Lebanese contemporary art has been centrally concerned with memory of the civil war, in particular the instability of memory resulting from both the psychological foreclosures generated by trauma and the political erasures engendered by a post-war condition of amnesty, impunity, and imposed silence. In the absence of institutionally sanctioned archives and histories, the artists of the jeel al-harb (“war generation”)—Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Rabih Mroué, and others born in the mid-to-late 1960s—have produced conceptual archives, videos, and performances that intertwine the personal and the political, mix fact with fiction, and document marginalized histories while questioning the epistemological and political grounds for producing any historical account. These artists have achieved international renown for their experiments with hybrid forms combining documentary and speculative modes that underscore the mediation of memory, history, and truth. Younger Lebanese artists, however, have sought to break away from the dominant thematic concerns and aesthetic approaches of this celebrated generation. Many of these artists, too young to remember the war, approach Lebanon’s past through its connections to related histories, from bygone moments of pan-Arabism to various social movements and political conflicts past and present, especially Syria’s uprising, war, and refugee crisis. This paper will focus on two such artists, Marwa Arsanios and Mounira al-Solh (both born 1978), whose work shares similar concerns and manifests in related forms, especially through the centrality of drawing to their videos and installations, and in their emphasis on embodiment, both in portraits they draw and the presence of their own bodies in their videos. I will examine works by Arsanios and Al-Solh by attending to their mediations of regional history through the act of drawing and their complex relation to the act of witnessing violence. At a biographical level, their “witnessing” has been more indirect than that of their artistic predecessors; and yet it takes more embodied forms, a fact which stems in part from their feminist projects of narrating the radical potential of foreclosed histories differently. Drawing from recent literature in media and cultural studies, I will argue that animation—literally, drawing figures in motion, but at another level, imbuing history with vital forces, embodying social processes, interrupting the field of politics with laughter and levity—is a form and a process of opening up potential histories that have been repressed by the civil war and the erasures it produced, suggesting lines of flight from the critical foreclosures thematized by the jeel al-harb.

Lebanon’s pre-civil war ethos is, in popular culture, nostalgically referenced as a site of decadent highlife and unrestrained capital endeavor. The adage of “Beirut: Paris of the Middle East” serves to position Lebanon’s geopolitical neighbors as its opposite and, following the official end of the country’s 15-year civil war, as a lofty goal in service to the country’s future reflective and external images. The adage of “Beirut: Paris of the Middle East” serves to position Lebanon’s geopolitical neighbors as its opposite and, following the official end of the country’s 15-year civil war, as a lofty goal in service to the country’s future reflective and external images. Faced with both the question of how to rehabilitate a fractured society and competitively enter into the cosmopolitan, geopolitical arena of nation-states, images of the country pre-war took on a new significance in providing an idealized image of not only the country’s past, but its potential future. By looking at the recent uptick in production of so-called popular “coffee table photography books”, this project seeks to consider the ways in which visual pre-war narratives are collected, circulated, and consumed. Given the multiplicity of narratives of, and claims to, the Lebanese state, this paper will take seriously the role of popular media-as-consumer-goods in grappling with and shaping historical narratives and present realities. What appeals to consumers about such books? Do such commodities work to draw a disparate nation—whose diaspora far outnumbers its residents—together, or does interacting with such visualizations of pre-war life fossilize a past that cannot be retrieved? Considering the process of production in its whole, I aim to study these commodities as the sum of each stage of their production, from sources and photo captions to final ownership of these books. With the dearth of official state narratives in mind, I also consider the role of the book-as-archive, and posit the following questions as the foundation of my research aims: how are these highly curated images naturalized in their place in a larger collection? Does ownership of such collections of photographs constitute a purchasable archive in which the individual is able to project herself into the ethos on offer? And, given the popularity of such books as gifts, what sorts of work do these mini-archives do to create, and elaborate on, postmemory as it is inherited between generations?

This paper is concerned with conversation aesthetics in post-war Lebanon, specifically with what I have been calling “impossible conversations.” How can different opinions, perspectives and memories co-exist without obliterating each other? Since 1943, the year of the country’s independence, Lebanon’s official history curriculum has hardly been updated. This absence, combined with the legacy of scattered historical conflicts, and an amnesty after the major 1975-1990 civil war (dates which are disputed) that absolved all political crimes, has engendered what some scholars have termed “historical amnesia.” In contrast to this absence of history, Lebanon has a lively political arena, with 100 active political parties, each re-writing a history that suits its party’s interests. All of these factors have led to a societal disaffection, an alienation of political and social others, and a dismissal of opposing or contrasting perspectives. In order to get at the question of conversation aesthetics, I will present “??? ???????” or “We Are History,” a polyphonic project I have developed, which resides online as well as in booths in public spaces across Lebanon. “We Are History” invites people to listen to automated montages of oral histories of people who have lived through 1943 to today presented as constructed conversations. This undertaking aims to provide a common discourse in order to have important conversations about what is missing, what can be agreed upon, and how to proceed next. These constructed conversations are built from monologues, contributed to the website. After these viewings, participants are then invited to share their own stories. Each newly contributed story is added to the archive, and tagged with its transcript which enables the interface to incorporate newly added video interviews into the pool concerning the event discussed, thereby changing the versions of conversations previously compiled. Conversation aesthetics is a concern for impossible conversations that are a result of three intertwined situations: years of disagreement, contradicting beliefs about the past and current conditions that prevent the occurrence of these conversations, thereby dubbed impossible. I use it to describe a computational approach to studying conversations in Lebanon around traumatic events, their meanings and the system of principles within which they operate, in order to get at a theory and practice of finding conversations where they do not exist, with a close examination of the conversation’s medium’s effect on the conversation and vice-versa.

What I highlight in this paper, and through demonstrating the digital interface, are how certain images/vistas/angles/views become iconic in the history of Lebanese tourism. Yet how might we consider the role of these images today? What is at stake in recirculating thousands of images through building a database to make them public? How does current nostalgia of the past reinscribe these images today? A View from the View is a digital project that explores visual ephemera of the tourism industry in Lebanon from 1900-1976 specifically through postcards. Given that postcards are a genre of photography, they largely run in parallel to developments of photographic practices of the region, and worldwide. This project emerges from larger ethnographic and historic questions (sensualities, sensibilities and affects) and the digital interface presents an interface to recirculate these metonyms of tourism. On the website, there are two iterations, Eddies and Reframing, as well as a fully downloadable database of all materials/metadata. Eddies is a GPS based interface that reconstructs views from postcards on a map – which renders an actual “field of vision.” Through a larger computational cycling these fields overlap and intersect making discernible, through GIS, types of views over time. Reframing is an attempt to break each image’s composition using computer vision and image processing (Matlab) to assess borders of elements – water to sky, sky to land, land to water. This raises questions of what might be viewed as appropriate “touristic” imagery in different eras. Through focusing on postcards, the significance of the interface is to explore what is at stake in moving beyond a flat/static catalog of imagery. It allows for new explorations, juxtapositions, and circulation of a specific genre of historical photographic images. The paper and demo of platform will also explore the creation of metadata and issues of materiality. It will also question what is gained and lost in reconsidering a contemporary audience, modes of (digital) distribution, and how these connect to issues of memory and nostalgia today in Lebanon.