‘Permanent Trespass’: Looking Beyond the American Century

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 248, ‘Disobedience’

Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad's performance Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & The American Century) (2021–ongoing) begins with imminent liquidation. ‘Everything must go!’, Saad utters to Grozdanić. She is holding a copy of the script, but she’s not reading it. Her delivery is unaffected; like the sparsely decorated interior that surrounds them, it’s a bit empty. Some chairs and tables are arranged in quadrants, a few draped in white cloth; flowers with long stems lean in scattered vases. The two artists are playing travelling eulogists, who re-encounter one another at an estate sale somewhere on the ‘old continent’. They’ve been hired to mourn the death of something that lacks a proper name; jetlagged, they’ve arrived onto the funereal ground of this collapsing epoch. 

Across six acts, and the projection of a ‘cinepoem’ above the stage, Grozdanić and Saad slip in and out of conversation about how to mourn the dead whom a history of ‘progress’ aims to obliterate. This is the atrocious end of the ‘American Century’, that ‘open faucet / of phosphorus / a screen and sky of skin and asphalt’ that continues to scorch the earth – from Sarajevo to Daraa, from Kabul to Gaza – in the name of imperial ambitions. Their script counterposes various registers of the dialogic form, unspooling the hyper-professionalized gambit with which the two eulogists begin. Oneiric recollections assume a faux didacticism, while stories of ideological failure – such as Susan Sontag’s 1993 staging of Waiting for Godot (1952) in Sarajevo, during her campaign for American intervention in Bosnia – trickle out as flatfooted prattle. 

In one act, titled ‘Anti-Historical Punk’, personal anecdotes – for instance of Saad’s childhood growing up in a militantly anti-Zionist family at the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon (1982–2000) – are told alongside fragments about how popular media administers a rhetoric of collective grieving onto its publics: cue the 1998 music video for ‘The Arab Dream’, which played across the Arab world during the Second Intifada; cue daily reportage about the International Criminal Court’s proceedings at The Hague; cue an end-of-year playlist by Barack Obama. As these moments aggregate, they ironize the ill-defined mixtapes of mourning that the eulogists’ slivers of memory implicitly critique. In another act, ‘Messianic Free Association’, Grozdanić’s character details meeting in a dream the ghost of the Jewish-German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. He introduces his idea, from The Principle of Hope (1954–59), of the novum, a sense of utopic future so convincing that it ‘come[s] with sweeping shifts in consciousness’, breaking from the conditions of the present to inaugurate a system of belief that resembles hope.

Initially commissioned as a live performance at ‘This Is Not Lebanon’ – a 2021 visual arts festival in Germany, where Grozdanić and Saad live, at which artists were invited to present works about Beirut after the city’s port explosion in 2020 – Permanent Trespass has come to absorb the multitemporal effort of conceiving the hope that Bloch espouses. An October 2024 iteration at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York, incorporated a new score and a filmic adaptation of the work, which includes a dense montage of original and found material. Both elements punctuate the acts, but the lo-fi archival footage presented in the latter unwittingly reverberates against the present tense in which Grozdanić and Saad perform. One sequence depicts the interior of Sarajevo’s City Hall, where we see the full-scale reconstruction of the courthouse from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and where ersatz bullet shells litter the floor, like a freeze-frame of the siege.

Amid the scenes, we see a blue sky full of white kites, a symbol of solidarity with Palestinian life, and a sea of schoolchildren in Gaza singing an ode to their homeland. Grozdanić and Saad’s film shows no more or less than what we witness every day: US-manufactured bombs detonated by Israeli occupying forces; the blueprints of tacky beach homes designed by settlers who want to make the shoreline of Gaza look like a resort; international courts failing to stop what human-rights experts around the world have repeatedly called a genocide. There’s no lag to history’s unfolding. Remembering it should be everybody’s job.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 248 with the headline ‘A Sense of Utopia’

^{Main image: Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad, Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) (detail), 2024, Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, New York. Courtesy: the artists and EMPAC; photograph: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC}