Roy Dib’s work across image, performance, and film moves between the archival and the fictional to navigate personal stories in direct relation to broader conditions of politics and place. Mondial 2010 (2014) follows the impossible journey of a couple from Beirut to Ramallah; a trajectory between two proximate cities ruptured by Israeli occupation. Composed of video footage filmed with a hand-held camera by various friends of the filmmaker, the film takes the form of a travelogue across geographies where movement is blocked, barred, and surveilled. Instead, the camera becomes a vessel that traverses imposed borders and creates possibility for togetherness. While the audience never sees the couple on screen, they follow their conversations as they chat, have arguments, and negotiate the boundaries of living out their gay relationship. Intertwined with the intimate exchange of the two men, the video makes visible everyday life in Ramallah and the conditions of violence and counter-resistance that mark it: the couple encounters friends, moves through familiar sites, and watches the World Cup or mondial, functioning here as a marker of the absurdity of globalization in a context where neighbouring places are severed by extensive infrastructures of occupation. At another moment, they record Palestinian demonstrators as they confront Israeli occupation soldiers and checkpoints whilst settlements loom across the landscape. As one of the men contends with the city, he says: ‘Maybe it should have remained the city I wanted to visit, but never did’, capturing perhaps the discomfort of Ramallah’s uncanny familiarity yet imposed distance from Beirut. Shifting between the scales of the personal and the political, the video is an exploration of intimacy and its geopolitical stakes.

Work in the exhibition: Mondial 2010 (2014), 1-channel video, 19 30". Courtesy of the artist