Ietedal Alkarssifi in a poppy field, 1989. by Diab Alkarssifi.

"1984 was a bloody year in Lebanon, with heavy fighting in Beirut.  Bekaa Valley was under the control of the Syrian army, but despite this and despite the war it was not affected by the fighting.  Life went on as normal. We were on a trip to the waterfalls in Yammouneh, near Baalbeck… I took most of the pictures spontaneously, without thinking, and then later, I see the beauty of the photograph.  I don’t like to reminisce about these days because they were too beautiful."

- Diab Alkarssifi, A Lebanese Archive

The lines above are excerpted from a conversation taking place between Lebanese émigré Diab Alkarssifi and artist Ania Dabrowska, with whom he is working to create his photographic archives. Together, they are looking through some of the photographs that have traveled with him to London, where he immigrated in 1993 and now resides. The history that is being described is that of the Lebanese Civil War, a violent conflict that embroiled the small Mediterranean country from 1975 to 1990, causing tremendous destruction and loss of life. Though this conversation happens 30 years after the day these pictures were taken, it is evident that the images, and the memories they invoke, still have an effect on Alkarssifi. They are representative of a particular time, when, among the indefinite violence of another bloody year, a respite could exist during which friends laugh, drink, dance, and enjoy each other’s company; when, as he says, “life went on as normal.” The beauty of such a day seems to impress itself upon the mind as an artifact of an irretrievable time.

What Alkarsiffi’s statement seems to illustrate is the ability of “beautiful” memories to evoke the most pain, in their capacity to measure, through precisely this beauty, the full magnitude of what has been lost. This is one of the textures of remembrance in exile; the seeming inseparability of pleasure from melancholy. In this sense, the archives provide the space for an emotional exchange. As the remaining embodiment of those days, these photographs transform Alkarssifi’s archives into a receptacle for the life that existed before, the site of interaction with the fragmentary past. Their power exists in the space between the image and the memory of its viewer.

As a conflict that still eludes full explanation and provides no clear outcomes or gains, and for which “no agreed account... has ever been implemented in the national education system” (Joanne Choueiri, The Missing Album, 2015), the Lebanese Civil War remains unresolved, and it is perhaps this continued lack of closure that explains the turn of many Lebanese artists to archives, in attempting to address a period with such a profound and continuing impact on the lives of Lebanese people. Due to their claims as repositories of cultural heritage and “history,” archives are attractive to artists, who approach them with a variety of intentions, whether for research, criticism, or in the hopes that they will become sites of understanding, repair, and reparations. Out of necessity, artists have also been at the forefront of their creation. The Arab Image Foundation, the most well-known repository of photographs in the Middle East, was created in 1997 by photographers Akram Zatari, Fouad Elkoury, and Samer Mohdad to address the lack of photographic archives in the Middle East and the disappearance of those that did exist.

Though the official span of the Lebanese Civil War is placed at 1975-1990, it is part of a longer and more complex history that reverberates to this day.  Like so many other areas in the Middle East and Africa, it includes the legacy of a European colonial mandate (French, in this case) that, in creating administrative borders, confined a land that had never previously existed as such to the European concept of a nation-state.  As well, a policy of religious separation by the French was codified into a constitution that assigned different political offices based on religious affiliation. As various factions battled one another during the war, the country was also exploited as the site of geopolitical maneuvering and conquest by various external actors, such as Israel, the United States, and the United Nations, which further inflamed and prolonged the conflict. The history of space, as it is marked out along territorial lines, is an indelible part of this story. After the start of the war, the issue of space pervaded Beirut as the city was separated into a predominantly Christian East and predominantly Muslim West, with a literal Green Line running its length.

In addition to space in a geopolitical sense, issues of everyday physical space permeated the lives of Lebanese people.  Awareness of one’s surroundings became a necessity as the city was deconstructed into a maze of passable and impassable streets.  Space became suspect as those venturing into public areas were forced to contend with sniper fire, car bombs, air raids, and ground invasion.  The geography of the home changed profoundly, as well, as families sealed windows and rooms facing the street and retreated to the interiors of their houses and apartments, or used certain rooms as bomb shelters.  Under these circumstances, the old meanings and expected functions of a space experienced a subversion that made the normal rhythms of life impossible to pursue, within or outside of the home. As an interviewee in one artist’s project states: “Of course, we never used the bathroom, since we stayed in it.  So this bathroom was no longer a bathroom in the true sense of the word. It became a space of hiding” (Joanne Choueiri, Bathroom Series from I did not grow up in a war, 2015).

In the face of so complete a rupture, Lebanese artists have turned to archives not as a site of any overarching truth, but as a starting point from which to explore the many facets of life during wartime.  Their projects show as strong an investment in the form and implications of archives themselves as in the contents of any given one; artists engage with archives as a process rather than a body of static documents.  This process of inquiry and commemoration is a reaction to the idea of archives as places where cultural memory is enshrined and made available (or not) through a variety of mechanisms. An implicit understanding of archives as sites of power inspires a variety of strategies: some interrogative, some confounding, and others striving towards inclusion.  

With this in mind, I decided to look at three projects and their approaches to archives: an attempt to collect a body of photographs documenting the domestic lives of Lebanese people during wartime, an artist’s intentional subversion of the archival form and its claims on history and truth, and the journey of a Lebanese photographer’s body of work as it is made “visible” and archived through the intervention of a strategically positioned third party.

Fictional neighbourhood plan with safe connections, I did not grow up in a war, 2015. Joanne Choueiri

The Missing Album

Given the experience of Lebanese people during wartime, it’s unsurprising that some Lebanese artists have focused their projects explicitly towards dealing with issues of space. This appears clearly in the work of Joanne Choueiri, an architect and artist whose projects explore the experience of Lebanese people in their homes during the war. The Missing Album, in particular, is an ongoing project that “attempts to gather an archive of photographs of Lebanese people living/hiding in their houses during the Beirut Civil War (1975-1990)... The individual memories merge into a collective memory questioning the state of the home and its interior during the war, especially with the absence of an equipped bomb shelter…. The project thus focuses on these stories of survival when the house becomes the only space of safety” (Joanne Choueiri, The Missing Album, 2015).

In doing so, The Missing Album attempts to address a gap in documentation that exists around an entire genre of experience during the war. At its core, it deals with highly personal subject matter that stands in contrast to the public urban spaces accessible to journalists, police, and war photographers. In response to the images of the spectacular destruction of streets and buildings that make up the official narrative of the war, Choueiri tries to introduce a narrative that functions in the realm where Lebanese people experienced it most intimately: the home. I found this project interesting in its focus on the human scale and on war as the cumulative lived experience of individuals. It also raises the question of how we define survival: as the bare minimum quality of staying alive, or as the ability to continue the traditions and ways of living that sustain us emotionally, in the face of catastrophic disruption?

Since Choueiri is interested in shades of interior experience, the evidence that she is looking for is often incidental and exists around, rather than as, the subject of the image.  After all, family snapshots generally document happy moments rather than sad or stressful ones. In such cases, we need to perform a close reading of the image and to know enough to interpret the clues in what we are seeing: perhaps a meal spread out in the foyer rather than the dining room, or bottles of saved water stacked behind a smiling child.  Sometimes, however, the situation is clearly evident, as when the camera captures a group of people sitting around a structural supporting column in a parking lot, or a mother bathing her child in a bucket.

The personal nature of the material also presents a challenge to collecting. As opposed to photographs disseminated by official agencies, the material Choueiri is looking for is dispersed across personal photo albums, in closets, or does not exist at all.  The considerations associated with developing film in a pre-digital age, the everyday preoccupations that don’t leave time for taking photographs, or the simple desire not to photograph are all factors that make this material different than that of an agency that creates and stores photographs as a core aspect of its function.  In addition, such photographs often have incomplete or no metadata attached to them, relying instead on the memory of the creator, which is transferred orally during the act of describing or recollecting. In such cases, Choueiri comes up with an inventive solution, proposing to take the “safe room” itself as a subject, photographing the room as it currently exists and combining it with the recorded testimony of those who survived in it.  

The framing of this artistic project as an “attempt to gather an archive,” then, creates a space and an impetus for these materials to come together and also the provides the framework through which they can be seen as constituting an addition to the history of the war, in this way leveraging the power of the archival designation.

Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves. Atlas Group Archive.

The Atlas Group Archive

If The Missing Album is interested in creating archives, the The Atlas Group Archive takes the archive itself as a subject. The Atlas Group is a fictional organization created by Lebanese artist Walid Ra'ad and its “archive” is at once an artwork in itself and a home for Ra'ad’s body of work around the Lebanese Civil War. Artworks created by Ra'ad are re-dated, placed within the archive, presented as archival material, and attributed to a cast of invented donors or characterized as found documents. This intentional misattribution plays with the idea of provenance and authorship, and the meticulous methods through which the artworks are created and reframed create a sense of authenticity that only enhances this disconnect, once the ruse is discovered. What is interesting about this project is its recognition of the effectiveness of the archive as a tool of inquiry-- and the effectiveness of capitalizing on the archive’s reputation for truthfulness as a framework for subterfuge. This framework allows Ra'ad to interrogate the creation of history and probe the boundaries of the document, both in its definition and in its capacity to capture and convey violence and trauma.

The Atlas Group Archive is viewable online. Couched in a sparse interface, plain sans serif font, and the administrative language of file types, it seems fairly straightforward until one gets a closer look at its organizational scheme. The further we explore, the more the archive opens up like a rose, offering its strange and melancholy insights. For example, the collection of a Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the Lebanese wars,” includes 226 notebooks and 2 short films “bequeathed to The Atlas Group for analysis, preservation, and exhibition.” Dr. Fakhouri’s eminence as a historian sets up certain expectations for his material. Browsing his collection, however, reveals a mix of materials that include self portraits during a trip to Europe and a notebook of horse racing results and notes gathered as part of an elaborate gambling ritual undertaken every Sunday by a group of Lebanese historians, during which “Marxists and Islamists bet on races one through seven, Maronite nationalists and socialists on races eight through fifteen."

Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Missing Lebanese Wars, Notebook Volume 72. The Atlas Group Archive.

One of Dr. Fakhouri’s films, entitled “Miraculous beginnings,” is characterized as a document.  We are told that “Dr. Fadl Fakhouri was in the habit of carrying two 8mm film cameras with him wherever he went.  On one camera he exposed a frame of film every time he thought the wars ended.” The result is a roughly 13-second film that is void of continuity, in which images flash almost too quickly to be processed.  The contrast between the intensely process-oriented method of the film’s creation and the dense cacophony of the finished result seems to reflect, by extension, the nature of the search for conclusions about the war. Interestingly, by capturing this ritual onto a concrete medium, the “document” seems to transform what is essentially a subjective experience- the mistaken belief that the war had ended, the desire for an end- into a documentary form.

Some materials directly address questions of narration and awareness of an archival audience. During the video testimony of Souheil Bachar, “the only Arab man to have been detained with the western hostages kidnapped in Beirut in the 1980s,” Bachar appears to art-direct the video of his own testimony from within the video itself, asking that his statement, delivered in Arabic, be translated into “the official language of the country where the tapes are screening… I also ask that you dub my voice with a neutral-toned female voice. Subtitle what I am currently saying. 

A hand points to an engine ejected from a vehicle used as a car bomb. My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair. The Atlas Group.

Let the subtitles appear on a black background, or if you prefer, use a blue background [the background fades to blue]… blue just like the Mediterranean.” These instructions for presenting the testimony become a part of the testimony itself, making the video a “document” that specifies the criteria for its own dissemination. They also manifest an awareness of the role of format and presentation in creating appeal and credibility, as reflected in the preoccupation with translations and a “neutral-toned female voice” as translator.

The Atlas Group Archive is full of mysteries and impossible miracles. Orphan photographs in shades of blue, discovered under heaps of rubble, reveal latent images of deceased men and women when they are analyzed in laboratories; a Lebanese army intelligence officer videotapes the sunset each day instead of his assigned target. Ra'ad also works with archival photographs, repurposing them into narratives of his devising, and displays a cataloger’s precision- or so it would seem- in collecting bullets and recording their locations of impact, manufacturers’ marks, and countries of origin. Such is his attention to form and detail that we accept this explanation until we realize the impossibility, due to the sheer volume of firepower used during the war, of such a task. We are never entirely sure where the fiction ends, and it is in this liminal space of unknowing that we suspend our ordinary expectations of historical narrative and open ourselves to different possibilities of interpretation. This is part of the beauty of the archive.

Om Ashad Qara, Siefa Village, Lebanon, 1984. by Diab Alkarssifi

A Lebanese Archive: From the Collection of Diab Alkarssifi

As the photographic collection of Lebanese émigré Diab Alkarssifi, A Lebanese Archive is concerned with migratory spaces and spaces of memory. In terms of its background, however, it serves as one example of the way in which archival spaces, or spaces of archival recognition, are established around a body of material. It is a vast collection, spanning a hundred or so years of Lebanese history. My main interest in this collection, however, concerns the dynamics of the project itself: the process by which an individual’s photographs were “discovered,” interpreted, and deposited in an archival repository.

The trajectory of Alkarssifi’s photographs is a long one. Born in Baalbeck (in eastern Lebanon) in 1951, he became a journalist and photographer for Lebanese newspapers Al Nidaa and Al Akhbar. By the time he left Lebanon for London in 1993, he had collected “around 27,000 photographs, including his personal albums, work assignments and collected photographs from friends, family and neighbors,” which covered a period of time spanning back to the late 1890s. In 2010, Ania Dabrowska was SPACE artist-in-residence at an Arlington hostel for homeless people in Camden, London, where Alkarssifi was living. The scope of her residency brought her into contact with Alkarssifi, who eventually brought to her “two big laundry bags that to my surprise were filled with negatives, transparencies, and photographic prints” (Ania Dabrowska, A Lebanese Archive, 2015). So began a partnership of sorts in which Alkarssifi’s photographs became the foundation of Dabrowska’s artistic practice. With Dabrowska’s connections, this has resulted in a published book, a series of exhibits and talks, and the eventual deposit of the photographs with the Arab Image Foundation, back in Lebanon.

Muntaha and Nihad Caracalla after a summer swim, Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1989. by Diab Alkarssifi

Ali Shukr and Khalid Salha at a May Day picnic, Wardeen Area, near Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1976. by Diab Alkarssifi

I was initially drawn to the project by the beauty and variety of the photographs in Alkarssifi’s collection. I began to explore, cognizant of the power dynamic inherent to the circumstances around the project, making note of details like Dabrowska’s name in the author field of a catalog record for the book, with Alkarssifi relegated to an added entry field; a statement in the project website  that “the archive of Diab Alkarssifi’s collection will be curated by Ania Dabrowska with the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut;” Dabrowska’s copyright attached to the images along Alkarssifi’s; use of phrases such as “came into my hands” and  “chance encounter” by Dabrowska to describe what seems to have been an intentional strategy by Alkarssifi; and so on.

I was struck as well by a comment made by Dabrowska in reference to the way in which information about the photographs might change with Alkarssifi’s memory of the events: that “until it was officially processed into an archive, the accuracy of information was a shifting territory.” As an archivist, I was intrigued by this statement and the trust it seems to place in the archive as a guarantor of accuracy; an enthusiasm that, for me personally, is tempered by an awareness of the many impositions of time, money, labor, and resources into archival work and processing work in particular. I was also concerned by the implications of such a statement: if the “archival” body is seen as authoritative, this would seem to shift authorship of the collection from Alkarssifi, with his messy laundry bags of prints and negatives, onto Dabrowska, the mediator and “curator” of the material that will reside with the Arab Image Foundation. As a result of her practice, Dabrowska’s name and titles of her devising are attached to Alkarssifi’s personal photographs, so that a snapshot taken by Alkarssifi of his infant son, Khalil, might now bear a title like Untitled 2 (Bloodlines), with Dabrowska’s name attached in an authorship role. Since curation and interpretation lie at the basis of Dabrowska’s artistic practice and claims to co-authorship of the archive, I was curious to learn, then, about the basis on which she proposed to “unleash new narratives” from the material.

The Lebanese Archive now exists as both as an archival collection and an artist’s project. As a collection of images, its strength lies in the breadth of its subject matter: the history of Lebanon as seen through the lives of those who lived there, in which a political demonstration, a picnic, a funeral, and a kiss all occupy an equal place in the tapestry of experience. Perhaps it’s this human quality that makes it so attractive for artistic intervention: the photographs, intimate and expressive, make us feel as if we are there.

Yasin Shamas’s New Year’s Eve Party, Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1977/8. by Diab Alkarssifi.

Lori Dedeyan is an archivist at UCLA Library Special Collections. She previously worked at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. When she isn’t writing about artists and archives, she enjoys working on archival exhibitions and on her own creative projects.