Writings

Mémoire pour l'obtention du Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies en Sciences Politiques, Université Saint-Joseph, Ecole Doctorale de Science Politique

"This presentation [First presented at "My Rights to My City" Workshop, Alexendria, Egypt, Nov. 2000] will address the issue of identity, national, cultural or otherwise, through the eerie parallel between the gradual destruction of the country's physical form and the gradual abstraction of the National Currency's design."

"First presented at "My Rights to My City" Workshop, Alexendria, Egypt, Nov. 2000"

"Quantum City proposes a description of quantum theory and the concepts of the 'new' physics of the 20th century, in a concise, non-technical language that is enjoyable to read and easy to understand for lay-people. "From this, it develops a conceptual language that can then be applied to different disciplines, in particular to urban design, where it is clear that the new vision can provide powerful insights into the growth and self-organisation of cities at different scales. The new language thus permits a higher degree of integration between the different disciplines of the city, and promises to be a useful metaphor for the development of various theories for the 21st century city."

Tampa is a performance which highlighted the ethnic caging process - currently at a peak in Australia. It is part of a PhD research project which critically analyses the gazing process throughout history and how photography played a key role in shaping and influencing cultural outcomes.

"Through my research and studio practice, I search for what binds me and separates me from my children. I investigate abjection theories through Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and focus on a particular form I call the maternal abject. This occurs at the time an infant separates from its mother, acquires language and maps its own body."

"By definition, writing is a type of memory. It preserves traces and defies death. In the wake of WWII, a number of French writers, including Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute, renewed this ancestral art. Their literature reveals to what point human memory is plunder, treachery and shameless theft."

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

"More than any other sort of memory, odors evoke very old recollections. Olfactory components have long been left out of the memory equation. Only recently have anthropologists begun to explore the role of cognitive processes in building these lasting memories. A survey of professional activity in the field of odors. "

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

The author tells about her adullt life as an active militant during the Civil War in Lebanon.

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°17 - 1996

"..on humanity's search for roots and belonging, the two ubiquitous criteria for social stratification: age and gender, the post-industrial revolution that will inevitably transform the concept of social class, the Internet, Television, blind nationalist as another refuge for identity, Cultural independence, and finding identity in Religion, Sports, Reference groups and communities, concluding by saying that "Consumer culture provides a sense of sharing and anonymity"."

A thesis presenting a transferable methodology for analysing contemporary socio-political graphics in a specified society, over a specified period of time. This methodology developed from an empirical case study of analysing 180 Lebanese socio-political graphics produced between January 2005 and September 2007. Click on a chapter title in the left menu to navigate through the thesis.

Master Thesis - MA Graphic Design - London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London

"The Mediteranean was, for centuries, a center for universal civilization that has given birth to religious and judicial systems, as well as the center of an important commercial and maritime network. But the cosmopolitan way of life is dying in Mediterranean cities such as Beirut and Sarajevo."

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°10 - 1994

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°49 - 2004

The Lebanese confessional communities have known centuries of more or less equality between citizens under the Ottoman Empire. But this coexistence was destroyed through the decline of the Empire . . Community problems that are still present until today provoking crisis in the Lebanese community system.

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°4 - 1992

"Discussing identity in Lebanon goes down to discussing community. Because the Lebanese, as a whole, have not defined yet their community personal identity, and that, since the building of Greater-Lebanon, proclaimed on September 1st, 1920 by the French chief in command in the Levant, General Henri Gouraud. The Lebanese war that broke off in 1975 must have been in a way the violent, absolute, irrational but also logical expression of this search for an identity."

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°6 - 1993

"A collection of excerpts from Jad El-Hage's latest novel, relative to the effects of the Civil War in Lebanon, highlighting the identity and cultural issues relative to the Lebanese diaspora in England and Australia as well as excerpts detailing the effects of the war inside Lebanon."

"At first view, Alzheimer's and permanent amnesia seem unrelated. One is progressive and prevails among the elderly, the other is rare and its onset is often sudden. Yet in both cases the memory of concepts is partially maintained, whereas there are no more individual recollections. Does this imply independent memories? "

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

"At the present time, one only conceives the reconstruction in Lebanon as linked to architectural modernity. This modernity must be defined in a specifical context which is the Beirut town in relation ton the internal dynamic forces of the country. If this reconstruction appears to be necessary and indispensable. It brings out a number of problems particularly concerning the preservation of the heritage. Can't one build accordingly to the new technologies without breaking from the Lebanese traditions and the city's memory? Re-establish a certain balance in orde to combining tradition and modernity?"

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°24 - 1997-98

"Mai Ghoussoub tells about political posters in Lebanon showing photos of candidates to elections, highlighting the following points : "Elections are not always about politics", "Lebanon as a republican fraternity?", "The various tales of masculinity"."

"It took me a long time to understand why my mother loved to tell the story of the doctor who delivered me. Whenever there was a willing audience, she would tell it. I must have heard it a thousand times. For her story to make sense, you need to know that I am the second female born to my parents and that my sister and I are their only progeny."

"[..."I went to the bathroom, I saw the ax leaning at the door on the outside porch. I went straight to it and came back with it in my hand. I faced the brute, he smiled, and said to me, So you found it eh. We both laughed and I killed him. I went upstairs. She had her baggage ready. I drove his truck, she sang all the way to Cliff Crete town. I finished the book, it was a success. At the end a bomb fell and everyone died except me and the neighbor’s girl"...]"

"[..."When the little boy and his friend the young fighter arrived at the war zone, the young fighter stopped the car, pulled a beautiful new gun with a silver colour and holds it in his hand. It is a shinny gun and can make many empty shell the little boy shouts with joy and smiles to himself"...]"

"[..."A heroic death, yes a lovely explosive death. War finally came and offered her that prospect. Combat and war, she was surrounded by its smell, a smell of powder, of screaming cadavers, of lightning, [...] All of it made her secretly cheer like a spectator in the bloodiest arena of all. Gore! Now it was the human turn to be butchered, stabbed underneath brilliant red cloth that is held, waved, and danced by strong, graceful arms"...]"

"An art book made in collaboration with painter Rafik Majzoub, features a collection of poems, reflecting fractions of the sharp-cutting reality of everyday life in Beirut."

"For a long after the end of the Lebanese civil war, the memory of the war was tabooed and repressed in the public sphere in Lebanon. This thesis examines the nature of the emergent collective memory of the war. The first part theorizes collective memory in general and the dynamics of social memory in post-war Lebanon in particular. The latter part of the thesis examines two examples of public memory of the war, namely two films on the war and the public apologies of former LF militiaman Assa'ad Shaftari."

Thesis for the Master of Studies, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, June 2002

"Our cognitive system forms representations of mental representations, both our own and those of others. The capacity to form these metarepresentations enables us to accumulate autobiographical memories. It also enables us to memorize statements we do not understand, which is important in learning."

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°42 - 2002

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°47 - 2003

This paper analyses Lebanon's post-war period (1990-2005) from the perspective of peacebuilding and argues that the country's precarious attempts at implementing a peacebuilding agenda must be sought internally in the country's inability to confront its war-time past, regionally in its subservience to Syria and internationally in its strategic irrelevance in the post-cold war period.

"This master's thesis examines the importance of denominational identity among Lebanese immigrants in Montreal. This topic is motivated by three reasons: 1) the longstanding Lebanese debate on the definition of Lebanese identity, 2) the fact that many researchers argue that Lebanese identity, even in a migratory context, is still structured around denominational affiliation, and 3) the need to broaden the scope of French Canadian historiography by focussing on migratory and ethnic phenomena."

Thesis for the Master of Studies, Université de Montréal, July 2003

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°47 - 2003

"Emotions and memories are located in the same part of the brain. However, the potential impact of this discovery was neglected throughout the 20th century. This interrelationship only began to be studied when the neurosciences finally focused on emotions "

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

"It is difficult to describe the anticipation and apprehension I felt at the prospect of visiting Egypt for the first time after 37 years. Egypt: a place I often referred to, every time I filled out a form requiring date and place of birth, but never really thought about otherwise. And yet, I have not had the luxury of not having to think about who I am in terms of identity. I realize that we are more than the sum of our parts. The issue does not trouble me now as much as it intrigues me."

"Cairo, January 3, 2002, United Press International"

"If the below article was an item of clothing it would be akin to the snood, if it were an accessory it would be a scrunchi (hideous elasticated hairband) or some other fade that captures the mood of the moment, and dates in a cringingly spectacular fashion. It would be the item of clothing that you would really love to throw away but somehow you hold on to it in case it comes back into fashion as nue retro or because your attached to it for its ability to pull you back to an exact moment when things were different somehow. I wrote in following my departure to London from Beirut at a time when I was celebrating the fact that my surname suddenly didn't matter and I could feel the first flush of independence... "

"Looking back now, It seems ironic that it was an institution like Tele Liban that initially seduced me to stay in Beirut and that same institution that played a huge part in my reason to leave Beirut. After Seven years of head banging, even the most resilient lover is pulled away from that which was previously seductive. Allow me to refresh our collective memories. . "

"Mahmoud Darwish's "Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982" can be read as a story of language discovering itself in the midst of the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. This involves an exploration of language as a "transgressive experience" of writing and reading, whereby language is creatively and critically experienced as a dense texture of conflictual impulses and developing residues."

"Lebanon that succeded in reuniting in peace sixteen communities was torn by war in 1975. Beirut particularly became a synonym of fear, destruction and the most murderous civil violence. At this stage, can one still talk about women during these years of war independently from identity? Did solidarity between these women occur independently from community divisions?"

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°17 - 1996

[..."A loud grunt in the plane's engines woke him up. Almost instantly, a scorching dryness took hold of his throat. He reached out for the glass of water on the out-folded tray next to him. He thought again how lucky he was to have nobody sitting on the seat next to him. He struggled to open his eyes but they felt sticky and dry, and his eyelids heavy, as if glued shut with cheap glue."...]

"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."

[..."A dead rat lay at the bottom of the stairs. You could barely see it standing here at the top of the flight, but you could definitely smell it. Oh, you could smell its sickening sweet stench from the end of the street! Well, almost. The electricity was out. It won’t be back until noon. But the loading dock at the other end was open, and it let some light in. Light that barely made its way to this side here, but ah well, it was enough to make out the fuzzy little outline of the decaying rodent below."...]

"If emigration was always a big part in the lives of the Lebanese people since the 19th century, 1975's war turned the statistics upside down and disrupted the myth of the "traveller at heart"."

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°5 - 1992-93

"A testimony of what Beirut used to be, as the basis for an analysis of what it could become... Solidere was just born then, and the economic crisis was not even underlying. Yet, it seemed to me that the roots of upcoming troubles were obvious. And 7 years later, the Lebanese have not even begun to rebuild their common space of living. The no mans land - the former green line" - remains so today, be it sweeter, cleaner, richer. Instead of a melting pot, the city center is nothing but a border between many worlds. The essence of a battlefield, in other words." His thesis offers an analysis of the following points: The Urban Inequalities in 1975, the Disappearance of the Center and the New Forms of Urbanization, The announced Renaissance of the Lebanese Capital, Beirut: the object of Debate."

Thesis published in June 1996 by the Political Science Institute of Bordeaux (France) as a two years research work for a bachelor degree.

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°47 - 2003

"The author develops the subject relative to the role and the practice of History in underdeveloped countries first, then in Lebanon -within the country's acknowledged geographical frontiers-: insisting on the fact that, since the beginning of the Lebanese war, thousands of analysis were conducted in order to diagnose the causes for the misfortune of the Lebanese people and to solve the crisis by proposing social, military, political, constitutional and even geographical solutions. But that none of these advocated solutions were efficient."

"History is a branch of "Human Sciences", it is then relative to the character-structure and the cultural and ideological environment of the Historian and of his audience. Considering this, any new discovery might be "taken" and integrated in the on-going ideology system, then scientific objectiveness would only be a camouflaged form of submission to this system."

"The author describes History in Lebanon, as well as in underdeveloped countries, as a subject that isn't well controlled by its specialists and is very often and easily hawked because of its irresistible emotional connotation. It is often used to make a number of "cuts" and to hide certain aspects of facts, accordingly to the environing ideology, not to teach and reconstitute the past. He concludes by proposing that school History manuals in Lebanon should be "unified". "

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°47 - 2003

"'untitled' is an ongoing multi-channel video installation continuing my series of projects addressing social and political realities and representations, manifestations, and enunciations, focusing on borders/nationalisms/ movements (shifts, transitions, and interstitial space/time) and subjectivity and the conditions of living between polarities of culture, geography, history, and ideology."

"'There was and there was not' is a transposition of a working studio and found archive, presenting the 'resources' & artifacts necessary to re-construct an understanding of the mediated process inherent in the definition and perception of a culture."

"An interview-essay with Jayce Salloum and Molly Hankwitz on some of the video works of Jayce Salloum. "As a video artist/cultural producer who has worked on a specific geographic region of the globe, the Middle East, the politics of representation in general, and the representation of resistance in South Lebanon specifically, can you discuss issues of representation with respect to your work which specifically deal with the subject of resistance and who would you most like your videotapes to be affecting and why?" "

"'This Is Not Beirut' is a personal essay on the popular misrepresentations of Lebanon and Beirut which documents the filmmaker's own experience while working in Lebanon."

"'Talaeen a Junuub' (Up to the South) is ostensibly a documentary on the south of Lebanon exploring current conditions, the issues behind the conditions and their representation both in the West and in Lebanon itself."

"In 1985, the Lebanese war's already been going on for ten years. Marie Seurat, young woman from Aleppo's Syrian bourgeoisie, sees this war as an unreal "show", until she is personnally "hit" when her husband, Michel Seurat, is kidnapped in Beirut airport, on his way back from France ... ten years later, she tells about her painful story wondering if during this terrible interlude, the war has not, in a way, given a meaning to her life."

French periodical 'Confluences Méditerranée' N°17 - 1996

"An article on the AUB collection of political posters in the Arab World, from Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon, works of art as much as a medium of propaganda and medium of public debate especially at times of war."

"An article on the intellectual creativity in Lebanon that has been witnessing a resurgence since the civil war's end, thanks to the healthy artistic environment that is bringing together diverse forms of writing, images, urban spaces, subjectivity, daily life, ideas of change, friendship and exchange."

"Our mental activity is based on external memories that developed in connection with writing, printing and more recently with information technology. This sort of development needs to be understood in terms of social sciences, as well as cognitive sciences. "

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

"Starting with the statement that "cities are the most significant repositories of identity", this article is about the therapeutic role of urbanism -"often misused, the decision makers often opting for the easy erasure of the traces of conflict, while designers often opt for a fetishization of the same traces" relatively to post-war city reconstruction and the notion of memory "which should not be eradicated because this would induce a form of civic amnesia". According to the authors, "therapeutic urbanism may heal on the level of the individual, of the citizen/user, and on that of the urban fabric."

"First published in ARCHIS Magazine, Netherlands, #4, 2003, pp. 60-68."

"An article on the life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon camps, twenty years after 800 to 2000 of them were massacred, on September 16th, 1982."

"An article on the life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon camps, twenty years after 800 to 2000 of them were massacred, on September 16th, 1982."

"An article on "Ajram beach for ladies": a beach in Lebanon reserved for women who won't "unveil" in the presence of men."

"An article on "Ajram beach for ladies": a beach in Lebanon reserved for women who won't "unveil" in the presence of men."

An article highlighting the problems relative to the issue of the non-existence of any reference to the Civil War in Lebanese school History manuals.

An article highlighting the problems relative to the issue of the non-existence of any reference to the Civil War in Lebanese school History manuals.

Doctorate Thesis, Université de Paris VIII, 1993.

Doctorate Thesis, Université de Paris VIII, 1993.

Doctorate Thesis, Université de Paris VIII, 1993.

Doctorate Thesis, Université de Paris VIII, 1993.

"Rather than a juxtaposition of modules and specialized mechanisms, memory would be the whole collection of traces left in our brains by each of our experiences. The reactivation of specific traces occurs when we interact with the environment, enabling memories and knowledge to emerge and to be reconstituted each time. "

"Science Magazine La Recherche - Special Edition 'La Mémoire et l'Oubli', July-August 2001"

"Excerpts from Hyam Yared's book, highlighting the identity and cultural issues of the Lebanese people."