Interview: Tanya Traboulsi

Photos: Tanya Traboulsi

I met photographer Tanya Traboulsi for our interview at Papercup. The tiny bookstore and café situated on a winding street in the Mar Mikhael neighborhood of Beirut is easy to miss but a pleasure to discover. Over tea and a cortado we talked about art, identity and cats.    

You know the owners of Papercup?

Tanya Traboulsi: Mmm hmm. Everybody knows everybody, I don’t even remember from where and how mostly. It’s like a huge family — maybe about 2000 people who are close with the art scene. Even if it is just from saying hi, but you don’t really know them, you will still recognize 99 percent of people if you have lived here for a while.

My story is a bit complicated. My mum is Austrian and I was born in Austria. I grew up here (Beirut) for the first seven years until 1983, and then we left because my mum didn’t want us to grow up here with the conflict. So I did my school and everything there. When I was 19, in 1995, I came back for a visit because I was very intrigued. I was taken out of my childhood here, and put in Austria and that was a kind of rupture. German is my first language. I spoke French with my dad, German with my mum, and they spoke English with each other. And my dad never spoke Arabic to me, so I only heard him speak it on the phone. Of course when I was here I was surrounded with it. But I don’t read or write. It is very difficult for me to identify with either here or there. I am really in between. If I add up the amount of years I have lived here and there, it is really half-half now. But Beirut is my home base because I work here.

Where are you currently drawing your inspiration?

TT: It might sound bizarre, but I get the best ideas when I’m half asleep, in the evening or before I really wake up in the morning. Of course nature inspires me, especially the sea. Italy and everything that comes with it. I love reading autobiographies and biographies, the movies of Éric Rohmer, old paintings. Sometimes an interesting conversation triggers really nice ideas too. My own experiences also inspire me and the feelings I go through, I usually like to confront them and not be in denial, so I can move on and evolve. Austrian actress Romy Schneider inspires me, and the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann — who was born in the same town as me in the south of Austria. 

How would you describe your work at this moment?

TT: I have been working on this series [of self-portraits]— part of it was exhibited in France at the 2019 Photography Biennale of the Institut du Monde Arabe. The photos are taken on my phone. I have my phone with me all the time and I take photos all the time. It makes me feel independent and light. I don’t have to carry my camera everywhere.

What sort of subject matter are you shooting?

TT: It’s not really a concept or a subject. I travel a lot back and forth, because my father passed away seven years ago and my mum is in Austria and I want to see her. And you get a different notion of time and of values when one of your parents dies. You feel like time is flying, you don’t know how long. So I go and see her and spend time with her in the south of Austria. I started taking pictures with my phone and posting them on Instagram and people liked them. I stuck to the same format and I kept going, and it has been three or four years now.

Intimate, soothing, calming — those qualities are what I am looking for, both in my own mind and life. All of the photos are very aesthetically beautiful and crisp, not blurred or anything. When my father died, he left me a big chunk of paperwork to work through and organize here in Lebanon and it was really affecting me and I was stressed out and anxious. So in the photos that I took I searched for this soothing, calming state of mind that I needed, and still need now. It is the reflection of what I am searching for in my life.

You have a cat? (This question was prompted by one of Traboulsi’s photographs.)

TT: Yes, his name is Bob. He is my center of gravity. I love him so much I can’t even describe it. And you know in Scandinavia they prescribe cats for depression and anxiety. After my dad passed away, he was sitting with me licking my tears, it was unbelievable. They know. They feel it. And the purring is very good for your nervous system. I would love to work [on] something with cats. And there are so many of them here on the streets, but people put food down and water. There are some shitty people, but mostly people take care of them, like in Istanbul.

You have said previously that Beirut was an unreliable city that continued to surprise you with its unreliability. Can you contextualize that?

TT: Yes, it is unreliable in terms of stability of course, given the region that it is placed in and the political situation and the neighboring countries. The Middle East is not a source of stability. But also in terms of daily life — there are blackouts every day, there are water problems. In summer sometimes, people don’t have water coming out of their faucets, there is a garbage crisis, the traffic—these are the negative things. In terms of infrastructure, it is a disaster because of the corruption that is deeply rooted in the entire system.

On the other hand we have such beauty. I was just walking from my car, I parked it a few streets away. It’s the end of November and it’s 26 degrees, you are walking in the sun and the mood is just — I can’t describe it — you have mood swings like 20 times a day, good and bad, because of Beirut and the way it is. There is horrible stuff and there is the extremely beautiful, you feel very close to life, which I don’t feel in Austria for example because everything is so steady. It makes me as a person. Maybe because people who live here are used to the constant adrenaline up and down, maybe we can’t adapt to stability anymore? And this is a source of inspiration for me, that is why I am still here and that is why I came back. In Austria, I’m calm; I have my routine there but I don’t really produce anything. I don’t have ideas, I don’t get triggered and challenged. But people who live here and have the experiences that we have experienced here, it’s probably hard to adapt to the total stability and safety. And also I lived the war as a child here so it marked me, it marks you when in your first seven years you sit in the basement and the bombs are going off. Thankfully I didn’t have to go through the whole terror of war because we had the chance to leave, but the society is traumatized, it needs a lot of healing which is partially not happening. It is an interesting source of inspiration for artists and many of the artists here — not just photographers — work a lot around their traumas and the trauma of the society and the war and the past. There is a lot of nostalgia in peoples’ works. Art for people here has become an outlet, and a kind of therapy as well.

What about some of the experiences that arise out of being female in this space? I feel like your work often takes on a female gaze.

TT: I did a series called Something Borrowed. I exhibited it at Beirut Art Center. I work a lot with self-portraits, because I am very independent and I like to be alone. I don’t like to rely on someone else, or a team, so I do everything on my own — all the artistic work you see, even the commissions. I don’t have an assistant. So I started taking self-portraits and using myself to present different characters, and this specific series talks about being unmarried in Lebanon as a woman above thirty.

In certain circles it is not a taboo of course, but let’s say in the general society it is a taboo. Everybody wants to get married and have children. Living alone as a women, in our circles it’s normal, but there are many families that don’t approve that their daughter goes and lives alone in Beirut for example. Living with your boyfriend by law is forbidden — the neighbours can call the police and they arrest you.

I live the way I want to live and nobody makes any problems. I am Austrian and I look foreign they tolerate it, but if I were to be fully Lebanese probably they would have, I don’t know.

So for this project, I borrowed some wedding dresses from the 80s. So it is this very kitsch plastic-y mood. In every household in Lebanon, you have framed wedding photos. Marriage is a very important factor in Lebanese everyday life and society. I never wanted to get married, and I’m not married. I knew as a child that I didn’t want to get married. I don’t want children and I don’t want a boss. And sometimes I felt like an outcast when it came to the expectations of society — I never had this pressure from my own family, thank god — but other friends I know who are not married do have this pressure. When are you going to get married? Yalla, you don’t have time, time is flying what are you waiting for?

So for this series, I chose five people who were unmarried and I interviewed them and recorded the interviews. I gave them fake names for privacy and I acted as them in the photos. So you have five self-portraits, and each one has an audio interview. I interviewed them and then I referred to this English rhyme something blue, something borrowed. So I chose something blue, something borrowed, something new. And for the line “a sixpence in my shoe,” I took one lira — so I turned it into a Lebanese context.

I found old magazines that speak about weddings with extremely dramatic subject lines like “into the abyss,” and I translated the titles and I scanned them and also exhibited them, so it was quite funny. I like to have some fun. I am a bit sarcastic sometimes, and ironic. It was a success, and I really liked working on it. And I did another self-portrait project, which I won the Boghossian Foundation Prize with. It’s called Seules (the French feminine plural) and I photographed myself with myself, because I am always alone and I like it.