well and the Egyptians in France well, I wish everybody well, and let them enjoy liberté, égalité, fraternité.
SS: The other day at your flat, you were telling me the story about how you came to do your first stencil...
CA: But I never did a stencil. A lady wanted an image of a singer and I did it in stencil, because I didn’t want to do one drawing. I wanted to have a file, like an architect, and from that file I could make a copy. I thought doing something once was not good. I wanted to have something, a drawing that was like a photocopy, where I would have given the photocopy, not the original, and kept the original with a number. I love the idea of not doing something once.
A big part of the stencils was also inventing an identity. I didn’t want to change my country to fit my name or change my name to fit my country. It took five years in Armenia for me to feel comfortable keeping my name and my country; I went in 2000. Anyway, I thought doing a painting by hand was overrated. You can’t do a painting by hand; you can’t draw anymore. I don’t.
Photograph from the artist`s archive. 1970s.
Chant Avedissian, Bint Karya (The Village Girl), 1991. Image courtesy of the artist.
SS: Why?
CA: Because when you see craftsmen, when you see how people copy, and how people have patterns in printing or for textiles or the forms in calligraphy, you see that people use something as a base pattern, and from that, they copy. I made a rapprochement with silkscreen because of this idea, because I discovered that people have filed forms that they use. I went to Aleppo, have you been to Aleppo? There are these magnificent textile printers, with huge ateliers and this guy is printing with one repeated circle and he does four meters of printing and they hang it on huge bars, in this huge place—it’s beyond. I went mad. It’s magic. Because the guy is there doing the most beautiful textile and he’s not an artist, he doesn’t say “I’m an artist,” he’s not in the Modern Art Museum.
In between Paris and Cairo I stopped doing any handwork, any painting. And I never wanted to do painting, but I discovered that people put photos of people on the wall- football players, movie stars- and I thought to do the stencils, but I didn’t know what was going to happen, that it was going to go on for so long. I did two or three stencils at the beginning and that was it. And then it went on and on and on and it became like drugs; you can’t stop. Then I stopped, I said enough is enough.
SS: The imagery of many of your stencils is taken from Egypt in the 1950s, during Nasser’s era. How did you pick the subject matter for your work?
CA: In the beginning it was my childhood memories, and then little by little I was shocked by what I discovered in newspapers, I mean the mise en scène that was there. Mise en scène means how a photo is directed; how an image is not true. Neither the people stand like that nor look like that; everything was fake. The images said things about liberty and happiness and sports, but the photos were composed, for propaganda, so it was very amazing to do this work—like The Arab Girl with a Gun.
And then there were portraits of people that were important. I did a portrait of Umm Kulthum because I thought she was a freedom fighter for bringing money for the army in 1964. I also did one of Afghani, who was expelled from Cairo by the British and died in Istanbul. The choices are half-conscious, half-subconscious. Sometimes you pick a drawing because it’s obviously aggressive- it was meant to lie- so you do it. I did it to emphasize the lie. Just so you understand the lie, by doing a stencil of it, or a photo of it, or exhibiting it, whatever. But the stencil, it’s a façade, a fake façade, because it looks like a painting and it talks about something quite horrible, something quite dramatic. A few of the stencils are like that, a few are dramatic, but it doesn’t show because it has color and it looks like a painting.
Chant Avedissian, Sitt El Kol (Umm Kalthoum), 1994. Image courtesy of the artist.