Then You Find Yourself in The Middle of Dust

Installation (Sound, construction cloth, pencil on paper)

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Created during artist residency at the Beirut Art Residency, May and June of 2018, in Beirut –Lebanon.

 

Between dust, noise, and a demolition, I evoke the fragile stages of the in-between, glimpses of something is not longer and it is not what it will be. 

 

Where does dust go?

 

Then You Find Yourself in The Middle of Dust is an attempt to contain some ephemeral elements during a demolition of a building in Beirut, Lebanon.  Soon after I started to document the process of the building getting demolish, neighbors and pedestrians started to give me fragments of stories of what the building was and what the space is going to become.  Soon, it was clear to me that this building holds a special history in the city, and its neighbors had strong opinions about seeing it go.  I grew nostalgia of a building I did not know.  One morning, while documenting the demolition, a neighbor of the building invited me to her home to have coffee.  I sat in her patio, with the demolition sounds very present in our conversation.  She told me stories of her family and her neighbors.  I asked her about the old building, the demolition, the new building, and the recent changes in the neighborhood, “what can I do? it happens, and it happens so quickly that one can only watch” she said.   

 

Here, I present a series of gestures, an attempt to contain, slow down, and organize this fragile moment of transformation. How do I contain what is banishing, what expands in the air and soon disappears? The impossibility to get a hold of them was my task.