Mapping Beirut’s landscapes of contestation: uprisings and artistic practice

As Beirut's thawra (Arabic for 'revolution') raged against the Lebanese government in 2019 and 2020, academic discourse (Lakrouf Sinno 2020. How people reclaimed public spaces in Beirut during the 2019 Lebanese uprising. The Journal of Public Space, 5(1), 193–218.; Fouani 2021. What happened to the public spaces of the Arab world? From colonisation to revolution: The case of Lebanon. The Journal of Public Space, 6(1), 203–214) focused on the re-appropriation of the city's public spaces by demonstrators, especially as a model for a new, more inclusive social order and form of government. At the same time, visual artists attempted to tackle some of the complex social issues brought forth by the uprisings. My own work during that period focused on the physical sites of contestation, places within the city that, having previously been socially irrelevant, took on an exceptional significance during the thawra. Embracing notions of Debord's psychogeography (1958/1981), and incorporating debris from the protest sites, the results were highly stylized and subjective mappings of the Beirut uprisings. But as the regime's heavy-handed tactics and the pandemic's social restrictions slowly pushed the activists back into oblivion, any optimism for a new way of life began to fade, along with the graffitied slogans on the city walls. In the streets today, an old, familiar sense of placelessness has returned, sites of hope again relegated to abandon.