Throughout history, dating back from the Civil War in 1975 up until the present day, Lebanese people might as well have coined the notion of “collective amnesia”. This project delves into the questions of memory, and how image and sound translate that remembrance and forgetfulness. It explores not only how the aesthetics of a crisis are not alien, but how a crisis is not visible: it is sonic. It is measured in the presence and absence of sound. And in our case, it is measured through resilience, a symptom of this collective amnesia. This project delves into what it sounds like to survive through resilience, and what it sounds like to survive through forgetting in the case of Lebanon.
“A city, perhaps like a person, remembers the most when confronted with its destruction. The aftereffects of trauma are a different story. They frequently give rise to individual and collective amnesias, along with the psychological symptoms that congeal when a traumatic experience is too painful for consciousness to address directly.” (Alan Gilbert, Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive, Part II: Testimony of Ghosts, 2016).
Over the past four years, Lebanon and its citizens have experienced more life-defining events than one would hope to experience in an entire lifetime. A nationwide revolution, a pandemic, an explosion that practically wiped away our entire city, an unprecedented economic crisis, inflation beyond comprehension, countless hours spent queuing at gas stations for whatever fuel was left, day-long power cuts, blinding poverty, life savings washed away by corruption, mass exodus of friends and families, shortages in medicine, and innumerable yet equally devastating hardships. Throughout this crisis, sound was momentous. Our victories were measured in its abundance, and our losses were measured in its absence- and at some point down the line- the disappearance of some of these sounds to make place for new ones; sounds of forgetfulness and of trying to move on while things are still going to hell. After a deep dive into my audio and visual archives from the past few years in Lebanon and the footage I have recorded and saved, I pose the following questions to bring my project to life: How do I recall the birth and course of a crisis, being physically so far away? What does resilience, and a lack thereof, sound like? How do I listen to a crisis?
The evidence of a crisis does not follow the same representation as other forms of violence. Therefore, I am looking at the entanglement between images, spaces, and sonorities of a crisis to explore the subtleties of slow violence in Lebanon.
I will rely on the combination and intersection of an assemblage of media technologies to unpack the condition of this crisis that escapes representation. This is through the use of my skills as a photographer and through the overlap of images with my auditory archives and a spectrogram to highlight the sonic elements of these photographs. Furthermore, it is through this method of photography and collage that I am reconstructing that amnesia and resilience.
In my field of work, I will document several sights in London, some of which may seem random and that I happen to stumble upon in my daily life, which have specific resonances with the structure of the crisis in Lebanon in my mind. Through these images, I will highlight the sonic element using a spectrogram, as well as an audio recording from my archives through a QR link. The images and sounds will be divided into two sections, one alluding to survival through resilience amid a crisis, and the other alluding to survival through forgetting.
