Rabih Mroué’s non-academic lectures subvert the conventional format of a lecture through the lens of performance, shifting from presentation to representation, from reality to imagination, and deliberately blurring the nature of the discourse he brings to the stage — at once authoritative and objective.
In Make me stop smoking, Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clipping and eyewitness reposts, that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations.
In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archive documents as much as he negotiates the validity of the reconstruction “reality”. What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representation?
Make me stop smoking is part of Rabih Mroué’s Non-academic lectures series, which also includes Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane, presented at Short Theatre 2025 on September 12.
Mroué also performs in A little bit of the moon, alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, on September 8 and 9.
Rabih Mroué born in Beirut and lives in Berlin, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. Rooted in theatre, his work includes videos and installation art. In 1990 he began putting on his own plays, performances, and videos. Continuously searching for an alternative and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theatre art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and its relationship with the other art-mediums and performing practiced. He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York). He is also a co-founder and a board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin since 2013-2014. He has been working as theatre director at Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich) from 2015 to 2019.He has performed and exhibited internationally including dOCUMENTA (13) – Kassel, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – Madrid, The ICP Triennial and MoMa – New York , Centre Pompidou – Paris, SALT – Istanbul, among others…
produced by Ashkal Alwan (Beirut)
commissioned by Akram Zaatari, 2006
ph. Rabih Mroué