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| Artworks by Tarek Chemaly |
"There's so much food on the table" exclaimed by Dutch friend as we sat in a restaurant next to the sea in Tyre. "That waiter is trying to trick you to order more than enough" asserted my Swedish friend, to whom I explained that the waiter - who knew me from way back yonder - was doing me a favor by mixing and matching the "best of" on the menu. That the Lebanese are generous and know how to throw a good table is beyond doubt, but the same affable and welcoming people can - in the blink of an eye - become the people who, war upon war, are capable of the atrocities we so often exonerate ourselves from as "a war of others" as the late Ghassan Tueni put it in his book . Thus obliterating us from the moral responsibility of our acts. The series is based on images of a table taken from a film shot in 1962 in the Cedars.
