LANA DANDAN

My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

The body participates in a distancing from reality forced by reality. Bodily empathy operates viscerally. I face the punctured building; I too become filled with holes.

Buildings are containers of memory. Beirut's architecture bore witness to the Civil War, as did my family. I did not. Beirut's buildings are impartial. The bodies are not. The marks left on the buildings are evidence of trauma, but where and how exactly this trauma was inflicted, I do not know.

This installation is one part of a project titled when I am there I am not here (beirut). This iteration, shown at the California College of the Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition in May 2013, consists of a long hallway lined with tall, broken, hand-stripped mirrors, supported by scraps of concrete. At the end of the hallway is a floor-to-ceiling projection of disintegrating images of the streets and buildings of Beirut. These images reflect and fragment in the glass, shifting between a sense of intimacy and estrangement, creating a feeling of disorientation, danger, and loss.

When I am there I am not here makes evident not the history of Beirut, not what happened there, but how we remember it in our bodies and see it on the surfaces of our homes. What, in its passing, has this unknowable history left behind?