Seeking Traces by Fernanda Carlovich

Seeking traces A search for the Arab Image Foundation in the city of Beirut

A search for the Arab Image Foundation in the city of Beirut Collecting Architecture Territories prof. Mark Wasiuta Fernanda Carlovich

cover Super-Private Scenes by Paula Roush. Retrieved from: www.msdm.org.uk.

Seeking traces

This work departs from a personal failure: on my travel to Beirut, I couldn’t visit the Arab Image Foundation nor even talk to any of its founders and workers. The institution was closed for visitors and researchers and engaged in the organization of a cultural strike with several institutions in Lebanon in support of the current Revolution. What first seemed like a good reason to abandon the idea of this publication became its central motivation. When reflecting on my experience of discovering Beirut for the first time, I’ve encountered the AIF elusive character and collection by accident several times. The AIF differentiates itself from the majority of contemporary private institutions, for its activities broke with the limits of the institution’s headquarters in the bohemian Gourand Street, had a fundamental role in shaping the cultural scene of Beirut, and spread its impact through different territories and practices. In the context of the political uprising taking place in Lebanon, this project will address the multiple operational spaces of speech and action of an institution outside the limits of its building. Instead of an attempt to map out the territories of the AIF extensively, the work will focus on three specific encounters that happened by chance on my visit to Beirut—each of which departing from a personal report to discuss characteristics of the foundation and its dialogue with the act of collecting in a broader manner. Seeking Traces is understood, first, as the personal hunt for the institution across Beirut, and second, a reflection on the importance of the marks in the objects collected by the AIF: if the blurry limits of AIF’s territory are merged with the blurry limits of the city itself, the traces in the negatives and photographs—evidence of the passage of time and conflict survival—are likewise present in the buildings and streets of the city of Beirut. Closely related to the impacts of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, the marks on buildings, photographs and negatives are the marks on that people, and therefore represent them. 5

A difuse institution

The Arab Image Foundation (AIF) is a non-profit independent association that forges “new pathways for photography and image practices.”1 Founded in 1997 by the artists Akram Zaatari, Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad, it has been collecting photography since then and accumulated over 600.000 items used in artistic, research and archiving practices on Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Argentina, and Senegal. Positioning themselves in the cloudy area between an artistic collective and a preservation institution, the AIF understands photography as a multi-layer medium, where it’s possible to retrieve information from the image depicted but also within the traces of deterioration and signs of the lifetime of the object photography itself. This valorization of the photographs’ physical traces led the institution to develop what they call “preventive conservation,” working to minimize any future deterioration of the items but not restoring them for aesthetic reasons. The AIF considers damage and deterioration to be important layers of the object’s memory. One of the few institutions with knowledge in photography preservation in the Middle East, they act beyond its own archive, helping other collections and organizing courses for the dissemination of this scientific knowledge.

1. “Arab Image Foundation.” Accessed September 25, 2019. http:// arabimagefoundation.com

The foundation focuses on collecting amateur photography— from family albums to anonymous records—that not necessarily have an intrinsic economic value, their value lies in the bulk of images that, collectively, illustrate the history and lives of the Arab World from within. The acts of collecting and disseminating these images are defying questions of authorship and the comitment with some sort of “truth.” For example, with the family albums in the collection, the simple fact of displacing those images from their original contexts—where people 9

had names, stories, and affective identities—to a controlled environment of a cool storage room erases some of the layers of meaning of the objects. It seems that the institution is willing to tell the whole history of the photographic object from the moment it was printed to the second before it entered to the collection as if the storage room could freeze that object from its future. In that sense, Zaatari understands the act of collecting as “the tearing away of the collected object from its living context.”2 On the other hand, the role of preservation, cataloguing and dissemination of the images—through the institution’s space in Beirut, their online digital catalog and participation in broader cultural exhibitions and events—allow those images to travel to other places and to be part of a broader chain of knowledge production and reasoning that can or cannot relate to the personal stories behind the images. The anonymous faces that populate the AIF’s collection become characters from various histories through the appropriation of these images, challenging the blurry limits between documentary and fiction. According to Zaatari, the ambitions of the institution shifted with the years from an initial intention to reconstruct the history of photography in the region to understanding the institution as a project of writing a history of the region through photography. Some of the images of the collection have a detailed history, but others just offer a little glance of a time and a space. Sometimes the photos act as documents to specific research and others they serve as a more generic illustration, an icon, or a fictional scenery of a time. Besides, the information of the images overcome the intentions of its photographer, once incidental objects captured can provide unexpected valuable information on the period.

This contrasts between preservation and use; document and fiction; chance and imagination complicates the archiving of those documents and collaborates with its understanding as a living entity, one that is continuously reinventing itself to make room for new uses and stories. AIF acts in an expanded field, not only because its collection is used as the basis for the artistic production of a Lebanese scene, but also because each of the objects has infinite layers of possibilities and interpretations. Moreover, the decision to concentrate the institution’s efforts on its collection, without having an exhibition space, connects the AIF’s internal production necessarily with external spaces for dissemination without losing a clear institutional identity. The diffuse nature of AIF questions what an institution is, where it operates, and what are its territories of influence.

2. Adami, Elisa. “History and Photographic Memory - Akram Zaatari, 2019.” Journal of Visual Culture, August 14, 2019.

01. PlanBEY

When I arrived in Beirut, after being the only foreigner in the immigration line, I emailed my contact at AIF, who politely refused to meet me. I decided to visit the institution in person since it was on the same street as I was staying. Walking down Gourand Street for the first time, reminded me of Mona Hatoum impressions of Sao Paulo. The Lebanese artist said with excitement that she felt at home with the city’s chaotic transit, decayed buildings, and uneven walkways. I felt her—and felt at home as well. I knocked on the door of number 337 on the fourth floor of the Zoghbi Building at least three times without an answer. Embracing my early failure, I went down the building and across the street to see a little store of tourist souvenirs. PlanBEY wasn’t only a gift shop, but a small publisher for Lebanese artists “rediscovering their journey in the city, and this city through their journey,” as their showcase suggests. The store combines small exhibition space, posters, postcards, publications, and editorial works, together with traditional Lebanese products like orange blossom water bottles, handcrafted soaps, and tapestry. I was caught by a series of postcards with photographs of the Civil War. They were taken by artist Fouad Khory, one of the founders of AIF. It felt weird to me, with a tourist mindset, to buy a postcard of a building destroyed 40 years before. I would learn from my time in Beirut the importance of that marks left on buildings.

< The collection of Mahmoud Merjan’s grandmother photographs that inspired HODA. Retrieved from: stories. arabimagefoundation.org.

This attention to traces—in images and buildings—was part of the language of many works on display in the small shop on Gourand Street, including the Super-Private Scenes, by Paula Roush. The work consisted of a six-volume publication of photographs taken in the late 1940s and 1950s by an anonymous author, sourced from the Arab Image Foundation. The photos themselves were beautiful, and the accordion fold spine creates 13

multiple ways of combining those bodies, allowing them to interact and adjust so long after the pictures where taken. For some reason, it reminded me of Derrida’s notion of the archive as a future-oriented entity, rather than a combination of closed historical facts. Since the absence of information on their stories, frees the artist to create a new narrative for them, exploring their performative potential. Another publication, HODA by Mahmoud Merjan, arose from the artist’s discovery of a box full of torn photos from his grandmother’s apartment. He explains that many of the eliminated figures were from her immediate family, most notably his grandfather, whom she divorced twice. Her parents remained untouched (for the most part), as did her children, and herself. Merjan is not using the AIF collection, but his work evokes the institution somehow. Especially when thinking about Akram Zataari’s own artistic practice, that is so interwoven with the ambitions and character of the collection. I later discovered that the artist works inside AIF as a documentation specialist, which explains the resonance of his work with the institution’s ethos.

< Super-Private Scenes by Paula Roush. Retrieved from: www.msdm.org.uk.

< Akram Zaatari Objects of Study, Studio Practices, Colllection AIF. Retrieved from: arabimagefoundation.com > HODA by Mahmoud Merjan Retrieved from: stories. arabimagefoundation.org.

02. The Photo Mario Project

On 29 October, Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced the resignation of his government after 13 days of intense popular pressure. The city turned calmer and empty, and I decided to leave Mar Mikhaël and walk south along the former Green Line. During the 15 years of the Lebanese Civil War, the demarcation line, separating Christians to the east from Muslims to the west, was a territorial division affected by growing vegetation. With the end of the war, the physical boundaries were dissolved, but the divisions remain entrenched in Lebanese society. As expected, many of the buildings on this borderline were abandoned by their former owners and occupied by troops from both sides. Among them, the well-known “Yellow House” that now hosts Beit Beirut was used throughout the war as a sniper’s nest for a right-wing Christian militia. Beit Beirut, or the “house of Beirut” is an ongoing project of a museum and cultural center “dedicated to the memory of the city of Beirut,” that involves various national and international, private and public interests, and perhaps for this reason, has an ambiguous character and difficulties of implementation. Although the house was closed that day, a quick chat with the security guard at the door allowed me to enter and see the exhibits with the lights off. The absence of energy wasn’t a problem at all—the house that was airy in its original design became highly penetrable after years of occupation in the war.

< Negatives from the Photo Mario Project exhibition.

In its semi-ruin state, Beit Beirut was filled with photographs of other turn-down buildings, in a meta-representation of the traces left by the war. It seemed a bit excessive, and at times even scenographic, the careful positioning of wreckage between the building’s circulation spaces. Youssef Haidar, the architect in charge of the building’s renovation, believes that “the traces of time, war and life spreading over 92 years” constitute Beit 19

Beirut’s “permanent museum collection.”3 Whether marks of a violent past or objects to be appreciated as part of a museum collection, the huge chunks of ochre-coloured sandstone fallen from the walls and bullet-riddled facades seem to share the logic of an environment frozen in time, as if inside a cool storage room.

< Beit Beirut building. 3 “Beit Beirut.” Retrieved from www.youssefhaidar.com

One of the exhibitions in view at the building was the Photo Mario Archive Project, an initiative by Mona El-Hallak. The architect and heritage-preservation activist was the one leading the fight for the expropriation of the Yellow House and consolidation of Beit Beirut. The exhibition tells the story of a photographic studio, Photo Mario, located on the ground-floor of the building. When rediscovering the building after the end of the war, Hallak found over 10,000 negatives of different formats and 21

some prints scattered under dust. With help from the Arab Image Foundation, the negatives were cleaned and restored—following the premises of their preventive conservation technique—and placed in public view so that the stories behind those faces were rediscovered. Unlike the fictitious character of the AIF archive apropriations, in the case of the Photo Mario project there is an intention to find the origins, names, and facts of people depicted on the negatives, as the wall text suggests: “The negatives are time capsules. They represent at once the prewar era of their timestamp: the time of resilience when the studio was abandoned both during and after the war; the time when they were found, collected, and sorted into an archive; and the time still to come when they have a story, when they are identified by the people who recognize themselves or their family, friends and neighbors.”4 In the Lebanese quest for reconnection with a prewar past, photo studios emerge as rich collections of faces that have known a different reality of the nation. Undoubtedly, AIF’s action to search for this type of practice around the Arab world has attracted the attention of other similar initiatives and reinforced the importance of these objects. The typical and sometimes bureaucratic record of individuals and families creates a strong bond for those, like Hallak, concerned with re-establishing a collective memory of the country. Even if the artist wants to discover the identity of Photo Mario’s clients, it is clear that some gaps will exist and could only be filled with the imagination of the collection’s interlocutors. Not by chance, somewhere around the exhibition, there is a small note that says: “Choose a photo and come back with a story to photomarioproject@gmail.com,” an invitation to collaborate with stories, not necessarily facts.

> The Photo Mario Project exhibition at Beit Beirut. 4 Mona El-Hallak. The Photo Mario Project exhibition. Wall text.

03. Instagram and Strike

On October 17 2019, the Lebanese government announced new plans for taxes on gasoline, tobacco, and online phone calls through apps such as Whatsapp. It was the last straw for the already unsatisfied Lebanese population, dealing with economic crisis that exposed an endemic corruption scenario, with legislation such as the sectarian rule, securing the dominant ruling class. The Lebanese Revolution began in central Beirut and soon spread throughout the country. With consecutive days of protests, the closing of schools and banks, the population took the streets to peacefully cry out for political reform. Many of the revolutionary claims are related to the post-war social and political instabilities that persisted from the 1990s and still impact Lebanese society on a daily basis. Eight days after the beginning of the protests, the Arab Image Foundation released a statement on open strike in the cultural sector. They wrote: “In solidarity with and participation in the popular uprising taking place across Lebanon […], we the undersigned cultural organizations and structures collectively commit to Open Strike,” and added: “Arts and Culture are an integral part of every society, and the expanded space of creative and critical thought is imperative in times of upheaval.” finishing with: “We are part of a national, regional and global desire to dream, think, fight for, enact and embody radical imaginations leading to structural and systemic change. See you on the streets.”5 < Retrieved from AIF Instagram account. 5 Statement on Open Strike in the Cultural Sector in Lebanon. Retrieved from: stories. arabimagefoundation.org

Even after indicating the strike, AIF remained active on their Instagram account. As a difuse institution, one could understand Instagram as another one of the spaces for dissemination of the AIF’s activities. The institution’s decision to continue its activities through Instagram suggests that this is a media apart from its other institutional spaces of action. I was especially struck by 25

the photo galleries created as representations of the revolution. With around 5 photos per post, these galleries bring together photographs, amateur or professional, with only the indication of their authorship—a curious fact coming from an institution that defy questions of authorship and anonymity. A recurring image in these galleries is that of the Egg, on Martyr Square. A much less edited version of an architecture arrested by the violence of the war, the unfinished cinema built in 1965, was occupied by the population to promote talks, discussions, and parties as part of the Revolution program. The building conquest as a symbol of the movement shows the tight connection of the population to this incomplete and charged modernity represented by such architecture. Images of this building and so many other representations of the Revolution traveled the world through social media, as the movement has a strong visual appeal. With all citizens as participants, witnesses, and spreaders of this content, I wonder how the AIF differentiates itself from all other profiles: are they curating essential images? Using their visibility to publicize other accounts?

< Against Photography by Akram Zaatari.Retrieved from AIF website.

These questions are especially relevant today, as AIF just launched its online platform, which, like the Instagram account, remained active throughout the strike. According to the director Marc Mouarkech, rather than acting simply as an archive, the foundation intends the website to “engage people in the documentation process—for it to become a collective, participatory activity.” To some extent, a collaborative platform for the dissemination of images is very close to other social media, such as Instagram itself. In a recent work named Against Photography, Akram Zaatari erases all image content from a piece of photographic paper, revealing only the traces of the passage of time in the matter. In the face of the digital circulation 27

of images during the Revolution and AIFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recurring concern with reading traces that go beyond the image depicted in the photograph, I question: what are the marks that a digital image carries? How to rethink collection and preservation in light of photographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current social function?

< Retrieved from AIF Instagram account. > Cellphones at the Revolution

Intentional dissonance

Instead of an extensive mapping of the AIF territory, I hope that these personal encounters reveal a little bit of the institution’s work and its territory of influence in a broader manner. In an recent interview, Zataari’s affirms: “I see the AIF as a radical alternative to both the museum and the archive. The AIF should’ve been able to bury these models and erect over them something else that is lively, useful, less of a monument and more of a social practice involving the art world and academia.”6 The diffuse character of the AIF seems to be less of a chance and more of a project. A project to reinvent the shape and social function of a cultural institution, rather than follow the models set by other nations that continue to be naturally mimicked in various contexts of the Global South. With the function of rewriting a national history through the voices that emerge from the images collected in the archives, AIF ends up rewriting a definition of an institution. An institution that exists beyond the museum’s boundaries—between the object’s marks and the territories of the city in which it spreads.

6 Zaatari, Akram. Against Photography. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2017.

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