In this age of memorials, it is customary to think of architecture as a means of commemoration. Indeed, as a synthetic physical act, architecture has long been a common and prevalent means of giving a commemorative presence to memory. However, by giving physicality to memory, architecture offers simultaneously its means of annihilation, thus becoming an ideal means of achieving its antithesis, oblivion. And just like memory, a finite selective process, architecture inescapably embodies an act of exclusion as well. As such architecture emerges as an ideal vehicle for oblivion as much as it is for memory.
Yet the question of memory and forgetfulness is essentially a political one as well. Why remember? Why forget? What to remember? And what to forget? The arguments generated by these questions reveal ethical, social and political necessities and inevitabilities for the intertwining of memory and forgetting. Memory for Forgetfulness is a series of works that explore the notions of memory and forgetting in the context of the city of Beirut in the shadows of the Lebanese War, culminating in a proposed architectural intervention in the city. The study consists loosely of a set of 3 pieces exploring the concepts of memory and forgetting, 3 pieces attempting to map Beirut, and the architectural proposal building on them.[*]
The first of the conceptual pieces, There's No Forgetting, is based on a poem by Pablo Neruda after which it is titled. It is an electrically operated "Poem Reading/Shredding Machine". The machine is operated by a control knob on the side of the box. The knob controls a paper shredder that rolls the poem up the screen by shredding it. Thus the only way to read the poem is by destroying it. The roll of paper, however, contains multiple copies of the poem, creating a repetitive cycle of presence and absence.
The second piece, titled Re/Constitution, was part of an interdisciplinary symposium entitled Constructing Memory/Memory Construct.[†] The symposium, which focused on constructing memory using the events of September 11 as a vehicle, was followed by a design charette in response. Participants were issued a kit consisting of a piece of plywood, wire mesh, and hooks to devise their responses with. Re/Constitution is an attempt to address the subject matter in a deceptively simplistic and direct approach, creating absence, an essential prerequisite of memory, and highlighting it with a diminished residue of what was. That was achieved by cutting a large rectangular piece out of the panel of wood, burning it, and placing its ashes back in the cutout frame. The result was a frame carrying the remnants of its absent piece. To underscore the ephemeral nature of memory, the ashes were held in place by two pieces of wire mesh, allowing the ashes to sift through, thus enabling the piece to further disintegrate as it is handled.
The third work, Re/Productions, is an installation that attempts to explore reproducibility in the context of conceptual art through the "re-production" of three works by German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz. The selection of the particular works aimed to explore issues of physical absence and presence (hiding, relocating, discarding) and signifiers of such presence and absence (a photograph, a statement, remnants) as well as the absence/presence of such abstract concepts as authenticity and art. The installation invited the public to be an active/passive participant in the work (doing the action/unknowingly) through the act of tearing the flyers and announcements (thus artwork), hence becoming an agent of absence, creating signifiers of it, and inadvertently becoming part of the installation.
The next 3 works attempt to map the proposed site in the city of Beirut. The site, situated in the pre-war center of the city, is saturated with memory of the throbbing pre-war life of the city—as well as its destruction, and its poignant present absence. Being at the eye of the Green Line, the battlefield zone that divided the city in half during the war, that part of the city witnessed the heaviest destruction during the war. As a result, in post-war Beirut, that area of the city has become a gaping void, an immense absence at the heart of the city. For a whole generation of Lebanese youth, a generation that has known the life of the city only in the multiple ‘centers’ that proliferated at its periphery during the war, the old heart of Beirut is no more than a blank slate onto which their parents’ memories are projected. Thus, in the slowly emerging new life of this part of the city, memory and oblivion are juxtaposed.
The first of the mappings, White/Shreds, explores the 'Green Line' and traces the location history of the nightclub B018, a precedent and a programmatic element of the thesis. The mapping builds on the first piece above, using the shreds generated by the poem-reading/shredding machine, as well as shreds of wartime Lebanese newspaper clippings and photographs of the war-marred zone, to depict the Green Line. The misalignment of the shreds renders the text/images unintelligible, thus transforming the reading to one of tonality. The dark zone is one where the ruins of damaged buildings remain, retaining the density of the urban fabric, albeit in mutilated form. The lighter zone at the top of the Green Line lies within the Beirut Central District, and was accordingly all but cleared of damaged building skeletons as part of the reconstruction process. As a result, it now stands as a gaping void at the center of the city.
The second and third mappings, Red/Blood and Blue/Band-Aids, engage a more visceral approach to the city. The starting point for both is a rational systematic study of the city’s historic and systemic layering, a study that gets all but obliterated, both literally and metaphorically, by the overwhelming emotional baggage of the war. Wax is employed in both studies as the means of obliteration due both to its translucency and its “process memory”. Hence, in a model analogous to that of the collective memory/amnesia of Beirutis, historic narratives get suppressed along with their gruesome ramifications in as much as the charged personal histories of the city uncover an otherwise unintelligible mapping of it.
The proposed intervention thus emerges as a play on the tensions between the necessity of remembering and the need to forget. The modulating duality of the proposal starts with the program, a Nightclub and a Media Processing Center, and continues into the tectonics of the project. The Nightclub, as a paragon of oblivious activity, was an essential device of acclimation throughout the war. The Media Processing Center, on the other hand, was a necessity generated after the war to intellectually process its multifold history as well as the myriad of archeological artifacts uncovered by the war’s destruction. As such the Nightclub inhabits a space that is tectonically related to the war, being underground with the only visible marker above ground a monolith of sandbags, while antagonistically tracing the form of the missing portion of a bronze age stone wall uncovered after the war. Thus while being programmatically oblivion-inducing, the Nightclub stands as a memorial to the war years as much as it evokes the ghost of an ancient Beirut. The Media Processing Center, on the other hand, derives its language from the post-war vocabulary of reconstruction, with a giant gantry crane and furnished shipping containers that echo the activities of the nearby port. Thus, though dealing directly with the material of the war and artifacts uncovered by its undoing, the media-processing center does not acknowledge the war directly. As such the program reflects the intertwined relationship between its antagonistic components: one that aims to facilitate forgetting of the memory of the war while inescapably reminding of it; and one that aims to register the memory of the war, but inescapably promoting ambivalence towards that memory by means of its very intention.
An integral dimension of this proposal, however, is its temporal aspect. For just as the need for the intervention and its subject can only be understood in a very specific temporal framework, so too does its existence. Hence, not only is the proposed intervention temporary, but it carries within its means of construction the implications of its erasure. The Nightclub, for instance, is basically a hole that is covered, literally, by its means of erasure, an enormous pile of sandbags. And the Media Processing Center, in its very conception, is capable of processing itself out of existence, being eventually dismantled and shipped off in pieces as its necessity declines. However, while the Media-Processing Center inhabits a site projected to become part of an extended Martyr’s Plaza, a grand square extending all the way to the sea, erasing the traces of the Center along the way, the Nightclub inhabits a future archeological park, proposing its memorialization as the latest layer to the canvas of the park. As such the walls of the Nightclub are designed with “sand watch cavities” that act as receptacles for its recyclable garbage and a measure of its lifetime. When its time is up, in a perverse twist only too suitable for Beirut, these walls are filled with resin, creating mini-landfills or middens, a time capsule of the refuse of the process of forgetting…
The complete text of the thesis preparation book can be found at "111101: Memory & Creation" under "Essays & Research" in the "Writings" sections:
http://www.111101.net/Writings/index.php