English

Drawing a parallel between two distinct moments in Beirut’s recent history, Marwa Arsanios’ research looks at the emergence of neoliberalism in Lebanon since the beginning of the 1990s, in the years immediately following the end of the Lebanese Civil War. On the one hand, Arsanios evokes the vivid memory of the 2015 garbage crisis, which continues to this day. After the closure of Naameh landfill outside of the city in summer 2015, thousands of tons of garbage filled the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, leading to public outcry and accusations of government corruption. On the other hand, she revisits the reconstruction project of Beirut’s city centre as the one moment that catalysed the growth of the real-estate dream which was based on land reclamation mostly from the rubble of destroyed buildings and garbage dumps. Starting from those situations, the video addresses the threatening long-term transformations that are brought about by the system of late capitalism, and the local reverberations of this system in Lebanon’s environmental and sociopolitical reality.

• Sektion Section: Artist in Focus. Marwa Arsanios
• Programm Programme: Programme 1