(work in progress/2023)

The project consists in designing a sound art machine centered around the year 1982 in Lebanon, which is the year of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an event that had an impact on my familial history, since, like many other families at the time, we had to be separated for a while. In the machine, I combine several layers of sounds –records I wish to make of familiar voices evoking the year 1982, news archives reporting the events back then, but also conversations around the current political and economic situation in Lebanon. What fuels this parallel between 1982 and the present is the phenomena of displacement, the way political events such as wars, invasions or political and economic collapses necessarily generate movements of displacements in all directions, temporary or permanent. The sound machine is thus a way to comment on a Lebanese present, one of massive migration due to the collapse of the state, while at the same time, anchoring this present political reality in a dimension related to memory, to a major past collective memory but also to personal and familial history. More specifically, what interests me is to investigate how the history of displacement is stored in the memory of the body, not only as a story that can be told but more as a set of sonorous qualities that capture displacement as a spatial experience. The starting point for this audio project, is a painting produced by my mother, in the context of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where many people living in the south were forced to be displaced in order to escape the bombardments. The title of the painting نهر الأولي or “The first river”, comes after the name of a river in the south of Lebanon and describes the long walking along the river, the movements of the people, and of their belongings.

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Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and Goethe-Institut e.V. Zentrale.