Imagining Imminent Erasure in Beirut This paper argues that the urban imaginary of contemporary Beirut is haunted by imminent erasure due to recurrent violence. Central to the discussion is the Ouzai landfill, where the debris of bombed out buildings of Southern Beirut was disposed of after the 2006 war. A comparative analysis of two artistic responses to the site demonstrates that the shock of the 2006 destruction produced a renewed awareness of the precariousness of the city as a whole. In a sequence near the end of the feature length road movie Je veux voir (Hadjithomas and Joreige, 2006), one of the main characters, Rabih Mroué, switches to interior monologue when driving past the landfill - apparently unable to convey directly to his French visitor, Catherine Deneuve, his sense of “a town that had to be discarded, hidden, buried under the sea.” The sequence ends with images of the sea rolling ashore, followed by a drive through a long tunnel. In the tunnel, Mroué resumes “Sure, we’ll start all over again.” The imagery and narrative of the sequence thus position the fear for Beirut’s potential erasure within the traditional narrative of a city that was destroyed and rebuild seven times since ancient history. In the art magazine Peeping Tom, visual artist Rayyane Tabet reproduced a front page of the New York Times showing endless lines of trucks carrying rubble to the Ouzai landfill. The contribution stated “If I were to write a text on sculpture, it would probably begin with this image.” This statement should be viewed in light of Tabet’s own works. Many revolve around an awareness that everything can be torn down, and that the only thing permanent is a sense of being on the verge of experiencing the unexpected. Rather than a cyclical conception of time, he approaches imminent erasure as a permanent condition that is close to what has been theorized as precarity (For example Puar, 2012; Butler, 2004; Berardi, 2009). In conclusion, contemporary Beirut is imagined as a city that does not last, and can be violently wiped out. The imminence of erasure is traditionally conceived of as a stage in a mythical cycle of death and rebirth, but some of the younger generation interpret it as a permanent condition not unlike what has been theorized elsewhere as precarity.