Le Merle

One thing we can do here is establish the difference between the two epochs. During the Hariri epoch, two temporalities coexisted. In scholar Fares Chalabi’s talk titled “Sectarian Image: Baghdadi ” ², he explains how, during the period of reconstruction, many artists were troubled by Hariri’s attempt to impose a temporality of peace while the war was being suppressed underground. As a result, artists began to explore the underground and capture the war that was not visible on the surface but weighed heavily beneath. Chalabi describes the images from that time as carrying a “virtual cut,” signifying a separation between the surface (peace) and the underground (war). Hariri presents only one fragment of Beirut. We never see him outside of Solidere, even though he drives from Koraytem to downtown. It’s as if he wanted to capture only the surface of peace, perhaps fearing the emergence of the underground. In the video, however, you can feel how the war creeps out: the last café he visited before his assassination, the conversation with the reporter mentioning political violence as if it belonged to the past, while in reality, it was a forewarning of his own future. With the collapse, Chalabi identifies the emergence of a new cut: the Global cut. This refers to the way the events of the collapse are felt everywhere. The electricity cuts are pervasive across Lebanon. After hearing Chalabi’s proposition, I started thinking about how to edit the footage of Beirut’s streets in darkness. Since the blackout was felt city-wide, I decided to gather different parts of Beirut into a single image in my video Floating Lights I. This is how my video negotiates a more nuanced image of Beirut than the one present in Hariri’s portrayal of downtown.

Lastly, I titled this series of videos Floating Lights not only to evoke a certain sensation but also to highlight the aesthetic difference between the Beirut that existed before and after the collapse, as described by Chalabi. Regarding the form of “balade” in the videos, I would also say that it is an effect of the collapse, where action comes to a standstill.

In a city hit by collapse, actions become those of survival rather than directed toward a future goal. If you need medication, you go to the pharmacy, or to several, and you might not find it. This breaks the regular sensori-motor circuit. You begin performing actions that don’t unfold regularly in space-time. You rush to turn off the heater, and at the same time, you want to make sure the lamp isn’t on, or check the elevator to see if you’re using government power or the generator’s. You might stock food in your fridge with ice beside it to prevent spoilage. In the total collapse of infrastructures, actions deviate from their original intent. At one point, I thought of accepting this impossibility of acting on the situation. I figured that if I doubled my daily life with an image, I could at least navigate through it. I began inventing exercises around the idea of strolling, choosing specific moments to stroll and record. It gave me a reason to move through the city amid the collapse. The beginning of the collapse was extremely difficult, and I was conscious that I couldn’t fight the context. I filmed what I saw.

When the power cuts began to intensify, I started exploring ideas related to editing. For instance, I’d be somewhere when a power cut caused a blackout. In the dark, people would shift a little, change position. When the lights came back, what you saw was the difference—the edit that had taken place. I needed to record the darkness caused by electricity cuts, to somehow capture this experience. I took a taxi, and when you ride through Beirut at the beginning of the collapse, it’s literally dark—dark times.

In the works, the darkness in the footage is
literal rather than metaphorical in the sense that if you overexpose the image, buildings, guards, urban wildlife and details will reveal themselves to you. When overexposing the video, noise takes over the image, pixels explode but then you can start seeing elements within, even if pixelated or completely distorted. In this sense, darkness as an aesthetic and political manifestation, is not seen as a lack, but a perceptive modality—maybe even a generative plastic means, as in saying, if there is no light, I can still capture the darkness. This blackness allowed for a literal edit that felt continuous, blending together all the dark from the different streets. It became a way of creating continuity in a discontinuous sectarian space. As I was developing the series, and since strolling became a practice unfolding in time and following a particular pace and the collapse is a dynamic term that equally evolves. In 2023, as a continuation, I strolled again with the aim of re-evaluating these conditions of collapse through another video. I felt the conditions of collapse had shifted, some lights appeared—darkness was still there—but with this shift the specificity of the image that could be produced was equally changed. Despite the presence of lights, I felt a curious phenomenon: the city wasn’t illuminated through the emergence of those lights; rather, the lights appeared as the only luminous thing in a pitch-black city. In other terms, it seemed that those lights weren’t lighting anything except for themselves. NGOs and politicians were installing lights, each street was lit differently according to its socio-political context, with different types of bulbs and varying temperatures. Some were powered by generators while others used solar panel technology. Some had blue lights, others yellow, and white lights appeared in isolated sections. This sporadic approach to lighting the street was evident in the captured videos through the different colors. What kind of edit could occur based on and through these colors? Whereas the blackout, even if only for a phase, was a common element to all, and with the street lights emerging again, colors become singular; meaning they can be appropriated by a faction or political party. With their non-unified look and various color temperatures, those lights reflected the fragmented and non-cohesive nature of the city’s fabric. This emergence creates not only a light that illuminates nothing, but a light that shines on itself, plunging the city into more darkness. This called for a montage that connects the colors as “pure, floating optical singularities,” despite the fact that it indicates the intervention of an NGO or a political figure. The return of lights in different colors created this condition, or optical modality, and the video was a continuum that shifts from cold colors to warm colors. In doing this, I thought I could challenge the appropriation of meaning behind the singularity. In this sense, the video reclaims colors for what they are, colors as colors and not as indicators. Thus, the orange bulbs installed on Charles Malek avenue by Lebanese NGO Rebirth Beirut can connect to other orange bulbs installed by the residents in Ras el Nabeh for example. I’m not simply seeking a critical position regarding this new form of capitalism, but trying to look out for its manifestations.

The work not only aims to document the colors of the streets in 2023, but also attempts to convey the experience of the collapse, as it was lived. What I mean by that is, when I began filming, I tried to meticulously cover as many streets as possible. I started producing tracings. Strolling and filming, adopted as a process, revealed with each stroll a new tracing of the city’s map. Each video filmed was a trajectory, a new tracing over the map. I could have stopped there and shown those tracing, but instead I decided to make a video that uses the tracing but also calls for something beyond information or data. First, and as we discussed above, colors nullify the geographical distances: Charles Malek Avenue is far from Paris Avenue, but in the video, they appear in the same shot, due to the presence of the color orange (perhaps referring to an originary schizophrenic map?). Second, in the video, or cartography, the possibility to capture a sensation reveals itself as a floating or a kind of lunar atmosphere, which is what we experienced during the collapse. What I was hoping for is to have gone beyond the map by proposing both a documentation of these colors as pure colors and also composing a video that uses the very material of the collapse, hence transfigure it and make it more bearable.