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Excavating Beirut: a study of time and space in Ziad Abillama, Ilaria Lupo, and the Dictaphone Group

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Excavating Beirut: a study of time and space in Ziad Abillama, Ilaria Lupo, and the Dictaphone Group

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Excavating Beirut: a study of time and space in Ziad Abillama, Ilaria Lupo, and the
Dictaphone Group

By Sasha Ussef

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Roski School of Art and Design
University of Southern California

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Copyright 2014 Sasha Ussef

ii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mother, Alexandra for her love. My appreciation to my family, friends,
and community everyday for the endless support and opportunities for conversation.

I would like to thank the following for their academic support and influences.

98 Weeks Research Project
Ashkal Alwan –The Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts
Rhea Anastas
Irene Tsatsos
Ruth Wallach
Noura Wedell
M.A. Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere 2014 Cohort

But like the falling
or fallen tyrants
everywhere are
being forced
to discover,
a tyrant
called
love
is

coming.

Brian Kuan Wood

iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………...ii
List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………iv
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………..v

Part One ١۱ | Travels and Excavation
Introduction –Landing and Disenchantment ……………………………………………………..1
Studying Time, Space, & Vertical Axis Excavation ……………………………………………. 6
Encounters
Project –X-Apartments, Home Works 6 …………………………………………………11
Space –Ashkal Alwan –The Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts ………...………15
Project –Ziad Abillama’s Where Are We?,1992 ……………………………………...…16
Space –98 Weeks Research Project …………………………………………………..…23
Project –Ilaria Lupo’s Readily Reversible, 2012………………………………………...24

Part Two ٢۲ | Time and Contiguity
Walid Sadek’s Archive ………………………………………………………………………….34
The exhibition Out of Beirut and accompanying symposium Public Time ……………………. 35
Globalization and Art Production ……………………………………………………………...38
Project –Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine, 2012 …………………………………………..42
Conclusion –Preliminary ambitions and Leaving ………………………………………………49

iv

List of Figures

Figure 1. Ashrafieh, Lebanon, May 2013………………………………………………………...2
Figure 2. Ashrafieh, Lebanon, Wallpaper, May 2013………………………………………..…10
Figure 3. Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon, July 2013 ……………………………………………….12
Figure 4. Camp Sanjak, Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon, May 2013 ……………………………….13
Figure 5. Ashkal Alwan, July 2013 …………………………………………………………….15
Figure 6, 7, 8. Ziad Abillama’s Where Are We?, 1992…………………………………18, 19, 20
Figure 9. Ziad Abillama’s Wherearethearabs?, 1992 ………………………………………….22
Figure 10. 98Weeks Project Space, Mar Mikhael, Lebanon, August 2013 …………………….23
Figure 11, 12. Ilaria Lupo’s Readily Reversible, 2012 ……………………………………. 24, 26
Figure 13. Readily Reversible photo archive, 2012……………………………………………..28
Figure 14. Ilaria Lupo and the construction workers, 2012……………………………………..32
Figure 15. Aabra, Lebanon, June 2013 …………………………………………………………33
Figure 16, 17. Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine, Lebanon, 2012……………………...42, 46
Figure 18. Passport, August 2013……………………………………………………………….51

v

Abstract

For generations, Lebanon has remained in a state of turmoil. Political corruption, transnational
influences, and sporadic ruptures dominate the country. Daily life has become a public ritual of
disoriented memorialization that somehow remains masked and burrowed within each city. In
this thesis, I contextualize the method of vertical axis excavation as a cultural underpinning for
spatial art projects manifesting in Lebanon’s contested public spaces. Interdependent on time and
space, this method of excavation is a borrowed concept mentioned by Lebanese artist and writer,
Walid Sadek, when describing the urgency for a vertical axis of excavation in the country’s
public art projects. He observes vertical excavation as a function of Beirut’s first rumored public
project, the 1992 beach installation by Ziad Abillama entitled Where Are We? While traversing
through a counter-public sphere, I explore the notion of excavation through a personal narrative
as a means to weave together spatial art projects that employ vertical axis excavation, including
Ziad Abillama’s beach installation and the more recent projects by Ilaria Lupo, Readily
Reversible, 2012 and the Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine, 2012. Lastly, this thesis examines
Beirut’s global positioning in order to understand the city’s urban condition and its critical
relationship with global art production.

١۱ Travels & Excavation

What separates them is equal to what they share.
Walid Sadek

Introduction

I landed in Lebanon for the fourth time in May 2013, yet it felt like the first. My mother
and I dragged our luggage into my aunt and uncle’s jeep –the same jeep that greeted us during
our first trip in 2000. Leaving the airport, the surroundings felt almost familiar and oddly
comforting. The endless blare of the car horns on the autostrad, or highway, stopped me from
drowning in my own thoughts as we drove to my family’s home in the Keserwan District of
Mount Lebanon. My mother was quiet and still. Her hands rested in her lap. The traffic gave me
time to stare at the remnants of old buildings, deconstructed by war. The older neighborhoods
were bordered with new reconstruction projects (see figure 1). As I was about to open my mouth
to comment on the way all the buildings seemed to be inching closer to the water, my aunt began
the usual catch-up questions at my mother who simply replied,

“Hamdillah, kil shi meshi,” –thankfully, everything is moving.

2

Figure 1. Ashrafieh, Lebanon, May 2013. Photographed by the author.

My Mother’s voice didn’t carry the same warm, nostalgic tone that overcame her when she first
returned to Lebanon in 2000 after emigrating in 1988. A distance with nostalgia allowed me to
explore Beirut with a newly developed critical consciousness characterized by a resurging art
form that revolves around interdisciplinary spatial art practices that bargain with the political,
activism, social engagement, and participation. The familiarity of the city wore away as the
elasticity of the fourth dimension of space –time –decontextualized my present, past, and future.
Due to Lebanon’s constant state of political traumas, including –the French and Syrian
occupation, the brutal sixteen-year Civil War from 1975-1991, the July 2006 War, and
surrounding Arab revolutions –some memories remain secret. Deeply rooted century-old,
unsettled scores disguise the internal and external realities of the country and the surrounding
Arab nations.
1
Politics have trained the public to fear the discovering of truths and their potential
violent consequences. However, secrets are “urban nourishment” that create an opportunity for

1
Samir Kassir and M. B. DeBevoise, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 17.

3

speech acts and redemption.
2
For me, this was the moment to reenter and retheorize the city.
This opportunity to approach the city with an aesthetic perspective temporally amalgamated with
the altered spatiality of Beirut in May 2013. In other words, I now had a different relationship
with time, which may have been recourse for the lack of hegemonic political activity and
organization that stemmed from failed elections, the neighboring Syrian crisis and Arab
uprisings, and other transitional state activities. My developing relationship with the city and the
state would subsist on relieving my imaginary impressions by reliving the city. Art allowed me
to do this. The visible urban condition of minimal shared public spaces, uncontrolled growth,
privatization, and resistant sectarian borders are all reactionary to the destabilized political
infrastructure.
Art practices may transcend political structures through questioning social and cultural
assumptions or understandings. Born in Beirut in 1966, Walid Sadek is a conceptual artist,
writer, and associate professor at the American University of Beirut who “endeavors to structure
a theory for approaching the ambivalence of living through a protracted civil-war.”
3
Sadek
explains,
In the face of totalizing discourses and edicts, art practices carry the responsibility
of challenging identity-based politics. The issue is to critique identity and
consequently representation as the act by which a combat of wills is played out.
Obviously, this difference of mobility falls within the domain of art and does not
enter the purview of political activity except as a critique. This proposal may lead
us of course to consign the whole of art to the bin of history or to the spas of the

2
Walid Sadek, “From Image to Corpse; a short story about 15 years of the 1990’s,” Naked
Punch 8, (August 2006): 60.
3
“Sharjah Art Foundation –Sadek,”, accessed December 12, 2013,
http://www.sharjahart.org/people/people-by-alphabet/s/sadek-walid.

4

retired. But I think that it would be an exorbitant mistake to expect of art practices
to engage more directly with politics.
4

Anyone confronting the notions of identity in Lebanon will most likely engage with politics.
Sadek suggests that it is the critique of identity and representation that motivates the inevitability
of dealing with politics as an artist living in Lebanon today. Since identity occasionally
inextricably manifests through critical art practice, cultural practitioners in Lebanon must access
the city without having to directly engage with Lebanon’s politicians and corporate dictators.
Further, urban interventions by artists require access to public space.
In conversation with curator Mayssa Fattouh, Sadek makes the critical claim,
To say it bluntly, public spaces do not exist in Beirut because they are inimical to
the politico-sectarian division of the city into exclusive and exclusionary districts
where the notion and practice of ‘public’ is primarily occupied by a public of
loyalists subject to the governing edicts of one particular elite.
5

He continues to describe public space as “an act of horizontal intervention.”
6
In Lebanon,
intervening horizontally to clear borders and density would collude with the existing power
structures in various districts. In order to approach public space through art, Sadek wants to
“reemphasize … the critical and persistent necessity of the vertical.”
7
He describes the vertical
through the first wave of post-Civil War public projects that occurred in the country, including,
artist Ziad Abillama’s beach installation and other various initiatives by the arts association
Ashkal Alwan. He states that these “few artists approached the monopolized spatial subdivisions

4
Stephen Wright, “Territories of Difference: Excerpts from an Email Exchange between Tony
Chakar, Bilal Khbeiz and Walid Sadek,” in Out of Beirut, (England: Modern Art Oxford, 2006),
63.
5
Walid Sadek, “Tranquility is Made in Pictures,” with Mayssa Fattouh, in Fillip 17, (Fall 2012):
60.
6
Ibid, 60.
7
Ibid, 60.

5

of Beirut… [and] propos[ed] an engagement with post-civil-war urbanity through a vertical axis
of excavation.”
8

In my thesis, I propose to contextualize the method of vertical axis excavation as a
cultural underpinning for spatial art practices in Lebanon. This method enables the conservation
of a certain historical moment in the current social fabric of the city. Through spatial art projects,
artists have the ability to employ a vertical axis of excavation in order to resonate an exchange
for a rectifiable continuity. When approaching the city, an unearthing of historical exchanges
including events, research, and conversations is necessary prior to calling for collectivity. Once a
collective has been grouped in “public space,” a dialogue is generated and becomes a platform
for future exchanges and responses.
Use of this excavationist method reflects the individual and collective concern with the
geographic, social, and political disruptions caused by the consecutive wars.
9
Through vertical
excavation, Abillama’s 1992 beach installation has become a significant project dubbed as the
reentry point back into the city.
10
I will frame the recent interdisciplinary projects by Ilaria Lupo,
Readily Reversible, 2012, and the Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine, 2012, based on this
resumption of intervention. The artists’ insertion of the self and of their projects into the urban
periphery summons an additional role for their works to act as objects that confront and consider
notions beyond that of an artistic practice by attempting to “reconfigure Lebanese society

8
Ibid, 60.
9
Walid Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War
Lebanon,” in Tamáss - Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon, ed. Nieves
Berenguer Ros (Barcelona: Fondacio AntoniTapies, 2002), 74.
10
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Abillama returns with sculptures that act,” The Daily Star, November
9, 2004, accessed August 18, 2013, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Art/2004/Nov-
09/94466-abillama-returns-with-sculptures-that-act.ashx#axzz2umr4piwH.

6

economically, socially and politically” in a specific manner.
11
The resurgence of socio-political
art through its many interventionist forms often entitled as political, activist, interventionist,
collectivized, socially engaged, relational, participatory, and/or dialogical forms of art, reflects
on the global changes that affect critical art production.
12
Interventions began in the early 1990s
in Lebanon through a few emerging art institutions including Ashkal Alwan –The Lebanese
Association for the Plastic Arts. The elasticity of time binds these seemingly unrelated projects
and fragmented narratives together, in turn facilitating those who respond to piece together
continuity.

Time, Space, and Selfhood
Time is an inevitable confrontation with what is physically and conceptually facing you.
It determines the way one translates their surroundings into a responsive action –or
nonresponsive. The extensiveness of time separates events into periods, which enables one to
explore the past to understand the present and to further make an assessment about the future. I
find that in order to explore one’s identity a passage through time does not follow a
chronological system. This altered temporal space allows one to understand their envisioned
perceptions of the future based on the current moment. However, contextualizing the now can
only occur with an understanding of the past. Rather than looking at history as a means to
determine the actions and events of the current moment, one must use the current moment as a
positioning to understand the past. From there, the future becomes a clearer “open space” in the
sense that it isn’t predetermined by a specific historical narrative.

11
Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion,” 74.
12
Gregory Sholette, “50 Shades of Red: Enterprise Culture and Social Practice Art, A Love
Story?,” 2013, 1.

7

In Lebanon, public space has become obscured over time. Art in Lebanon is influenced
by time and space. Time determines the content of the art, and the works’ historical and
sociopolitical context of the region. Considering time as capital, it can take the form of multiple
exchanges including working for money, sharing social moments, and even exchanging love
either through gestures of empathy or through the global economization of love. Installation art
and more recently, social practice interventions in public spaces deal with different sociopolitical
issues that become indexical responses to the region’s historical traumas.
I will refer to a physical and conceptual space that is determined by time. Time
determines the present physical structure. In Lebanon, the devastating deconstruction of
neighborhoods and obsessive reconstruction of rising structures and private communities are
manifestations of consequent wars. Only the duration of time would have allowed for this
transformation in urban space. Further, art spaces are not funded by the local government, which
still does not allocate funding for the arts. Therefore, how artists interact with public space in
Lebanon can be a direct response to the lack of institutions and spaces to practice in. Our
conceptual space is flooded by the way time determines our current psyche –all a reflection of
the past and regard for the future within the present moment.
Vertical Axis Excavation
Prior to understanding the concept as a whole, it is critical to define each word separately.
vertical, adj. and n.
/ˈvɜːtɪkəәl/
adj. Of or pertaining to, placed or situated at, passing through, the vertex or zenith; occupying a
position in the heavens directly overhead or above a given place or point.
vertical point n. the culminating or highest point, the point of greatest development or
perfection.
13

13
"vertical, adj. and n.". OED Online. December 10, 2013. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/222776?redirectedFrom=vertical.

8

The vertical passes through and lies above as a point –such as the sun. Yet, it feels as if
Lebanon has a verticality that extends into the depths of the sub surface. A depth, which harbors
unknown content, and remains a site for conceptual and physical redevelopment. The physical
depth is a traumatic site that constitutes the area beneath the surface where the consequences of
the political traumas remain tucked away. In order to explore the vertical based on a point that
exists far above the surface, the point below the surface needs to become unearthed. In order to
reach the vertical space above the surface, quite literally and conceptually, one must employ
vertical axis excavation.
axis, n.1
/ˈæksɪs/
Axis of rotation or revolution.
The axle of a wheel.
The ‘pivot’ on which any matter turns.
The imaginary straight line about which a body (e.g. the earth or other planet) rotates; the
prolongation of that of the earth on which the heavens appear to revolve.
14

Axis suggests the potential grouping of people around a revolving idea that extends
beyond the physical realm. If the Earth stops revolving around its axis, time stops. Similarly, an
axis must exist in order to allow time to move forward. A collective is dependent on an axis in
order to have the ability to reach the vertical. Also, the rotation of an axis depends on an
externality, and in an art project the subject has the ability to perform outside the boundary of the
art object. These subjects can take the role of participants and audience members, and even the
artist themselves. A participant is physically present in the moment to interact with a project.
Therefore, the audience of a project includes not only the physical participants of an intervention,
but also those who become familiar with the project through any manner. These players have the

14

"axis, n.1". OED Online. December 10, 2013. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/14054?rskey=HsM5Zv&result=1&isAdvanced
=false.

9

power to disseminate the information and most importantly extinguish a multiplicity of various
venues for response.
excavation, n.
/ɛkskəәˈveɪʃəәn/
The action or process of digging out a hollow or hollows in (the earth, etc.); an instance of the
same; the result or extent of the process.
An excavated space; a cavity or hollow.
The process of laying bare by excavating; an unearthing.
15

Spatial art projects that use excavation suggests a research based practice that hollows out
overlooked and undiscovered information. Excavation does not determine how the public will
use or respond to the information. However, the gesture of excavation exposes information that
has never been dealt with before. Post-excavation, the method allows for interactions between
the researcher or artist and the audience. This relationship initiates a response beyond one of a
simple witness. Therefore, vertical excavation must be dependent on an axis, which rotates time
and space to reach equilibrium. Once this threshold has been reached, time and space no longer
conflict the conditions of a formative narrative. The consistency makes these factors
insignificant, because one has inhabited a livable chronotope. By producing material that exists
in multiple iterations amongst various participatory audiences, the transformation of spaces
becomes a reactionary process of spatial art practices. This has the potential of creating more
livable spaces.

15
"excavation, n.". OED Online. December 13, 2013. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/65686?redirectedFrom=excavation.

10

Figure 2. Ashrafieh, Lebanon. Wallpaper. May 2013. Photographed by the author.
16

16

It was a little past noon and I just lay there, sweat dotting my face. I was in the convent dormitory room my aunt had registered
for me to board in the Ashrafieh neighborhood, while I was attending Home Works 6 events in the city. On my schedule it said
the reading was going to end around 2am. The convent closed its doors at 11pm. Even though I was in proximity of the project, I
couldn’t access the reading if I remained at the dormitory. I paid for two weeks of stay and accessed the room for midday breaks
in order to recuperate from Beirut’s humidity.
I didn’t want to just be there, and had to find a way to put up with what was physically around me.

11

Encounters
Project | X-apartments, Home Works 6 Program
A couple of days after arriving, my mother and I took a service –Lebanon’s informal taxi
system –to Arax Street in Bourj Hammoud to view our first public project in the city, Matthias
Lillenthal’s X-Apartments.
17
The project explored two neighborhoods; Bourj Hammoud –an
Armenian community in Beirut, and Khandaq al Ghamiq –a Shiite neighborhood south of
Beirut’s redeveloping district (see figure 3). The project was a unique intervention characterized
by having participants traverse between open public streets and private homes to view site-
specific works by the students from Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works Program. Addressing
marginalized narratives through this mode of self-guided exploration influenced my perception
of the significant interdisciplinary aspects of art projects and the potential for the aesthetic to
impact the human condition.
We were told to meet someone at a local café in the neighborhood that was located in the
center of a roundabout. My mother and I flung towards the ongoing cars and taxis; it felt as if
this was the only way to create an opportunity to cross the street. A women sitting at a table

17
A service is a form of public transport through a private car, where the driver and his car can
be regarded as a social space and an interface of voices across time. The collaborative workshop
by 98Weeks and Bik Van der Pol portrayed the reality of the city and its public space through the
perspective of service drivers. The workshop tends to make available these overlooked and
possibly undervalued platforms of information that could bridge the gap between what is known
and what remains unknown. The workshop booklet describes the manifestation of the service,
“It all culminated in 1931 when there was three-month strike where the people of Beirut stopped
paying their electricity bills and they boycotted the tramline. This long strike resulted in the
‘group taxi’ phenomenon, which has been called since then the taxi-service, or simply: the
service. The ‘service’ would load up to five different passengers on its way and would take them
to wherever they would like to go in the city. Since then, taxis started to work in the city for no
more than five pennies per passenger. Until now, the service is the most popular public transport
method in Beirut.”
98Weeks and Bik van der Pol, You talking to me? Workshop, 12-18 October 2012, Beirut,
Lebanon, 98Weeks Project Space.

12

Figure 3. Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon. July 2013. Photographed by the author.
underneath a green umbrella in the open-air café handed us two sheets of folded paper with
printed guidelines –one in Arabic for my mother and English for myself. This sheet was our only
guide through the artists’ chosen routes and sites. Bourj Hammoud’s booklet began:
From Café Roundabout, go down the ramp facing the municipality. The
municipality is a 2-story building painted in beige and white, underneath it is a
shop called ‘Jack gifts.’ Put the municipality on your left and walk against traffic
flow. Walk for about 50m and take the 1
st
left. (On the corner there’s a kebab
restaurant called ‘Restaurant Issa’). Walk down that road, in the horizon you see
the highway.
After about 100m, there is a car park on the right, go into the car park. Walk
diagonally across the car park until you see a graffiti saying ‘MAFIA’ on the wall
on the left side of the car park. Please wait at the graffiti, you will be picked up
here (see figure 4).
18

18
X-Apartments, Booklet. Home Works VI, (May 2013), 1.

13

We walked across from the main roundabout intersection and away into a small alleyway that led
us to a parking lot encased by buildings on three sides and multiple horizontally spread cement
structures on the other. These directions led us to Camp Sanjak –the oldest Armenian refugee
camp in the neighborhood. My mother had visited Bourj Hammoud’s Arax Street numerous
times in the past, but she had never been here. A man led us through the cement buildings and
corridors.

Filing up the staircase, my mother and I followed the man up the narrow flight of steps
into a workspace filled with piles of cut leather and other cobbler materials and tools. A woman
told us the story of the Armenian shoemaker who moved to the camp during the 1970s and began
a business in the room we were sitting in. He left the business and space to his son, Raffi
Figure 4. Camp Sanjak, Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon. May 2013,
Downloaded from http://goo.gl/cXaFmS, December 15, 2013.

14

Pambkoukian. Outside in the corridor, the son continued to reproduce custom designs of
women’s shoes on a small wooden table as the lure of flashing lights led us to another dark
room. Immersed in what felt like a nightclub or a trendy store at shopping mall, the scent of
cheap alcohol drew us to two women who invited my mom and I to pose for photographs dressed
in colorful boas and stilettos An instant sense of discomfort took over the room as my
overwhelmed mother immediately denied the offers to be photographed, drink a shot of whiskey,
and purchase shoes. She didn’t want to play the role of hyper-consumer within this environment,
while I was left puzzled over her lack of willingness to experience the project.
We stepped out of the room, and joined Raffi at his worktable. Artist Phil Collins invited
us to start a conversation with Raffi. We learned that in this neighborhood that dominates
Lebanon’s handmade leather and jewelry market, the refugee camp remains the son’s workplace.
Raffi distributes his shoes to high-end consumer departments stores in many countries including
Lebanon and Dubai. Beirut’s first department store ABC, which opened in the Ashrafieh district,
also carries Raffi’s design baring a rebranded label. Having previously heard about the
department store’s controversial development built over a gravesite, I was again reminded of my
role as consumer. A ruin of a neighborhood undermined our roles as art viewer. Curious and
skeptical, we navigated through the next seven sites.

15

Space | Ashkal Alwan –The Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts

During the next two weeks, the multiple layers of projects curated and supported by
Ashkal Alwan reflected the fundamental mission of the space for providing support and
opportunities for research, production, education, exposure, and public engagement (see figure
5). Curator Christine Tohme founded Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for the Plastic
Arts in 1992, to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to critical art production that promotes
public engagement and open dialogue. Those involved with Ashkal Alwan knew that a
conversation between locals about the surrounding conditions and events needed to exist. The
space has been active since 1994, when Tohme and local artists began to organize garden and
street exhibitions in public space. Tohme stressed the presence of the artists to engage with
public space in order to promote a dialogue between the arts and the community. Tohme’s call
for engagement received varying feedback and evolves today through the continued participation
of practitioners in the growing nonprofit space.

Figure 5. Ashkal Alwan’s Library. Photographed by the author, July 2013.

16

Project | Ziad Abillama, Where Are We? and Wherearethearabs?
Art cannot provoke the dead into living.
Walid Sadek, Place at Last

An interest in public interventions in Lebanon led me to the documentation of the
Lebanon’s first rumored urban intervention by artist Ziad Abillama. In August 1992, Abillama’s
beach installation, Where Are We? accompanied by a poster titled Wherearethearabs? triggered
a series of questions revolving around the discourse of the war, the significance of the beach site,
the relationship between object, image and text, and the effectiveness of art as a catalyst for
debate or change.
19
Ziad Abillama experiences ethnic rebirth during the Gulf War claiming, “I
had no identity before that.” He continues, “I discovered that I was going to be an Arab no matter
what. I had to do a lot of homework,” which “enabled me to understand there was a
confrontation. I was born when I became fascinated yet never completely overcome by the
political.”
20
The destabilization of Lebanon resulted from the internal conflicts of the Civil War
as well as the ceaseless dramas throughout the rest of the Middle East. Traumatic events and
emigration sometimes activate a rediscovery of an identity. For Abillama, this confrontation
resulted in a body of work that critically dealt with Lebanon’s condition post-Civil War.
Abillama cleared an area of Saint-Free Beach, which had become a dumping ground in
Antelias –a city north of Beirut. Many waterfronts in Lebanon became dumping grounds during
the Civil War, leading to enormous environmental degradation of the land. He erected an
installation featuring a series of sculptures made from an array of objects, ranging from a plastic
chair to engines, all enclosed by a circular barbed wired fence and steel poles.
21
In the
documented photos that remain of the project, a generator provides light, revealing the single

19
Wilson-Goldie, “Abillama Returns with Sculptures that Act.”
20
Ibid.
21
Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion,” 68.

17

entry into the encircled installation that enclosed the various pieces placed on the site’s rubbish
(see figure 6). Inside, the sculptural objects theatrically stood as they exhibited a critical gesture
towards the war.
In this work, Abillama intentionally reactivates the war through the installation’s
theatricality by exhibiting the excavated war remnants to the public. The elasticity of time
repositions these weapons, machines, and engines as nostalgic objects.
22
It unveils the war as a
historical moment which provides a foundation for a reemergence or a “becoming.”
23
The viewer
is confronted by an environment and culture, which have disintegrated into war remnants and
consumer objects of desire. The site voided the tensions within Abillama’s own conceptual
dumping ground and the troubled sociopolitical conditions inherent in post-Civil War Lebanon.
Abillama is critiquing the notion of “becoming” a part of a global stage by using installation art
to examine his anxieties with the war.

22
Ibid, 68.
23
Ibid, 68.

18

Figure 6. Ziad Abillama’s Where Are We?, Photograph from Walid Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion:
Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon,” Tamáas: Contemporary Arab Representations, 71.

19

Figure 7. Ziad Abillama’s Where Are We?, Photograph from Walid Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion:
Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon,” Tamáas: Contemporary Arab Representations, 72.

20

Figure 8. Ziad Abillama’s Where Are We?, Photograph from Walid Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion:
Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon,” Tamáas: Contemporary Arab Representations, 73.

21

The installation remained on the dumping ground only temporarily; Abillama left the
project to be destroyed by bulldozers used to redevelop on the coast. This work reiterated the
obverse use of excavation to argue in favor of the burial, both physical and historic. However,
Abillama’s concern with art’s effectiveness in communicating the message motivates his
accompanying poster.
24
The poster implicitly critiques the effectiveness of art as a mode of
communication. On the poster Wherearethearabs?, Abillama assemblages clipped texts over a
black and white image of a crouching barefooted young boy (see figure 9). Sadek best describes
the image,
He arranged, as a polemical map, a series of quotes pronounced by leading
European artists and intellectuals ranging from racist categorization of Arabs and
their stagnant civilization, to statements advocating an absolute modernity and the
rule of speed, as in statements by the Dean of the Italian Futurists Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, or the French-born designer Raymond Loewy who says that
‘The axe handle, plough share, scalpel, ships engine fan, and needle are all valid
from an aesthetic point of view.’ In parallel, the invitation card blurred the
boundaries between the veracity of documents with parody by including putative
clippings from local and international newspapers praising the talent and
pioneering spirit of Abillama, describing him variously as a Gibran Khalil Gibran
and as a long awaited innovator.
25

The first project directly engages with a critical discourse of installation art by exposing the
remaining detritus of war. Abillama exposes the war through the relationship of the materiality
of steel alongside random objects of consumption. The poster furthers that engagement with
market commercialism through the textual use of critical speech on an image. The image protects
and disseminates Abillama’s appropriated speech by securing it within a commercial market and
distributing the prints. While the beach installation’s temporary existence uses vertical axis

24
Ibid, 75.
25
Ibid, 69.

22

excavation somewhat literally, the poster reflects Abillama’s critical consciousness in a state of
contiguity, frozen in a realm that develops from an artistic practice.

Figure 9. Ziad Abillama’s Wherearethearabs?, Photograph from Walid Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion:
Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon,” Tamáas: Contemporary Arab Representations, 66.

23

Space | 98Weeks Research Project

Figure 10. 98Weeks Project Space, Mar Mikhael, Lebanon, August 2013. Photographed by the author.

In 2007, artist, Marwa Arsanios and writer, Mirene Arsanios founded the organization
98Weeks Research Project and its nonprofit project space in the Beirut neighborhood of Mar
Mikhael. The research topic shifts approximately every 98 weeks, as artistic and theoretical
inquiries result in workshops, exhibitions, publications, community engagement projects,
publications, etc. Complementary to the space’s projects, the archive hosts a physical library that
reflects their mission of integrating a range of international and locally driven interdisciplinary
artistic investigations and collaborations (see figure 10). 98Weeks is an open space, which
allows artists and curators to explore the current research topics concerning the built
environment, feminist dialogue, publications, and radio broadcasting. In April 2013, they began
publishing artist texts to respond to their research topics and the formative elements of language
through the platform 98editions. Taking over an abandoned car showroom during Home Works
6, 98Weeks live broadcasted their online series Our Lines Are Now Open. Previous projects
include collaborations with Francis Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc Medina’s walking workshop As Long
as I am Walking and Bik Van der Pol’s taxi workshop You talking to me?.

24

Project | Ilaria Lupo, Readily Reversible

Figure 11. Ilaria Lupo, Readily Reversible, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

While researching at 98Weeks Project Space, I met Ilaria Lupo. She lived in the same
building a couple floors above the space in Beirut’s Mar Mikhael neighborhood. At our first
meeting, I already had a copy of her performance work Readily Reversible, which took place at
a construction site (see figure 11). The 8-minute video documentation displays two versions of
the performance. The video opens with Lupo’s first performance in June 2012. Looking up, a
basket is being elevated as it shakes from side to side. The frame shifts, as the shots go back and
forth to a handheld camera perspective of the documenter walking up the stairs. Rubble lays
broken all over the cement steps, as the documenter ascends to the top floor of the unfinished
skeletal building. The activity of the crane is out of character as it moves through the darkness,
and attracts the nearby public’s attention. The neighbors watch from their balconies and others

25

sit in the frame of the unfinished windows, only visible as silhouettes. It is dark, but city lights
flood the surrounding area and trace the wire basket elevated by a crane. The audience ascends
to the platform through a construction site elevator system, as the lit wire basket becomes
visible. Over twenty people stand on what could be an unfinished balcony or room, as they
watch the suspended basket in which Lupo sleeps. In the opening of the video, the process of
running up the stairs produces a sense of hasteness, yet this “ rich visual texture [goes] without
progress, [which] namely [suggests] the stagnation of place.”
26
The feeling of the stagnation of
place continues with the artist’s action of sleep and the audience’s acquired role of witness.
During the second performance in November 2012, Ghiath Al Jebawi, Lupo’s Syrian
assistant, is in dialogue with a provisional worker from another Mar Mikhael construction site
near an electricity company. In the documentation, Al Jebawi and the worker talk in the dark as
they lean against the side of the rising concrete wall on the last completed tier of the building
(see figure 12). In the background the crane dangles framed by their bodies, as their conversation
reveals the dark truths about the site’s entombments. This construction site is just one of the
additional spaces in Lebanon that also functions as an unofficial burial ground. Below them, a
significant number of migrant workers remains enclosed in boxes made of stone. The
conversation proceeded as follows:
- It’s all rocks; rocks on their backs, and all is dressed in rocks.
- You mean its like boxes with people buried in? Boxes made of rocks?
Did you open and check what’s inside?
- He opened it.
- They opened it.
- They checked it, and it turned out to be filled with workers

26
Walid Sadek, “Place at Last,” Art Journal 66 no.2 (Summer 2007): 47.

26

Figure 12. Ilaria Lupo’s Readily Reversible, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

The documentation ends as the crane lowers the basket and Lupo descends from her
temporary escape.

Lupo is an Italian-born artist based in Beirut , who deals with public space and
intervention through performance, installations, and publications. Lupo transfers the materiality
of construction to the notions of representation. Prepared for Beirut’s Exposure 2012, the site-
specific project Readily Reversible intimately confronts the sociopolitical conditions behind
Beirut’s post-war compulsive response of deconstructing and constructing. Lupo explains, “I
often peered at the provisional workers’ houses at night, while the sites were dormant. The
electric lights revealed the semi-open shelters, where the absence of walls fails to protect the

27

intimacy of workers.”
27
During the day, construction sites are active and operational work places,
but at night, the sites become homes. Even though the sites become inactive, they are not private
spaces that produce a sense of belonging. They remain artificially lit by the surrounding
streetlights, which assure the workers that the space is not theirs. This constantly reminds the
worker, that even though they sleep here countless nights, these sites are simply temporary
shelters.
Before permanent residents inhabit these sites, their unproductivity remains masked by
the enchanted relationship that the public has with construction. During the day, passersby of a
construction site deem the redevelopment as a sign of the city’s progression. As the internal
realities of the site settle in after hours, they begin to represent the detrimental effect of the
social, economic, and political conditions on the migrant workers and refugees. The complex
confrontation with the realities of the place causes one to become more conscious of the
infatuation with construction. This consciousness transforms the construction site into a
evaluative place of our own making.
To begin the project’s research, Lupo visited twenty-five construction sites in Beirut
over the course of three months. With the help of her Syrian assistant Ghiath Al Jebawai, she
built a close relationship with the Syrian refugees who worked on the construction site.

27
Ilaria Lupo, “Readily Reversible,” in Beirut Exposure 2012 exhibition catalogue, (Beirut:
Beirut Art Center, 2012), 58.

28

Figure 13. Readily Reversible photo archive, 2012. Images courtesy of the artist.

Every morning at 6am, Lupo photographed the rising structures from the rooftops –sharing
moments of invisibility with the workers in these troubled sites (see figure 13). These sites are
open to the natural views of the sun rising and setting, but limit the visibility of temporary
workers. Developers comfortably approved Lupo’s request to take photos, figuring that capturing
the sunrise from the sea was a common and practical desire, especially for someone who could
be mistaken as a tourist. If she did not have access to the top of the building, workers gladly
photographed the elevated view for her. Her comprehensively documented panoramic
photographs were not exhibited, but she shared them with the workers. The photographs became
a part of the axis of the project, that allowed the project to develop and encouraged the migrant
workers to continue participating in different iterations of the project.
After the completion of this series of documentation, Lupo invited all the migrant
workers to her home where she hosted a meal and displayed the images through a slideshow. The
confessional content of these images that features the sun, removes itself –modifies “content” not
“images” from the private lives of the workers, to unite multiple sites into a spectacle.
Externally, reconstruction becomes a spectacle for the desire to provide new glamorized spaces

29

for the Lebanese. Images summarize readings of a subject, but photographs of the sunrise
conceal the internal realities of reconstruction. The images are a preliminary “revelation of the
private” that frames Lupo’s subsequent site-specific performance.
28

One night Lupo summoned an audience to a construction site in Mar Mikhael behind the
popular restaurant Mandaloun. The public habitually overlooked this construction site used in the
initial performance. Construction workers assisted Lupo as they led viewers up the dark skeletal
building to the platform. The action of walking in darkness characterized one of the precarious
aspects of the workers’ lives. From here, the audience viewed the crane suspending the lit wire
basket. Inside, Lupo slept with her blanket and pillow. Passersby encountered Lupo’s temporary
home, a temporary home for many escaping misfortunes who, unlike Lupo, had nowhere else to
go. Building sites become effortless monuments that leave no traces of the workers. They do not
represent the inconstancy of embodiment.
29
Discussing representation, Sadek writes, “It is an
edifice free of interiority, able to oust the tenuous conjoining of presence and absence and with it
the labiality of saying ‘I am elsewhere.’”
30
The indexical nature of the building, positions the
site as floating within a geo-political depth that requires vertical intervention.
A couple of weeks after viewing the documentation, I met with Ilaria Lupo for a
midday coffee session where she exposed more aspects of the projects. What the audience never
sees in the film are the twenty-five Syrian migrant workers assisting Lupo. This is an unfortunate
decision by the documenter, not the artist. The incapability of safeguarding this memory due to
flawed collaboration motivates a future intervention with the workers that the artist briefly
alluded to in conversation. If the documenter demotes the position of the figure it is because a

28
Ibid, 78.
29
Sadek, “Place at Last,” 35.
30
Ibid, 35.

30

pure representation of the work is accomplished through the artist. What the perceiver perceives
should constitute a separate image of what is actually present during the moments of the
performance. In order to live in contiguity with the socio-political nature of the site, the artist
must challenge and break the notions of representation by generating a pressed image of the
figure and background.
31
This difficult task becomes manageable through social practice and
involving multiple levels of media.
Lupo opened up about constantly relocating her life to different regions every couple of
years. This constant relocation is reflected in aspects of her practice where she attempts to
resolve the central notion of escapism. Living in the Mar Mikhael neighborhood for two years,
Lupo dodges a past, or possibly even some form of her reality. Accordingly, the subjects in her
work have escaped sociopolitical misfortunes and currently live in Beirut, also, with unsettled
ideas for return. Therefore excavation of a site in Beirut through labor and action –for both Lupo
and her subjects –constitutes an alternative awareness of a foreign territory as a locality for
provisional recuperation from previously occurring calamities. Seen on the surface, buildings are
predictable places of household and business accommodations. Yet, they are also tangibly
available as an invitation to a subversive narrative of the unfamiliar.
Escapism through the image of sleep is the readily reversible state. The artist notes, “The
expression ‘readily reversible’ is taken from the definition of sleep as a ‘readily reversible state
of reduced responsiveness to, and interaction with, the environment.’”
32
When the eyes shut, the
mental absence allows one to distance oneself from feelings of oppression, but only
temporarily.
33
Workers shift sites every couple of years after construction concludes. This

31
Ibid, 47.
32
Lupo, “Readily Reversible,” 58.
33
Ibid, 58.

31

transient nature embodies the unclear relationship between protection and captivity. Lupo
articulates an imaginary dimension during her refuge in the wire basket. The exaggeration of
sleeping at an elevated height makes the artist appear not as an individual subject, but an object
within a site of protection and captivity. Cultivating an intimate form of escapism, the act by
virtue of critical consciousness reminds the viewer that the materiality of Lebanon’s urban fabric
goes beyond the initiation of a clean start through reconstruction. This project invites all to enter
the space “and mingle namelessly in a space pre-occupied by the corpse, by that which no one
owns but which everyone will become.”
34
Unrecognizable, unnamable, and unfamiliar these
invisible figures have interrupted the monument of the construction site, and yet are unable to
revolutionize a historical narrative.
35

Lupo provoked a dialogue between the public and these contested invisible sites through
her individual anxieties of retrieving an unmarked record of Beirut’s many construction sites. At
once, this laborious and multidimensional task leaves a feeling of depression. Ilaria’s last email
read, “I actually got a minute of depression re-seeing the group picture and knowing that they
disappeared from the documentation. Working in public space always requires one to deal with
so many people and be able to prevent ALL the mistakes you would never imagine one could
do” (see figure 14).
36
As someone from non-Lebanese origin, Lupo has the ability to move
through the landscape rooted by a perspective available only to her. She descends to the city only
to disturb a surface and in hopes of a future without hidden costs. Whether the descent was deep
enough is undeterminable. This deliberate act of exclusion from the documentation is a reminder
of the facelessness of the workers. The position Lupo takes of escaping, also comments on the

34
Sadek, “Place at Last,” 44.
35
Ibid, 44.
36
Ilaria Lupo, email message to Sasha Ussef, December 8, 2013.

32

realities of the living conditions of not only the migrant workers, but possibly artists as well. It
may only characterize the continuity of the relationship between the artist and the public.
Figure 14. Ilaria Lupo and the construction workers, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

33

Figure 15. Aabra, Lebanon, June 2013, Photographed by the author.
37

37
Historically, the town of Aabra, meaning, “passageway” in Arabic, led to the Kingdom of Sidon. In this village,
the rasad, translating to “without body” from Arabic, or spirits guard hidden treasures. 98Weeks conducted research
on djinn and all other types of spirits for OuUnPo’s curatorial project Godzilla and the Phoenix, which took place in
June 2013 in Japan. The collective OuUnPo formed in Europe and has taken the initiative to investigate the Arab
Spring in order to integrate the knowledge from the uprisings into European democratic and artistic practices. In
2012, OuUnPo developed a relationship with creative practitioners in Lebanon at the 98Weeks Project Space.

34

٢۲Time & Contiguity

It now appears that he will not acquire his own death. Time is against him. Time
is now preoccupied with the calamity. Time is against all of us. There is no more
time do what we always said we would. No time to love or hate, no more time to
rest or ache. It was simply not his time, not even his death. He was neither citizen
nor individual. Rather he waits as they do in that purloined place for him to
return so that they call live, love, eat and drunk in ways unnoticed by cameras.
Fadi Abdullah

Walid Sadek’s Archive
Walid Sadek’s textual archive influences my perception of the region. His writing
brought me to the realization of the temporal nature of the dimension of spaces. A traditional-
three-dimensional space only considers physical elements, but a four-dimensional space includes
time. This temporal force resynchronizes, and is not restricted to a specific form of time, as is
indicated in Sadek’s reference to public time. The space of time differs depending on the
characteristic of the event or exchange. Sadek explores how to form a “habitable chronotope”
during the protracted state of war that frames the contemporary history of Lebanon. Sadek’s
dense theoretical texts seep into the geographical, the spatial, the temporal, perception, identity,
and representation within the framework of critical art production in Lebanon.
His texts become a prerequisite for a non-infatuation with the past and a platform for
contextualizing the present. The use of the anecdotal in his writings about forgotten artists and
assassinated figures recontextualizes the plasticity of time within Lebanon’s protracted state of

35

war. Next, I will explore public time and globalization through Walid Sadek’s texts and the
critical events and exhibitions that followed them. Public time depends on the changing global
economy, which produces transnational actors that transform places into global cities.

Out of Beirut and Public Time
Out of Beirut took place in multiple iterations including an exhibition, a symposium, and
two books. The project was organized by Modern Art Oxford and curated by Suzanne Cotter
with the assistance of Christine Tohme, Director of Ashkal Alwan.
38
The exhibition raises
important questions of history, memory, the relationship between public and private spaces, and
globalization. In order to provoke a dialogue on the role of the region’s interdisciplinary
practitioners this project brought together artists, curators, and writers from across the Middle
East to Beirut. The exhibition included the following artists, many of which are Beirut locals –
Ziad Abillama, Tony Chakar, Ali Cherri, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Gilbert Hage,
Heartland, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, Jalal Toufic, Paola Yacoub
and Michel Lasserre, and Akram Zaatari.
39

Modern Art Oxford organized the symposium Public Time in 2006 to respond to
inquiries about the exhibition Out of Beirut. The exhibition was a “pivotal survey of Beirut’s
contemporary art” at the time.
40
The symposium was divided into the following three categories:
Public Time, On Translation, and On Travelling.
41
A book was published with edited transcripts
of the symposium featuring the excerpted readings from the file Public Time and the subsequent

38
Andrew Nairne, “Foreword,” in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter, (UK: Modern Art Oxford,
2006), 7.
39
For more information on the exhibition please reference Out of Beirut catalogue.
40
Suzanne Cotter, editor, Public Time: A Symposium, (England: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 2.
41
Ibid, 2.

36

panel discussion. The file itself features accounts written in 2005 at the witnessing and
memorialization of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Prime Minister at the time. A series of
killings in Beirut of activists, intellectuals, and cultural practitioners followed his death. The first
presentation of the file took place within the framework of Home Works in November 2005.

Public Time
Artists and writers Fadi Abdallah, Bilal Khbeiz, and Walid Sadek read excerpts of the
Public Time file at the symposium. Walid Sadek describes the files stating, “These texts, as you
will notice, never denote any of the figures who were assassinated. Rather than documenting the
events, they attempt to witness their consequences.”
42
Each artist illustrates public time through
their texts reflecting on unnamed victims of assassinations. This allows the reader to
contextualize the moment rather than delving into a preconceived historical narrative bounded to
a name and an image. The artists’ rejection of Lebanon’s media controlled history is shown in
this response of not attaching a name to the well-known victims. Bilal Khbeiz begins reading the
first text from the file. He describes public time as something that is unclaimable and controlled
by the international media.
What befell them was a public time they could not claim as theirs.
A public time that set their waking hour to the clock of the world
and the deafening muttering of a million shutter click. The
inhabitants, once struggling to become citizens in their own city,
were suddenly hurled as props into a ceremony conducted by
international media. It is not that inhabitants found themselves
running out of time. Rather, they duly took leave of their daily jobs
and quotidian worries and huddled together partaking the making of
a time that would not accumulate as theirs: a people reduced to a
crowd and forced into living a single instant.
43

42
Cotter, Public Time: A Symposium, 8.
43
Ibid, 8.

37

Each writer explores the notion of public time through a formative narrative about individuals
learning about the assassinations of these figures. These stories position the international media
as a puppeteer that takes away time for public mourning. Therefore, public time remains
inaccessible to an individual during a socio-political disaster. Media records events and screens
them for international audiences, removing the opportunity for reflection within the locality.
Collective mourning is essential to the recovery of a city after traumatic experiences. This state
of temporality has occurred in past wars, and there is a need to resist it from suspending the right
to experience without global interference that in turn singularly influences the future. Public time
alludes to achieving some type of secular time, which is seemingly impossibly in Lebanon.
44

Each writer defines the term public time with tensions of his own. Walid Sadek recognizes that
the term public time is “provocative” and he says,
I think that public time is proposed as a time that comes at the heel of
a defeat, a society’s failure to construct what you call secular time.
This has been my experience of living in Lebanon. The consequence
of such a failure may at a certain juncture of momentous events throw
a society unwillingly into a public time. …To recapitulate, we are
proposing a public time understood as hegemonic. In it we live for a
certain period and return to what I am defining as places. We are
therefore thrown back and forth between two extremes incapable of
landing in a secular time. The difficult task is therefore to find ways
of writing and politically pursuing a move from places into a secular
time. It is thus that we can resist the next round of public time which
will, I think, inevitably continue to be the structure by which
international calendars are set.
45

44
Ibid, 17.
45
Ibid, 17.

38

As in most wars, an accurate series of collective memories does not exist. During periods of
mourning, time somehow slips away from a nation as it shares its political trauma with an
international audience. This rids a nation of moments for collective grieving. Time constitutes of
shared and individual experiences and representations. Reporters illustrate events to their liking,
therefore adjusting the recollection of memories and narratives.

Globalization and Art Production
Globalization is a term that has been used more often since the 1980s, and continues to
affect the transformations of the human condition. This period of time has immersed humans into
a global economy that reframes our geography. Transnational figures alter places before the
space even develops locally. This rapid global development overrides the initial phase of local
development. Therefore, local development becomes a reactionary process that may take the
form of collective actions through public events and gatherings. In the arts, Sadek identifies two
autonomous courses of globalization that were set by writer Bilal Khbeiz: ‘“First is that of the
image, where events accumulate but never occur and second is the course of the real where
events occur only to vanish with a trace.”’
46
However, because of this process the relationship
between art and society has changed. Actions do not dissipate; they are witnessed, documented,
exchanged, and responded to by the public. When the public does not have access to space –
whether physical or conceptual –there is no room for actions.
Not being able to access public time is a response to the consequences of globalization.
The media, which functions as a transnational figure, denationalized the physical and conceptual

46

Walid Sadek, “Peddling Time while Standing Still; Art Remains in Lebanon and the
Globalization that Was,” Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (London:
Blackwell, 2011), 41.

39

space of Beirut. This brings up the question of which actors have claims to the city.
47
Beirut sees
a response to the global economy in the first wave of art production post-Civil War. In
November 1998, Ashkal Alwan –the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts released a statement
that “call[ed] for artistic purity and stress[ed] concurrently the binding clarity of Lebanese
national identity.” Footnote needed Following this primary clause, they specified, “‘that
exhibited works must be sculptures and monuments of value, made of solid materials that can
resist time.’”
48
This claim posits a sense of ownership over art production, and more importantly
the city. Along with excavation, non-infatuation or critical consciousness and transience allow
for a shifting in art consciousness. Sadek explains that “the gradual shift of installation art from
its ‘installationist’ mode –that is, constructional and excavationist and which relies on the
particularities (even if only temporary) of a place –to another mode whose basic characteristic is
that of a floating intervention in an already existing non-artistic field.”
49

Changes in the production of art can be seen between the first generation of post-Civil
War artists and the following generation of emerging artists. Sadek explains that when dealing
with public space artists cannot “succumb to the inarticulate persuasiveness of matter without
reneging on their stated task to suspend the weight of the world.
Their inability to achieve pure
representation is not a failure but rather the mark of reluctance traceable in Beirut art starting in
the mid-1990s. Some artworks exacerbate this reluctance… by dragging back onto the throne of
pure representation –and consequently into public space –the instability of physical matter.”
50

The first generation of artists produced work addressing the world through the platform of

47
Saskia Sassen, “Whose City is it? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims,” Public
Culture 8.2 (1996): 206.
48
Sadek, “From Excavation to Dispersion,” 76.
49
Ibid, 76.

50
Sadek, “Place at Last,” 38.

40

globalization from the position of the “reliable witness.”
51
This temporal orientation caused
many Lebanese artists to confront a precarious role of mimicking their dissent of the Civil War,
rather than exploring the “conditions of living a protracted war.”
52
A more recent generation still
grapples with this position; however, a contemporary method of social reform reconsiders the
role of art and allows an interdisciplinary approach to debate socio-political events within an
aesthetic realm. Sadek continues to explain,
Even if the global art market, ever eager for information and events, continues to
host the work of Lebanese artists, it is nevertheless crucial to state it does so
against a very different background. When traveling now, Lebanese artists do so
with a local landslide not far behind. Their peregrinations are decelerated by a
land awash in violent geopolitical struggles, a land un-fixed by crisis. In the least,
these artists have to grapple with the thickness of a land in disarray, of places they
can no longer own as an amenable referent to their work nor disavow and without
which pursue their careers; damaged places tugging at their sleeves, forsaken
without an operative temporality. For as the local and regional powers vie to
define the time of the nation regardless of actual costs incurred by inhabited
places, it remains to be seen if artists, among others, will resist the sundering of
time and place and propose, against all odds, a habitable chronotope.
53

Conventionally, political factions define the now. Their conception of time suspends the
course that an individual can take to draw an alternative path within the social sphere.
54
In this
manner, individuals within the public can no longer claim time as theirs.
55
Projects engaging with
Beirut’s urban space through a vertical axis of excavation have the potential of reinstituting a public
time. The temporality of a horizontal clearing overlooks the concern of places and therefore
embodies the wait. Vertical excavation of a site revalues time and results in the “waking up of
corpses” –an unearthing and resurfacing of history that is buried within a landscape. Excavation

51
Sadek, “Peddling Time while Standing Still,” 41.
52
Ibid, 43.
53
Ibid, 44.

54
Ibid, 47.
55
Ibid, 48.

41

methods embrace a resistant underground force that avoids the unjust taking over of the sea and sky
and reconsiders the places upon which the Lebanese could live.
56
Resistance lives underground –
incarnated by those that have died. Only survivors or witnesses can deploy excavation methods.
Vertical axis excavation is dependent on time and space in order to make a narrative concrete.
Currently within Beirut, the need for vertical site excavation through an aesthetic event “provides
the ground essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events.”
57
After an event activates
a space, a window opens for the public to write a collective history cleared from a sectarian spatial
density.

56
Sadek, “Peddling Time while Standing Still,” 7.
57
Ibid, 11.

42

Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban
resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our
heart’s desire… The freedom to make and remake our cities is one of the most
precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
David Harvey, 2008

Figure 16. Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine, Lebanon. 2012,
Downloaded from http://www.dictaphonegroup.com/work/the-sea-is-mine/, December 15, 2013.

Dictaphone Group, a Beirut-based collective formed in 2009, focuses on the notions of
the public and private through site-specific live art performance. Together, Tania El Khoury, a
live artist working between London and Beirut, Abir Saksouk, an architect and urbanist, and
Petra Serhal, a performer and producer, debate public space by bridging art and research through
public interventions and info-activism. Tania El Khoury’s individual live art practice overlaps in
some aspects with her collective practice with the Dictaphone Group. However, she revealed that

43

in Lebanon “it’s about having a certain conversation with people about things that are relevant to
our society and politics.”
58
This comments on the sociopolitical status of the country that has
been discussed, and reflects on the spatial determinacies of action.
Dictaphone Group’s 2012 site-specific performance This Sea is Mine interrogates the
notions of the public and private specifically the increasing privatization of the seafront along the
coastline in Lebanon (see figure 16). This recent intensification of privatization contributes to the
dispersal of the urban terrain. El Khoury claims that “these interventions on the coast result in
the reorganization of the production of the built environment.”
59
Primarily delving into the
public, the project raises many questions including the “issues of neo-liberal development
policies, conceptions of public space, and alternative social practices as resistance” as a means to
reclaim the right to access these spaces.
60
This exploration continues to examine the economic
and legal realities of ownership of seafront properties, in order to construct a space where the
Dictaphone group’s research helps redefine and govern the public’s relationship with space.
Dictaphone Group and the local fisherman, Adnan, lead a group of five locals through the
sea as they reclaim the waters. Prior to getting on the boat, Abir Saksouk reminded the
participants that the local public does not have access to the main park in Lebanon, the Horsh,
even though tourists do. The Mayor of Beirut, Bilal Hamad, said in a speech,
“The fear is that people will enter and have barbeques. It will be as if you are
entering the zoo in Egypt, seeing barbeques, eating, drinking, and people lying on
the grass –especially on Fridays. We also fear that the park will turn into shisha-

58
Jim Quilty, “Dictaphone: crossing borders and barriers,” The Daily Star, March 09, 2013,
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Performance/2013/Mar-09/209381-dictaphone-crossing-
borders-and-barriers.ashx#axzz2umr4piwH.
59
Dictaphone Group, “The Sea is this Way: Editorial Note,” Artezine (Fall 2013), accessed
December 10, 2013 http://www.arteeast.org/2013/10/20/the-sea-is-this-way-
%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A8%D8%AD%D8%B1-%D9%85%D9%86-
%D9%87%D9%86%D8%A7/.
60
Ibid.

44

smoking grounds. You know, we have become quite good at this throughout the
sidewalks of Beirut. You find a women’s hairdresser setting up three tables and a
shisha. You find florists on the sidewalk with shishas. Tomorrow the Horsh will
also be turned into a shisha location, or into a place where immoral activities
happen, or a place where one person fights with another over political issues…”
footnote needed

Furthermore, fancy beach clubs and other structures constructed along the coastal line limit
public access to the sea. Adnan tells of the dramatic environmental changes that have taken place
since the 1970s and have led to environmentally degraded maritime ports. Chemicals and waste
from the landfill reduces the growth of fish and vegetation. These anecdotes help reinforce the
catastrophic events that have affected the public, but that remain ignored. Everyone knows they
have a right to access the sea, yet no one knows exactly why they can’t freely get there.
Tania el Khoury uses this tour as a platform for conversation and exchange regarding the
socio-political issues pertinent to the affected individuals, allowing them to be a part of the
debate. Responsible for the preliminary research, Abir Saksouk actively acquired legal and
historical information on Lebanon’s land use regulations along the coastal line. Considering that
the state does not have an urban planning sector, Saksouk pried for details inaccessible to the
public.
61
Not only does this site-specific project provide access to the coastal line from the sea, it
also opens up access to information.
Dictaphone Group explores the seafront stretch from Ein el-Mreisse port to Ramlet el-
Balda beach two times a day over a 10-day period. This stretch of beach has become popular
with tourists. Signage referring to the sea as private property prevented the project from taking
off from Zaytouna Bay. This is Solidere’s expensive real estate project, distinguished by its
private marina, exorbitant restaurants, and boardwalk. The late Prime Minister of Lebanon Rafik

61
Tania El Khoury, in conversation with Sasha Ussef, August 2013.

45

Hariri founded Solidere - the French acronym for “The Lebanese Company for the Development
and Reconstruction of Beirut.” Post-Civil War, Solidere took the initiative to plan and redevelop
the Beirut Central District (BCD). The company has been criticized for its lack of transparency
and for displacing people during redevelopment without providing just compensation or due
process of the law. Many Lebanese citizens are unaware of Solidere’s method of reconstruction.
El Khoury informs the audience that the joint stock company used three various companies under
different titles in order to acquire land for minimal cost from vulnerable property owners after
the war. Solidere is redefining Lebanon’s collective identity through forced redevelopment to the
postcard image of the country prior to the war.
Well-known sites marked on the Dictaphone Group’s journey included the Riviera Beach
Club and Sporting Club. Each of these pricy clubs is hidden behind cement walls restricting their
visibility even from the sea. Near Sporting, Khoury swims to a floating plastic blue dock and
stands with her sign The Sea is Mine facing the resort. She takes the role of activist –a role that is
often misunderstood in the collective’s practice. Within the past couple of years, activists in the
Middle East aimed to revolutionize their countries’ governments through massive uprisings in
public squares.
62
This means of info-activist organizing is a form of spectacle. Rather than
soliciting spectacle, Dictaphone Group is inspired by these counter revolutionary performances.
However, their work stands alone as live art –“an art piece.”
63
While rowing through the sea
they stop for a cup of coffee on a nearby rock. In these moments the project depends on the
viewer to respond to Tania –they recite information she gives them on small posters, creating a
new collective memory of the sea.

62
Tania El Khoury. “The Contested Scenography of the Revolution,” Performance Research: A
Journal of the Performing Arts 18 no.3, (2013): 202.
63
Quilty, “Dictaphone: crossing borders and barriers.”

46

Figure 17. Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine, Lebanon. 2012,
Downloaded from http://www.dictaphonegroup.com/work/the-sea-is-mine/, December 15, 2013.

Tania El Khoury calls herself a live artist in her individual practice. In London her public
performances intimately engage with a single person through conversation, leaving the rest
unaware of to the practice. The Dictaphone Group’s performances also characterize a sense of
intimacy through conversation. However, since there are multiple participants, the project
generates misleading interpretations of their actions by the public. In London, Khoury’s practice
is much more intimate than in Lebanon where she feels it is necessary to have conversations with
people relevant to the socio-political climate of the city.
64

After the discussion, the artist jumps into the sea holding a sign that reads “The Sea is
Mine” in Arabic, while inviting the audience to reclaim the sea by swimming to the coastline

64
Ibid.

47

(see figure 17). In an article Khoury states, “It’s always about using other people, accidental
audiences –not just taking an idea and hiding it in a neutral place.” She continues, “A therapist
once told me that to survive a trauma, you can get out of your body, see it from above and say,
‘OK this is what’s happening now. This is traumatizing. I understand.’ Then come down.”
65
Her
live art practice allows Khoury to have an out of body experience. Her need to have a
conversation with the Lebanese public enables her to explore traumas that are embedded within
the region.
Beyond the performance, the collective produced a downloadable publication –in both
Arabic and English –that features the data and knowledge manifested in the performance. In the
booklet, a map describes the well-known territory in a new manner. Each site visited is marked
on the map with the violated planning codes of the state. Unsurprisingly, all of the developers
have broken the law in order to construct the sites. The marks made upon the map now precedes
the territory, and will yield countless readings of the sites through the map. A map is a
reproduction of territory and therefore engenders a sense of the inauthenticity of the real.
However, in a place where the public is ignorant of the realities rotting their realities, this map
exceeds beyond the body of the publication. It transforms the sites into a state of critical
consciousness that resonates with the reader.
The collective digitized a downloadable audio track as well. Accessible through a digital
platform, anyone can walk along the Corniche –or seaside –and listen to the tour. The polemical
now extends into the future. The repetition of this information through multiple performances
and media can be seen as problematic in the sense that the collective is framing the response of
the perceiver. What is perceived depends on what is being told. However, since the narrative is

65
Ibid.

48

fact based and research intensive, this type of framing conducive to excavating the site. Like
Lupo’s project, the Dictaphone Group was able to disturb the site in the hopes of bringing the
figure and the background together in a verifiable narrative. From here, many can respond to the
project in various models. In the current quarterly issue of Artezine featuring the Dictaphone
Group, many cultural practitioners tackle access to the sea in relation to their identities and
habitations.
The ongoing phases of this project reflect the vertical axis excavation method. The
collective actively responds to daily issues by finding historical information that has been hidden
and kept away from public access. This information is brought to light in three interventions
through live performance, print, and the digital, which allow a group of people to absorb and
respond to it in various modes. Further, this leads to the construction of space for a more open
narrative that takes multiple forms and continues to evolve consistently through time.

49

Conclusion
Where the edicts of a definable identity thrive there thrives as well a profound disjuncture
between place and time. Identity can build a place into a fortress in spite of temporal
contingencies, squarely in the face of history’s multi-directionality. Identity can also
saddle a preferred mythical timeline and trample irreplaceable built environments and
painstaking dwelling practices. Identity, in other words, is a reduction of the dynamic
and labile dyad of time/place into the haughty domination of one term over the other. The
dilemma seems inexorable: those who struggle for the defence of place often do so as if
places are pregnant with a vertical temporality, one that begins in their depth and
flourishes within their boundaries. Those who struggle to found in time a lingering
stability claim that another calendar, one that can turn backwards and then elsewhere, is
not only possible but has always been available.
Walid Sadek, Not, not Arab

Prior to arriving in Lebanon, my research lured me into fictional narratives, extensive
archives, and endless images. These drew me to the city like no other. They hypnotized me into
wanting to believe that these alternative narratives were true, and I hoped that some of them
were; they provided me with answers to a series of complicated questions that had been troubling
me my entire life in some form. They seeped into my environment that was geographically
distant and happened to muddle my perception of my surroundings.
While in Lebanon, a friend warned me that the conversations do not really change there.
They keep unearthing the same points in order to provoke the same groups of people, a method
of preserving separation. It took me a couple of months to mentally adjust to attempt to absorb
Beirut’s milieu, and I eventually felt the same numbness that many felt in the city (see figure 2).
I did not want to just be there, and had to find a way to put up with what was physically around
me.
It is no surprise that there is a market for the good of being good. In Lebanon, people
aren’t really that good –in the sense that they lack the collective notion of the common good.
They lack it until they have been criticized for lacking it. Or, maybe this manner has to do with

50

love. Love can be manipulated from its attractive role of romantic phenomenon to the driving
force of an economic power. I recently read an article that referred to Mao’s campaign in
opposition to Confucianism during the Cultural Revolution where Mao sought to remedy the
question, “Why anyhow should I love someone out of some universal principle when my own
family is suffering?” The article breaks down the context of love and claims,
Love within strong and well-managed infrastructural conditions is explained with
transcendental and highly personal terms—we are meant to be together, we are made for
each other. We have so much in common. We are a private commons within the society.
Love is allowed to be platonic and never opportunistic, and only the most wretched or
destitute people marry the child of a factory owner for that reason, for a passport, etc. But
when the trash man stops showing up, everything starts to marble and flip. Infrastructure
turns to love and love becomes infrastructure. The son becomes the trash man. True love
becomes a healthy family business, with children as its labor force. The economic
mobilization of love might explain how love can be used to territorialize close
communities. It doesn’t explain how much power these communities actually hold
through those very bonds, through their ability to dissolve the apparent necessity of
making alliances with power structures that don’t offer any immediate form of reciprocal
support simply because they are there.
66

The projects explored in my thesis transcend Lebanon’s traditional power structures by figures
that express an empathetic gesture, perhaps one of love.
Lack of public funding, few university art programs, one national private museum that
exhibits contemporary art, which also happens to be closed, all leave artists under duress and
open to benefit from the global arts initiatives.
67
Artists want to work in public space in
Lebanon, and sometimes when they cannot work locally they are obligated to work abroad,
producing works that respond to other geographical locations. These emerging artists enter
cities with a sense for a vertical axis of excavation. The audience is global, but the actions of the

66
Brian Kuan Wood, “Is it Love?,” E-flux, accessed March 10, 2014, http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/is-it-love/.
67
Stefan Tarnowski, “Lebanon,” ArtAsiaPacific: Almanac 2014, (2014), 139.

51

artists also contribute to local conversations. Unfortunately, the consequences of this global
condition disorient the local (see figure 18).

Figure 18. Passport, August 2013. Photographed by the author.

52

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract For generations, Lebanon has remained in a state of turmoil. Political corruption, transnational influences, and sporadic ruptures dominate the country. Daily life has become a public ritual of disoriented memorialization that somehow remains masked and burrowed within each city. In this thesis, I contextualize the method of vertical axis excavation as a cultural underpinning for spatial art projects manifesting in Lebanon’s contested public spaces. Interdependent on time and space, this method of excavation is a borrowed concept mentioned by Lebanese artist and writer, Walid Sadek, when describing the urgency for a vertical axis of excavation in the country’s public art projects. He observes vertical excavation as a function of Beirut’s first rumored public project, the 1992 beach installation by Ziad Abillama entitled Where Are We? While traversing through a counter‐public sphere, I explore the notion of excavation through a personal narrative as a means to weave together spatial art projects that employ vertical axis excavation, including Ziad Abillama’s beach installation and the more recent projects by Ilaria Lupo, Readily Reversible, 2012 and the Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine, 2012. Lastly, this thesis examines Beirut’s global positioning in order to understand the city’s urban condition and its critical relationship with global art production.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Ussef, Sasha (author)

Core Title Excavating Beirut: a study of time and space in Ziad Abillama, Ilaria Lupo, and the Dictaphone Group

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Planning / Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/28/2014

Defense Date 04/01/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Abillama,art,Beirut,chronotope,contemporary,curator,curatorial,Dictaphone,excavate,Excavation,group,Ilaria,Lebanon,Lupo,OAI-PMH Harvest,Planning,public,Sadek,space,spatial,Time,Urban,Walid,Ziad

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Tsatsos, Irene (committee member), Wallach, Ruth (committee member)

Creator Email sasha.ussef@gmail.com,ussef@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-385424

Unique identifier UC11295748

Identifier etd-UssefSasha-2424.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-385424 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-UssefSasha-2424.pdf

Dmrecord 385424

Document Type Thesis

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Rights Ussef, Sasha

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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