Event overview
Sorry this event has been cancelled due to building closure (burst water main). Will be rescheduled! Beirut, fascinating urban palimpsest, site of multiple memory cultures...
Beirut, Lebanon: Mandate era villas juxtapose enormous tower blocks, the rebuilt souks resemble a Gulf state airport while in the southern suburbs, street names are absent and navigated by a cartographic memory often of things which no longer exist.
Underlying traces are perpetually revealed on the urban surface. The city as text forms a register of indexical figures in search of some form of organisation, curation or classification. This memory machine produces, occludes, resists, dialogues with and defies discursive constructions. An often schizophrenic mixture of love and hatred.
The urban fabric produces even as it directs the city subject’s trajectory à la Baudelaire. Beirut is a complicated case - nodal, where the Occident encounters the Orient; ‘postwar’, but with an only uneasy peace.
I want to address where unclaimed experiences are located, how belated representations of the trauma of the civil war are expressed; how cultural production is staged within the city, what are the discursive constructions that emerge from urban space and which are then transmuted into an aesthetic articulation.
Image: Rabiem22 flickr
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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9 Feb 2016 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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