Departing from a reflection on land appropriation and ownership in Lebanon, this group exhibition brings together three bodies of work which probe the dominant paradigms of private property.

Contemporary relationships with land are mediated by specific tools and disciplines ranging from technical mapping and survey, to agrobiology, as well as by imaginaries vehiculated by capital and nation-state. By looking at these mediations more closely and proposing alternative examples of contemporary land struggles as well as experimentations around traditional modes of agriculture and commoning, this exhibition proposes possibilities of emancipatory –perhaps liberatory– pathways towards a renewed understanding of our environment.

Moving away from heteronormative dogmas of filiations, extractive economy, or modernist mastering of nature, works on view offer historical and philosophical counterpoints that draw on legal, geological, geographical, environmental, and societal arguments. For the fourth installment of her research-based project Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Marwa Arsanios uncovers layers of land transformation surrounding a now defunct quarry in the mountains of North Lebanon and attempts to transform its legal status into a mashe’. In a project dating from 2017, Ahmad Ghossein locates an unregistered plot of land in the South of Lebanon and investigates ways of mapping and recording it. Finally, Sabine Saba’s new work Territorial Calendars takes the form of an audiovisual diagrammatic installation around land inheritance and underscores experiences and struggles drifting away from the prescribed family structure into a space of other kinships.

Curated by: Marie-Nour Hechaime
Exhibition design: Jacques Aboukhaled
Exhibition: Mind the Gap