Der klügste Mensch im Facebook (The smartest Guy on Facebook) is from Manbij, a small town in the Syrian province of Aleppo, and worked as a blacksmith and welder before he became an artist with words.
Influenced by the „Arab Spring“, when protests also began spreading in Syria, Aboud Saeed decided to start his personal revolution on Facebook, choosing the digital network as its medium and declaring his wall as a freed zone.
Between bomb attacks and power cuts he now posts anecdotes, aphorisms and commentaries on a daily basis, using his poetic and radical language to create literature in the format of status updates. He writes about the brutality of war and the banality of his everyday life which seems to just go on: his job, his friends, the women that don’t return calls. His bitter sense of humour and his precise observations of the absurdities of everyday life not only provide personal insights into the situation of civil war but also offer a brilliant analysis of the social dynamics in the translocal cyborg age.
In 2013 his book, The smartest Guy on Facebook. Status Updates from Syria, was published in German, English and Spanish, probably as the first work in literary history to be composed solely of status updates, including dates, times and the number of likes.
Director Karim Chérif now brings this work onto the stage as an experimental contemplation of the globalised coexistence of everyday life and extreme situations and examines the meaning of self-representation in the digital space as a survival strategy.
I will write down everything I am thinking at this moment, about the void that has turned me into a pseudo poet. ‒ Aboud Saeed, 30 December 2011, 00:07 am ‒ 34 likes