Unraveling: Act I (SCENE BREAKDOWN) [BLACK SCREEN: VOICE-OVER] I don’t question the originality of the invitation’s conceit and the thrill of being invited to contribute; however, when the email from Ahmad and Haig assigning the word “qalaq” to my contribution arrived, I nearly screamed with rage. It landed in my inbox during the Second Confinement […]
Rubble (ر.د.م)
Backfilling (Radm) as a Process of Rewriting History [Burying – backfilling – obliterating – erasing – blinding – silencing] A farmer once recounted to me that the word “kfar”, found in the names of many villages (such as KfarKila, KfarNabrakh, and others), stems from the belief that the act of planting seeds is blasphemous (kufr): when the […]
Beast (و.ح.ش)
“How well can we ever know people who have lived through civil wars? How much can we ever really know about the violence and destruction, the losses, the devastation? The overpowering fear they must feel every day? Can we ever really understand how they are transformed, which things change inside them, and which things harden? […]
A Vicious Viscous Matter Seeping into the Souls of a Ravaged City
It is said that one’s self-image differs from the view of others. It is also said that the further reality strays from an ideal, the more the likelihood of an existential crisis intensifies and the blurrier one’s self-image becomes. The monster within awakes as the self dissociates from the lived reality. Unable to live in […]
Can Disaster Be Made Legible? A Conversation with Forensic Architecture’s Samaneh Moafi
On August 4, 2020, Beirut’s central neighborhoods were obliterated off the map following the detonation of some of the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored at a port warehouse. Within a two-minute timeframe, two hundred lives were lost, seven thousand individuals sustained mild to life-threatening injuries, and over three hundred thousand were […]
Number, Price, and Knowledge
A century and a half ago, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq reminded us that Arabic words were formed according to a system of derivation and paronymy. Words decline into other words, all emanating from a root with which they share a conceptual connection. To think about words in this way is to incessantly map out the web […]