Marfa’s Beirut // Getting some very local inspiration

Spent a wonderful afternoon in one of the few local galleries in Beirut that focus on contemporary art – Marfa’s Beirut (more info on the exhibition below):

Starting from a piece of land without a trace, Ahmad Ghossein’s project aims to question the conceptions of space, land, and its thickness – or the limits of its depths before it can be considered ‘underground’ in South Lebanon. This part of the country has no official cadastral record and no information about it exists in the Directorate of Land Registration and Cadasters in Lebanon. Cadastral surveys were considered one of the foundational tools for ‘modernizing’ a country, registering and classifying the demarcations between public and private property, and did not only imply enabling the planning and implementation of modern infrastructure, but also organizing private property, and thus introducing a new “objective” or “scientific” ordering of social, economic and political relations. Ahmad Ghossein starts from a personal experience and looks into the implications of such missing data, investigating the states’ practices and processes in relation to cartography, geodesy, hypsometry, and other related sciences.