Jayce Salloum — Video Transcript

My first works were all found footage films where I used material from television, from movies and from archives. So that was the way I sort of started to learn how to use video imagery — through deconstructing what already existed and trying to create a new type of meaning out of what was there and at the same time develop a critical response to the mass media. And then I started to use those works more politically focused on warfare and violence.

Often times the subjects that I choose are people that are articulate about the condition that they happen to be living in or the political condition, the social condition, the interstitial condition. So I’m much more interested in championing and working with people that have been marginalized, people that have been oppressed, people that haven’t had a chance for their voice to be heard…giving them the opportunity to be heard in a personal way.

I did a lot of work in the Middle East focusing on Lebanon, looking at how people live through and struggle though resisting the occupation, the Israeli occupation. And then I looked at conflicts in former Yugoslavia. So let’s say those themes that are related are themes of resistance, of survival, of “re-historicizing” or looking critically back at history, looking at the present situation and articulating speculations of what might be coming in the future.

I make my work to be engaged with anybody that will watch it. So, there’s a wide variety of entry points or different ways of engagement that people can enter the work, whether it’s linguistic or theoretical or visual or formal or conceptual. I’ll provide entry points. I’ll provide moments of pleasure, of formal pleasure, of beauty, of complexity, besides political engagement and encounter. So I try to keep my camera and myself as open as possible.

You can never really know how effective your work is going to be, how powerful it might be in making change. You can only hope for the best and try to make the most engaging work you can. And I think that our work can lead us to places that we might not imagine.