Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the different recollections and everyday interactions with cityscapes and landmarks in Syria and Lebanon and interrogates the techniques used by Syrian and Lebanese activists to create archives of past atrocities.

Paper Abstract:

Syria and Lebanon have witnessed different forms of political violence in the last decades: uprisings, revolutions and (civil) wars that have greatly affected the architecture and landmarks of major cities and smaller towns. This paper aims to compare the treatment of the marks left by these events on Syrian and Lebanese cities. Beirut is a palimpsest of past political violence: its traces are not erased, they are exposed to everyone’s sight and sometimes turned into museum or memorial, even though or maybe because they revealed events that are still polarising. The city thus appears as a living archive of its contentious past, even the most recent one with the slogans of the 2019 revolutionary demonstrations still present on the city’s walls. In Syria, however, the regime has been carefully erasing all material traces of the 2011 uprising and subsequent armed rebellion by razing to the ground entire neighbourhoods and towns focusing on signs and proofs of the very happening of these events and their repression. The revolution's very materiality thus seems to have disappeared. How can cityscapes and architectural landmarks become archives of past political violence in these two cases? This paper will look at the different recollections and everyday interactions with these cityscapes and interrogate the techniques used by Syrian and Lebanese activists to create archives of past atrocities.