“Both the questions and the answers, from and with images, but also from and with the word and the body, both of whose presence is strongly felt in Mroué’s work and whose reconsideration has become extremely necessary in today’s context, seem to be of vital importance for forming a thought about the contemporary image.”

PABLO MARTINEZ*

In the beginning, images mean everything. They are durable. Spacious.

But dreams congeal, turn into form and disappointment.

No image can carry the sky anymore. Clouds seen from a plane:

Only vapor cutting across the view. The crane is only a bird.

Even communism, that is, the ultimate image, is always renewed.

For it is washed again and again in blood – everyday life

Hands it out like small change; blackened, sweat running down and blinding the eyes.

Great poems are wrecks, like bodies long loved, but No longer needed,

borders finite, the route of our insatiable species

Laments between their lines, their raptures

built on the bones of workers

For the beautiful means the possible end of horror.

—Heiner Müller, Images [original title: Bilder], 1955

A poem about images in which images offer no comfort strikes me as a good way to begin this text. Images written for a work that begins with images positioned beyond representation. Words about images that confirm absence, images that no longer want to carry the sky, images that emerge from the other side of horror. Just like the ones that make up the work of Rabih Mroué, which explains the nature of images to us by showing it. The heartbeat of images, the flow of their blood, the way they shoot. Because images shoot, too. They leave their marks on the retina; they hurt, they caress. They open new wounds in old scars. This is nothing new: the agony of the image.

However, not all images behave in the same way; not all of them are alike. Not all of them play the same role in history. At the 2011 conference Historias que nose han escrito [Stories That Have Never Been Written], Rabih Mroué presented his “non-academic lecture” The Inhabitants of Images at CA2M. The title alone is enough to tell us about the relationship Mroué establishes with images.