Beirut Bereft, a Sharjah Biennial publication

BEIRUT BEREFT, ARCHITECTURE OF THE FORSAKEN AND MAP OF THE DERELICT.

by Rasha Salti

Beirut Bereft, Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict is a collaboration between photographer Ziad Antar and writer Rasha Salti at SB09, that includes the production and publication of a book, as well as an exhibition of photographs.
To the image of its political, social and cultural scapes, Beirut’s urban landscape still bears markers, scars and vestiges of its seventeen-year long civil war, more than fifteen years after the cessation of violence. Bullet-riddled facades, charred walls, shell-gaped floors can be sighted often enough for one to ponder the weight of the toll of the war. These vestiges stand as glaring effigies of the tragedy, loss and pain of the experience of enduring a civil war. Their owners have not reclaimed or fixed them for a wide variety of reasons no doubt, but essentially they boil down to lack of means or motivation. Frozen snapshots of chapters in the war, yet to be resolved, yet to find closure.
Peppered through the city’s fabric are other buildings, unfinished, often in their bare concrete shell. While each one must have a story, at face value, they symbolize failure. Tucked between “functional” buildings they are cast out from attention and thus have slipped from visibility. These unfinished buildings were built in the 1970s,1980s, and 1990s, throughout the interrupted chapters of the war. As real-estate and construction became amongst the preferred avenue for making quick profits and laundering illicit funds, the wealth of warlords often consolidated in property.
These unfinished buildings, whose construction has usually stopped a few steps short of completion, were used during the war by militia fighters as temporary ‘encampments’, rooms were furnished with basic materiel to accommodate for sleep and meals. Higher floors and rooftops were used for sniping, facades and windows of lower floors were buttressed with sandbags and used for securing upper-hand in range of fire over the thoroughfares they accessed onto. If the structure of the building afforded underground levels, these were used as ‘prisons’, where ‘enemy’ militia fighters were stowed as well as kidnapped citizens. As the serial episodes of the war unfolded, the cast of protagonists changed, and the schisms of enmity and alliances changed, so did the map of control of the city’s neighborhoods. Unfinished buildings morphed into encampments and became strategic landmarks in the battles between militia groups seeking to expand their control. When the violence was halted and negotiations for the post-war peace accord negotiated, the fighters packed up and emptied the buildings. Their status as ‘landmarks’ was suddenly arrested, and they once again became the failed, unresolved projects imbricated within an urban fabric that was eager to move forward and thrive. These bare-faced concrete edifices, guarded by rusted fences, seem like the embodiment of metaphoric structures for the country’s power elite, its meshwork of relations and the destiny of capital that rules its recent history and present. Today they stand bereft, at once encasing sorrow, destitution and abandonment, surly evidence of failures, nagging reminders of what is systematically cast away from sight, representation and narrative.
To the image of its political, social and cultural scapes, Beirut’s urban landscape still bears markers, scars and vestiges of its seventeen-year long civil war, more than fifteen years after the cessation of violence. Peppered through the city’s fabric are other buildings, unfinished, often in their bare concrete shell. Tucked between “functional” buildings they are cast out from attention and have slipped from visibility. Built in the 1970s,1980s, and 1990s, throughout the interrupted chapters of the war, they were used during the war by militia fighters as temporary ‘encampments’, rooms were furnished with basic materiel to accommodate for sleep and meals, higher floors and rooftops were used for sniping, facades and windows of lower floors were buttressed with sandbags. These unfinished buildings morphed into encampments and became strategic landmarks in the battles between militia groups seeking to expand their control. When the violence was halted and negotiations for the post-war accord negotiated, the fighters packed up and emptied the buildings. Their status as ‘landmarks’ was suddenly arrested, and they once again became the failed, unresolved projects imbricated within a bustling urban fabric. Today, these bare-faced concrete edifices, sometimes guarded by rusted fences, stand bereft, at once encasing sorrow, destitution and abandonment, surly evidence of failures, nagging reminders of what is systematically cast away from sight, representation and narrative.