I Thought I knew Where I was Going Commissioned by Ashkal Alwan / Beirut, Lebanon / 2016
The video draws from an autobiographical relationship to five seemingly suspended and disparate modern sites built between 1934 and 1973, in and around Tripoli, Lebanon. Whether conceived for leisure or industrialization, these sites of varying scales were at the core of the modernization of the city. In the video, the sites constitute a spatial apparatus to negotiate individual memories with broader urban and social realities. They are examined as triggers of memory, as processes of discovery and analysis and more importantly, as a tool for negotiating different kinds of obsession. Oscillating between decay and signs of life, the video addresses the material form and the inherent vision of these modern projects in juxtaposition to one’s own, switching between past, present and various distances and experiences of perception. Taking the form of an essay film, the video moves from one site to the other while introducing through text different kinds of information that alters the image. Boundary lines shift between the personal and the urban, warscapes are linked to materiality and at the core of the investigation, obsessive behavior in/of space is what remains. The different sites are the following and they are listed according to their chronological appearance in the video: Tripoli International Fair, Ghandour factories (steel and sugar), Horeishe Beach resort, and IPC (Iraq Petroleum Company).
The Line Workshop by Ghassan Salhab, Ashkal Alwan HWP 2015-16 / Beirut, Lebanon
The video examines the eastern edge line of Beirut as a body (river/highway), dissecting its characteristics through repetition. It separates sound and image in two parts and in the third, brings them together to emphasize the absence of the river itself.
