Marwa Arsanios · Falling is not Collapsing, Falling is Extending

Matter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated or static entity. Matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification; nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or marxist theories. Matter is not a support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. Matter is not immutable or passive. It does not require the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it. Matter is always already an ongoing historicity”

Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter drawing a parallel between two distinct narratives in Beirut’s recent history, Marwa Arsanios’s research looks at the aftermath of the neoliberal project that took shape at the beginning of the 1990s, in the years immediately following the end of the Lebanese Civil War. Starting from a situation that remains present in the recent visual and political memory during the garbage crisis that began in 2014, this exhibition addresses the threatening long-term transformations that are brought about the system of late capitalism, and the local reverberations of this system on Lebanon’s environmental and sociopolitical reality. The exhibition features a film projection, an installation and a series of drawings.

The installation takes the spaces of different garbage dumps around the city of Beirut to look at the accumulation of waste and its relation to strategic real estate development. It is made of different elements; sculptures and topographies, drawings and a film that come together in one spatial installation. The film takes as its starting point the destruction of the building where the artist herself grew up and moves into looking at how rubble is used as a material on garbage dumps, mixed with waste in order to build land extensions that are then turned into real estate havens. It has been one of the strategies used by real estate development in order to gain land and privatize the seashore. It attempts to look at matter and material in its intrinsic relation to real estate and economy, and to look at the real estate economy from the perspective of matter with all its histories, but furthermore to deal with the viral side of history. The series of drawings of fauna and flora takes the ecosystem of the garbage dumps in order to map out the living beings around these spaces. The topographies also work as a mapping device for the different dumps, land extensions and plans for land extensions, bringing together in one space the different temporalities of these development projects.