مدن متخيلة | IMAGINED CITIES. 2008

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

A collective recollection of Martyr’s Square- Beirut, by different individuals, all describing the space as it was experienced in different periods. The collection of past accounts and experiences of a space that no longer exists triggered the artist to imagine, and allowed her to capture the lost sense of belonging by remembering, forgetting, fabricating, and describing an experience of the city. The memory of a space is being represented through the space of imagination. The narratives are derived from personal experiences of the space and reflect on an everyday dialect between the space and its occupants, offering snapshot impressions that represent a recollected memory, and further, a subjective linear reading of the space. The created narratives of these four imagined cities intends to narrate the memory of a space that consequently becomes a space of memory, an imagined space. By doing so, the artist intended to construct an unattainable city experience through the representations of memory.

Each imagined city renders a photographic spatial reconstruction of Martyr’s Square- describing an impression of a space in the following periods:

City of desires (Pre-war), City of Amnesia (Civil war), City of Order (Post-war), City Of Obsessions (Current).

City of Desires

I am walking in a city. I see a man. He is stuck in a moment. He starts playing a memory, and replaying it, and playing it again. “I am singing the songs of yesterday. I am calling for my familiar. To see this city you have to live in the past and dream of the City of Nostalgia.”

He roams around the myths, and he paints a fantasy, of romance and love, of forbidden sins and happiness. He is hallucinating. He is fabricating. He is dreaming. He is home where he never left. He is living in the City of Nostalgia.

“I am sick. I am stuck in a moment and have lost my familiar. I only desire to go to the City of Nostalgia”

Nothing sleeps in the City of Nostalgia, nothing rests... It is an on going musical. Its a whimsical spectacle of light, noise, and aromas. You can only hear it in your memories; you can only visit it in your dreams. He is in grief. He wants to go back home. He is seeing past ghosts that haunt his vision, and nourishes his fantasies, in expandable moments and melodies of yesterday that turn into delusions, dissociations and infinite episodes of psychosis. He is in grief for the lost City of Nostalgia.

“The City of Nostalgia only exists between stolen moments, embellished and relived, only in my dreams. See I am sick and seeing things, I long for my familiar. I am sick and only desire to see the City of Nostalgia.”

He then points at nothing and hallucinates of this city, where the grass is greener, the wine is finer, the living is better... He is dreaming of the city of light, the city of glory and myths, that is the City of Nostalgia.

“I only remember, I’m only left with remembering. See, I am sick with a lost familiar. I only remember cacophony of sounds and lights. That is all I hear and see. Only in my dreams I can go back home, to where I belong, to the stolen City of Nostalgia”.

I left him in his dreams, smiling, pointing at things that are no longer there. He is remembering and stuck in a loop, suspended in the lost City of Nostalgia.

City of Amnesia

I am walking in a city. I hear nothing, and see no one. Then I see a man with a hole in his head, lingering on the walls of this city. He is forgetting what he remembers. “I forgot what I remembered, for this is the City of Amnesia. To experience this city you have to forget, you can only forget.”

Then I hear a loud noise in the distance, in nomans land, in the City of Amnesia.

“You cannot speak of the City of Amnesia! Just listen to the terror from a safe distance. It is the awaiting silence. “

Silence.

More Silence... and a prayer.

“To my God I pray, My God, help me forget!”

In the City of Amnesia, in the vacancy, only they who cannot speak live.

In the City of Amnesia, in the empty grey streets, only the deaf linger, in hope to find a reason for their existence in this city. They roam the streets, looking for a target, for a goal, to unpack an ideology that was sold to them. In the melancholic battles, of explosive melodies, and the bullets that carved the walls of this city, and pierced their bodies, and their fragile memories, forcing them to forget. 

“We don’t live here; we just roam between these structures that protect us from a man watching from a distance, from the other side of the world.” And in a stolen moment, he speaks a silence, and deafens you with it, in that vulnerable moment. Only the dogs wonder freely in the city of amnesia, surviving on the remedy of forgetfulness, only the dogs can run in the green field of nonexistence. 

In the City of Amnesia, you become a primal wild animal. The instinct to survive becomes your only drive. You desire nothing but blood, sex and drugs, to numb you from the pain and the horror of this place, wishing you could run freely with the dogs, eat the corpses and cleanse the streets from the horror it witnessed, and drink from their remedy of forgetfulness, on the green-line, in the lushness of differences, right in the middle of the City of Amnesia.

In the City of Amnesia, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to remember. In the City of Amnesia, you remember to forget.

What a blissful thing it is to forget.

Silence...

Moments of silence.

Silence.

City of Order

I am walking in a silent city. I hear a sound. One foot in front of the other, I reach a cement wall and I see a man. He is the architect of dreams and memories. He is the creator. He silently constructed his architecture, around the rocks he sung a sound, the sounds of the City of Order, and I listened:

Block, block, blocked
Blocks of cement all around,
No one allowed,
No sound,
Except who sings the sound of Order.

You will no longer recognise, Instead you realise,
To see this city you have to sing, The sound of Order.

Blocked, blocked, blocked,
With blocks of cement, it’s blocked,

Allowing no one in,
Except for the blessed,
Who can dance on the sound of Order.

Clean the dust from your eyes, And block your ears,
For, to see this city that you desire, Desire the sound of Order.

Block, block, block,
Block your memory and forget, And start remembering the sound, Of the city of order.

Blocks, Blocks, Blocks,
Blocks of cement, tombstones on the right, Front, left...And I see,
The sound of Order in front of me,
Singing the sound of yesterday
On the melody of Order.

And I dance. Around the blocks I dance. Around the cement I surrender to Order. In trance... I dance... in the City of Order.

City of Obsession

I am walking in a city. I see a crowd. They are imagining. They are obsessing about a city, or an idea of a city, no one knows what they are seeing. They are imagining. They are chanting and marching together. They are obsessing over a city they never visited, they can only imagine it.I am walking in a city and I am tired of walking behind a crowd, I’m tired of searching for a city I don’t know, I want to stay where I was before, where I walk alone, behind no crowd.I am walking in a city, behind the crowds I march, to find a truth, a reality, between all the fabrications and imaginations, I walk with no where to go, and nothing to do, except obsess with crowds and imagine cities...

I am walking in a city and I’m looking to belong, in a city I don’t know. I am looking for an identity in a city of crowds, and obsessions, and fetishes over a city that never belonged to anyone, not to you, not to me, not to anyone other than the memories that are suspended in time. To the million instances that come together to create a million cities. I’m still walking. Still imagining. Trying to belong. I’m left to obsess with the crowds over a city that will never be realized. I’m left to obsess with crowds over a city that will always be remembered.

No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

Italo Calvino’s, Invisible Cities