The Lebanese Rocket Society with introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Khalil Joreige.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

February 20 2016, the Harvard Film Archive screened The Lebanese Rocket Society. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Khalil Joreige.

David Pendleton  0:20  

Good evening, everyone. I'm David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to a very special evening. We'll be closing a retrospective this evening with a filmmaker in person. We'll be closing the program with a bang—or boom perhaps is more appropriate.

First of all, before I say a few words of introduction, before I introduce the filmmaker, I just want to ask you remind you to turn off any device that you have on your person that might make noise, might shed light while the house lights are down, while the film is running, for the pleasure and concentration of those around you.

Starting last weekend and ending tonight, we've presented a number of the films of the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. They have been working as collaborators and as partners for many years now, working both in the art world and in the cinema world. And I think, doing a fine job of bridging those worlds. We more and more see filmmakers looking to the art world to help with funding—artists interested in working with the moving image. But when often gets the sense with a lot of these artists that one side, one wing or the other comes first, that one wing is sort of an outgrowth of the original impulse. But it really seems to me that Joanna and Khalil, their gallery work stands on its own, and same with the film work. One thing that we find in both cases is a lot of rigor in terms of interrogating the medium that they're working in. We also see a lot of crossover in terms of themes and interests. And you yourselves have the opportunity to compare right now because Hadjithomas and Joreige have their first museum show here in the US—right here in Cambridge—just down the road at MIT, the MIT List Center. There's an installation called I Must First Apologize that opened officially to the public yesterday and is on view until April 17th. So I encourage you all to go down there and see it. It was a really major addition to their work and complimented the experience of having watched their films over the last few weeks, to a great extent.

A lot of their early work grew out of their experiences and the national trauma of the various civil wars and incursions in Lebanon. And this work is moving on in a different direction. And an interesting way, I think ,so is this film. Their most recent feature film is a documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society. I won't say too much about it. It's their most accessible film as well, while at the same time raising a number of really interesting questions about the use of the archives, the uses of history, questions of reimagining various identities, reclaiming lost narratives, and all of that stuff. There's a way in which a lot of the early work was often about mourning the past and this seems to have sort of announced a different relationship to the past—at least that's how I see it; we can see what Khalil says. Joana has returned to Paris—the two divide their time between Beirut and Paris—has returned to Paris for various professional and personal obligations. But we're very grateful to have Khalil here with us to represent the filmmaking team. I think that's all I'll say about the film for now. We will have a conversation afterwards, including your participation please in the form of questions and comments. But now, before we start the show, let's hear a little bit from Khalil Joreige.

[APPLAUSE]

Khalil Joreige  4:22  

Just a few words, because maybe some of you won't stay for the Q&A. And I would like to thank David and all his team because I felt very well in this place. There [are] places where there are kind of territories where you recognize yourself, and the question of territories is at the middle of our inquiry, meaning there [are] places where you feel at home. This film is part of a whole research being in art and cinema; it's a body of work by itself. It's maybe the first time we are intervening [in] art and film. And one of the most important things, it came after a whole body of work related to the 2006 war, and it was a moment where we were trying to find some reason to believe in the words, quoting Deleuze. And so it's also a tribute to dreamers. I will come back after, and hope you will like it. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  5:32  

And now, David Pendleton...

David Pendleton  5:35  

[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] ... particularly the end of which I find more moving every time I see it. actually, now that I've sort of absorbed the story. Although as I was telling you, maybe just to start the discussion, the thing that distinguishes a lot of your earlier films with Joana Hadjithomas is this mixture of fact and fiction so that in fact, the first time I saw this film, I saw it a festival without an introduction or anything, I hadn't even really read much about it. And I found myself wondering the whole time, How much of this was real? I thought, Oh, they went to a lot of trouble to reproduce all these photographs and hire these actors. And it was only by the end of the movie that I convinced myself that it was a true story.

I'm wondering hat happened with that impulse to mix fact and fiction? It seems like it's present in this film, maybe in other ways. I wondered if you think about this film as containing fiction, for instance…?

Khalil Joreige  6:32  

Actually, the reason why we decided to make it as a film, even as a quite linear narrative, because [when we started] our research, everybody was saying, “No, no, this is a joke. This is a complete fiction.” So it was really problematic for us, because usually, we try to show a certain complexity. And we try to deconstruct certain narratives. But here we have to respect some of the documents that we had [found]. We, the people who want to tell a story. So little by little, we decided that no, we should do it maybe in the most traditional way. But at the same time, it was always dealing with this idea that it could be a fiction. It's still appearing for a lot of people as a fiction, as something impossible. And it's linked to a lot of our practice, even in the exhibitions that [we] are presenting at the List, like how a story can appear efficient, how you can believe in a narrative, how you can believe in an image being in Je veux voir, or where you have a body of fiction that would create some reality or here, true events that are appearing like a fiction or [?scans that are becoming efficient?].

David Pendleton  8:03  

At the same time, there is a link to some of your earlier work in that we see the two of you. There is a sense of which the process is exposed in the film, you know, just in Je veux voir, we see you making the film, here we see you doing the research, going to meet the people building the rockets, etc. So there is a tie to some of the earlier work.

Khalil Joreige  8:23  

Actually, for most of the people that are present here, they escaped a film that would be closer to our aesthetic, because for nearly a year—a complete year—we shot a completely different film, meaning a film about the absence of images. We were making very slow, traveling, very melancholic shots, about evoking certain images that we were not finding. And suddenly, we found everything.

And it's not a posture in our aesthetic, meaning that we don't want to have this aesthetic just because we want to make a mystification of the story. When we found the elements, we were able to have all the story. So, “Okay!” When we found everything in Tampa—this is what was very surprising like, more than two years after we started our research, we had all the elements and because [we] worked a lot with archives like this, as soon as you start to know where to look, you start to find things. When you have the names, you start to find more and more and more and little by little, we had the complete story. So for the first time in our life, we had the story, a history. And we had to do it in a much more traditional way.

David Pendleton  9:50  

Are there questions in the audience? I’ll go ahead and throw it open before I go on with other questions. We've just sort of started to scratch the surface but I thought I would offer.

Here's a question down here. Just wait, we'll bring a microphone down to you so that we can all hear, if you don't mind.

Audience 1 10:07  

Thank you very much. A very, very fascinating movie. And I'm curious as to– You see a couple of words in the credits at the end, but how did you both hear about the story, and in what way was it told to you?

Khalil Joreige  10:21  

The first time it was Joana’s sister. She was making at that time, a CD-rom—imagine how old it was—about the history of Lebanon. And she came with this– She found it in the newspaper. And she came, “Did you know that we had a project?” [We considered] it was a joke. And we started to scratch a little bit. You know, we have a lot of smaller stories that we kept secret till it was evolving. So we went to the Haigazian first, there was not a lot of things. And then we found this stamp that you can buy at the airport, actually, at 5000 pounds, which is nearly a dollar and a half. And then we—actually at that time we made a book called Vacants, where we found four images, because on the stamp there was a drawing. So we can always exaggerate a drawing. We can imagine it's a huge one with the moon and... but a photo will give us a sense of the dimension of the rocket. It was much more important than what we were imagining. And this is how we start to work on this project. So it's a very long process. Very, very long.

David Pendleton  11:46  

Other questions? I wanted to ask you... I'm going to ask you a question about research—sort of a multi-part question. You can answer in whatever order. First of all, I'm interested in how you became a filmmaker and an artist, because research is an important part of your process, but then I know that you started with a more traditional academic formation where this idea that the archive and research would naturally have been–

Khalil Joreige 12:17  

Yeah, but we were not very interested in the archive for a long time, because we were much more dealing with the notion of how we can live our present in Lebanon. Most of our films are happening in one day, like A Perfect Day, Ashes, Rounds—most of the films—Khiam, Open the Door... Because we were interested in the states that we are living, meaning that there's a kind of condensation of... Condensation is not the right word, I imagine.

David Pendleton

“Condensing,” you could say.

Khalil Joreige  13:03  

Yeah, of all the different times...

David Pendleton

Like past, present, future...

Khalil Joreige  13:04  

And this difficulty of living a present. This is why we call it a “historical presence” especially in A Perfect Day where we have this guy always in the same position.

David Pendleton  13:16  

Who's kind of a zombie. The son in the film we were talking about last night, he was kind of a zombie.

Khalil Joreige  13:21  

And then when we start to scratch on this story, we found that there was like a rupture in the conception even of our history. Meaning that after a break, we were facing an impossibility of projecting ourselves into it. So one of the questions that is related to why as we start to do films is that we were always having some problem in how can we position ourselves? What kind of images we can relate to, what kind of images we can believe in. When we started on this project, it was not just for us a project about the past, it was also how we can invoke a past to be able to articulate, to reactivate something in the present. So the second part about the art project became something very important for us. It was also a kind of invoking a past as a tribute to those dreamers and how the word dreamers changed. And then we realized that if we had the past and we are living at present, there was something quite bizarre that in the Arabic world, there's a real lack of science fiction, of possibility of projecting ourselves, so we started to dream about a uchronia. A uchronie.

David Pendleton  14:59  

A utopia. It's sort of a no place. This is a uchronia, which is sort of a “no time,” what you are saying. Or “outside.”

Khalil Joreige  15:08  

From the beginning of the project, we were referring to animation, because at the beginning it was to compensate for the lack of documents. And then when we had all the documents, we came to see the animator—but this is an old kind of animation. It's not computer, it's really drawing—and say, “Oh, sorry, but our collaboration will end at this point.” [LAUGHS] And then we said, “No, no, no, we should try to imagine if this project didn't stop, what it [would] be.” And it generates really a fascinating relation in Lebanon, because suddenly this topic about anticipation, projecting ourselves in a future, started to move a lot of people. There is nearly no science fiction in the Arabic world. And it pushed us to think why? Why we were not able to project ourselves? And this is one perspective—I'm sure it's not the only one, but I'm sure that also the rupture of ‘67... and the ways that we were not able anymore to consider ourselves into a contemporary place, sharing a same interest, research, but being against modernity and things like this, was part of this problem.

David Pendleton 16:34  

Yes, there's a question. Two questions. Let's go to this gentleman's because I saw him first, and then we’ll go to you.

Audience 1  16:41  

Thank you, Khalil, for this movie. I'm one of these Lebanese that were not aware of this Lebanese Rocket Society. And I was thinking about the history impact. So as you know, when we study history, we start with the Phoenicians and the letter. And don't you think this is something as important as what we used to study in history? And we all know that our history books stop at maybe 1946 with the French and the Lebanese independence. Did you get some influence from all these politicians that maybe this kind of events can be put in our history books?

Khalil Joreige  17:16  

I have no influence on politicians. [LAUGHTER] But of course, the issue of the writing of our history is at the core of a lot of artistic practices in Lebanon. Because we were having so much issue in the writing of history in the way that we have to deal with—even in the ways that we want to chronicle our contemporary history—it was also an issue of representations. This is why artists start to work on these topics. It's not because we had nothing else to do. It's just because Okay, what kind of story can we share together, what kind of images we can share.

This film had, of course, some effect in Lebanon, especially in the younger generation. And after a lot of small stories reappeared– When we started, [there were] really no documents at all. And after, little by little other stories started to be revealed, to get out of these latent and forgotten places. We found a ticket of alyansib, meaning a lottery [ticket] with a rocket on it. So the guy kept it, even if it was not… he didn't win anything. You see a lot of small stories, and after a lot of [people] start to come to us saying, you know, “My father is the one who invented the laser. You should do a film on him,” and another one about the fastest gun in the world. It is made by an Armenian guy in Lebanon, so if I can make a film on him. It's not about that. I'm not going to continue on that track, even if it's interesting. But also, I think this is a small event in the history of Lebanon. And even it's not about Lebanon. What I like in this project is that if you think about it, most of the people involved in it are not Lebanese. This is also something that allowed us to escape the problem of national representation. It is called The Lebanese Rocket Society as a tribute to what Lebanon allowed them to do at the moment.

David Pendleton  19:38  

And also the title appears in English, I notice, as opposed to in Arabic like on the credits and everything.

Khalil Joreige  19:44  

Yeah, they [INAUDIBLE] people wouldn’t understand [INAUDIBLE]

So this issue about national project is also something that I try always to escape. So I don't want to become the person who would write one of the books of history, but I'm very happy that this story is now known and shared a little bit more. It's even you know, now the rockets that are still in front of the Haigazian, young people come and say, “No, it's here for… It's been like 50 years that it's here.” [LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  20:28  

So your project has changed the past, then!

Khalil Joreige 20:31  

It's rewriting the past! [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton 20:33  

Yes, there was a gentleman right there. Raise your hand, so that... Okay, look to your other side Jeremy's coming to you.

Audience 2 20:44  

Hi. There was a mention of [UNKNOWN] saying that people in the south and the north, faraway, objected to the project? Did you have a look at any of the diplomatic archives... [INAUDIBLE]

Khalil Joreige  21:02  

As you can see, the state of archive is quite a mess in Lebanon, so…

Audience 2 

I mean, American, British, French…

Khalil Joreige 

But we managed to find– They know who asked and we know that it's De Gaulle who asked to stop the project. We know that it's also the Americans. What is quite weird that we found that the National Assembly in Japan was really worried and made a special session on the Lebanese project. And this is, of course, our own interpretation. I think that partly when they hit Cyprus, it was done on purpose. We exist. It’s a small spot, Cyprus, in the middle of an ocean, so you can target it wherever you want. Like this, being so precise…. But of course, this is just my own interpretation.

Audience 3  22:15  

Thank you. That's a fascinating movie. How did the Armenian team, the Haigazian team react to the Lebanese army revelations that they actually intended it for military purposes? Did you get any feedback?

Khalil Joreige 22:32  

When we launched the film in Toronto, where you saw it, Manoug Manougian came from Tampa. And suddenly he heard his friend saying that “No, no, it was, in my mind and in the mind of the army military project.” So we invited him for the launching in Lebanon. And he was really going to argue with his friend but his friend died before. So it’s also something unresolved. For him, actually, probably... Okay, General Wehbe is saying this after fifteen years in the Army. Maybe, when he started the project, and he was just a small [?general?], he was not so convinced that it was a military project. And of course, the military will say, “We know what we want.” And I think that at the moment, there is a research—and this is something very common in a lot of places, even [?noble?]—you can always produce something for research and then it can be taken for bad reasons. The Internet would, I think, know more than me.

I noticed that some people recognize certain sounds related to the Golden Record, like the first artificial voices... Because at the end, what you hear are the real sounds of the Golden Record, and there’s a woman saying “Bonjours tout le monde!” is how the Americans are imagining that French should address aliens.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  24:29  

Other questions?

I mean, going back to this question of working with the archive, though, and working with an incomplete archive, it seems like in your earlier work, you work on that subject, the fact that the archive is incomplete or that these past materials had been destroyed or are missing. I'm thinking of like Khiamm 2000 – 2007, where the place itself has been destroyed. The objects that were inside, some of them have been saved, some of them have been destroyed. Here, it seems like it's more a matter of complementing the archive or adding to the archive instead of sseeing the archive as as incomplete, it's more about trying to supplement it, it seems to me. It's a very different impulse, and I'm wondering if that represents a certain shift, in terms of what you're saying before about looking for images and a need to believe, a shift towards a certain optimism or desire to be sort of productive in this field.

Khalil Joreige  25:34  

We had a lot of issues with archives, especially– Okay I'm gonna... Please, Hashem and [UNKNOWN] here…. A lot of our generation had to deal with the archive because it was a way of using certain tools to be able to write a history. So we were trying to think and make certain critiques to those artifacts to those elements, how we are contextualizing each of these documents. The relation between documents, a discourse on the documents, the use of the documents was at the heart of a lot of practice of Walid Raad—[his show is] opening in a few days at the–

David Pendleton

The ICA.

Khalil Joreige

–the ICA—[and] a whole generation of artists. In this film, we decided to work in a different way. Not anymore creating our words where we can put our fiction towards the document, but really study a document, meaning, okay, let's do a work, a serious work, a serious study where we have to deal with sociology, with how we have to deal with the document and things like this. It was for us another attempt, probably because we were facing suddenly a huge amount of [UNKNOWN] life. And most of the people that we were shooting were dying. So it's a weird sensation that... We feel a little bit more responsible about how we can tell their story. Like the all the photographers. It's very sad. It's [as] if they were waiting till they [told] the story. Strange.

David Pendleton  27:43  

Other questions?

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Khalil Joreige  27:45  

No, this came from the artwork. It was much more easy than to finance a film.

David Pendleton 27:58  

The question was how the sculpture was financed.

Khalil Joreige  28:01  

It’s part of the project. So it came from the beginning. It was commissioned for a biennal in Sharjah. And it was put in front of the museum. And it's in the Biennal and in front of the museum and in front of this university. It's in this [UNKNOWN] territory that these kind of objects are protected from a misunderstanding. Meaning that here it appeared as a joke to take it on the street. It was such a hell to organize. We didn't put everything in it because like the army came 20 times to the factory to be sure that it was still empty. They were all asking, “Why are you doing this? Why are you not dismantling it and taking it? It would be easier, cheaper and everything,” but it was for us really because we consider the power of cinema exactly like in I Want to See when we are taking Catherine Deneuve at the border. It's because we believe in the power of this medium, that things can be done. And it's because it is a sculpture and not a scientist's project, that we can transport it. This is why I introduced before the film I said, “It's about a question of territories.” There are certain territories where we can exist. And we are assisting to a shrinking of these territories. We are seeing more and more a binary world: Are you with or against? Can you do this or you can't? It's very difficult for us to continue if you're not hoping that at least in certain worlds, these kinds of things are possible.

David Pendleton  30:03  

That's related to one way in which I understand this film as a political film. Because you're looking at the ways in which the idea of productivity or creation within the art world or the cinema world can have these ramifications—real social and political ramifications—outside of the world of art and of cinema.

Khalil Joreige  30:25  

Yeah, really, I consider that there's certain setups in the art world that can allow us to negotiate in realities. When you do a film, and you decide not to give the scenario, to wait for this encounter, it's exactly the same kind of things when you are fighting [in] a society where you want to at least stop the shrinking of this territory and negotiate with the different power to be able to still exist in these places.

David Pendleton  31:00  

But it reminds me of another way in which cinema is sometimes said to be political, related to Deleuze, since we're both fans of Deleuze’s cinema books. The other favorite quote is, you know, he talks about political cinema is that cinema that's where a people must be invented, that there's a certain political cinema that attempts to call a community or a people into being. And I feel like this film is also harking back to memories of Pan Arabism and looking at ways in which maybe Arabness could be rethought today, if I'm not mistaken. Or is that too tribal?

Khalil Joreige  31:41  

I'm not a nostalgic person at all. So I'm not saying that we should go back to a kind of– I think even that in the Pan Arabism ideology, there was something very… it was maybe really focusing on a military project and this is where it fails. But there is nevertheless, a kind of dynamic. This is why it was very weird when we were editing and seeing all what was happening in the region. At least there's a will [to] change, even [if] it's after it went even worse, but at least it is not a system that is naturalized. It is not something that we have always to accept, meaning we can negotiate, we can fight against it. So for us, it was really why we call it a tribute to dreamers, because we noticed that dreamers were in the 60s, people who want to change the world. Little by little, the meaning changed. And now it's people who are outside the world, which is bizarre. So it's a tribute to [UNKNOWN], so people who want to change the world.

David Pendleton  33:05  

Well, and even in an American context, actually, I mean, harkening back to this moment in the 1960s, when rocket science was about discovery, and about excitement and about a certain optimism or vision of the future, as opposed to what it's about now, which is death and destruction. I think even for an American audience, there's there's a way in which it's useful, I think, to go back and reappropriate that past.

Khalil Joreige  33:32  

Yeah, or maybe the goal changed, maybe space [is] not anymore that kind of dream. And today, it would be DNA or other things, but there's new research, which was amazing in the 60s, when we started to study it. Every week, there was a very important discovery, invention that was on the front pages of the newspaper. So space was really something that was challenging people and a kind of emulation. And I think that in this town, there's a lot of other emulation, even if it's not space, but this sensation that we are all searching somewhere is– Manoug said it. Even with his small tools, his small budget, he was having the sensation that he was contemporary [with] NASA. I am feeling contemporary of a lot of filmmakers that have much bigger budgets than me or even sometimes smaller. Smaller, there's less and– [DAVID AND KHALIL LAUGH]

David Pendleton  34:50  

Right, there aren’t many of those.

Khalil Joreige 34:52  

But it's this conception about time is something very important because the territory is not any more a geography being national, like in Lebanon or in the US, but it's contemporary, meaning sharing a same time. And this is a notion of territory that is very important and Manoug is saying it in a way.

David Pendleton  35:19  

Mmm hmm. That’s beautiful.

Are there other questions in the audience? Now we've got a couple. Down here and then back there.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

David Pendleton 35:30  

“Why didn't you paint the cedar on the rocket?”

Khalil Joreige

Because if you paint it today, it would become a national symbol. Everybody's fighting for the flag today, on every side. So for me, it's more like having a kind of a screen, a widescreen, a possibility of projection. If you make it today like it was, with a flag, it can appear a little bit too much as a national project or monument today. So the notion of monument for me is very complex, because who are making the monuments in Lebanon? There is this topic in the film. If you noticed, most of the monuments little by little are not shared. Or they're being appropriated by the army. Like Arman’s sculpture, it was in the public space and now today it is in the defense ministry. So it's very weird for us. So the notion of monument by itself is something very problematic.

David Pendleton  36:48  

But this reminds me of something you mentioned the other night. That rock out in the ocean that's so important in all of your films...

Khalil Joreige 

Roauché

David Pendleton

The Roauché. What's happening to it? You made reference to it… you were saying it was disappearing or…?

Khalil Joreige   37:01  

Not the Roauché by itself, but the region around it, it's called Dalieh is today under… There’s a Rem Koolhaas project on it.

David Pendleton

Ohhh…

Khalil Joreige

We like Rem Koolhaas, but if he can do it somewhere else, it would be better.

David Pendleton  37:23  

You mean like on the walkway right there?

Khalil Joreige  37:26  

Yeah, right there. A place where it was not supposed to be built two months ago.

David Pendleton  37:32  

I'm sorry, there was a gentleman who had his– Oh, he's leaving! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to drive you away. I was just gonna interject one thing. Would you still like to ask?

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE COMMENT]

David Pendleton  37:46  

Okay, sorry… Yes?

Audience 4  37:55  

I'd like to talk about rockets for a second. As you've shown in the movie, the relationship between the individual scientist and the state is a tortured one, especially in rocketry. And for me, it's interesting that in this country, the theory and practice of the modern rocket engine was developed by Robert Goddard back in the 1920s. He was seen as a joke at the time; he was not taken seriously, he was a dilettante. As a matter of fact, you can find archival pictures of his first rocket launchers that are exactly like the farm pictures with the half-metre rocket and the, you know, bushes catching fire and so forth. Of course, today, there’s a space center named after him, but back then he was a joke. And it might be a small consolation for Manoug Manougian, but I was curious, did you ask him about what actually triggered his early interest, his passion, his obsession? He dedicated his energies to this. What was the endgame for him? What was the actual dream?

Khalil Joreige  39:19  

It was strange, because Manoug from the beginning, he said that he was dreaming [of producing] rockets since he was in Jerusalem, like since he was twelve years old. And now that he's eighty, he’s still teaching in Tampa, and a group of students came like, four years ago and asked him if they can do a rocket with him. And he said, “But I did this project with my students in Lebanon fifty years ago.” And he started to think and then he said, “Okay, but we will not use any chemical propellant.” And they launched their rocket three years ago. So nearly a year after we started this project, meaning that this guy is still dreaming of building rockets. It can be an obsession, but it's not– He's a researcher. He did something with [UNKNOWN], something like this. I'm not a specialist, but it's weird how, like sixty years of research in rocketry. And he’s eighty years, meaning he's still continuing and dreaming of contributing to this research. And you can find it, it's in the newspaper. And they launched two rockets, actually now. They launched another one, I think, last year. He says that now NASA is interested in this project. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  41:10  

Are there other questions? Well, then perhaps, in closing, I'd like to thank the MIT List Center, which did a lot of work to bring Khalil and Joana here to coincide with these events, especially the Henriette Huldisch. And I'd like to thank Khalil and Joana for coming. Do you want to say anything about future projects that you're working on? Or we should– It's been a nice discussion, we'll wrap it up like that. Thank you very much, Khalil, give our best to Joanna. And thanks to you.

[APPLAUSE]