“It is about the time that is not yet consumed in construction sites, the time before the space gets defined, named and determined or inhabited. Memories are like the echo of a stone that is still in movement.. “
In 2021, with the help of a fund from Zoukak theater, a theater institution based in Lebanon, I worked on an installation that also tackled the relations of the body memory to the place. In this project, I was interested in cement, or by how cement, as a purely material component with which I played as a child, carried the memory of Lebanese history, with its ongoing cycles of destruction and reconstruction –mountains are transformed into quarries to produce a cement that fuels a strong construction activity, which gets destroyed by a war-related event, which calls for reconstruction again and thus for more cement extraction. In this project, I generated a photographic material of construction sites, voice notes, and site-specific performances, to convoke how cement, as a material, captures, with an affective political resonance, the cycles of construction and reconstruction.
2021, Type Installation and Performance,
Funded by Zoukak’s Theatre, Presented at STATION, Beirut, Lebanon