Lebanon participates for the first time at the Venice Architecture Biennale, presenting the exhibition “The Place That Remains, recounting the unbuilt territory.”

Developed by curator Hala Younes, Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University (LAU), the Lebanese Pavilion aims to provide an assessment of its territory, an identification of what remains, and a reflection on the built environment through an inventory of unbuilt land.

In this first national participation, our intention as a group of architects, educators and scholars is to draw the attention of both the related professional body and the public as a whole to the conditions of architecture in our country. Lebanon has abundant human capital in the fields of architecture and engineering—700 newly graduated architects annually—yet its landscape and built environment are losing their meaning day after day. The attention of practitioners is focused on built objects, and hardly on open spaces and unbuilt territory—on the “space between things”: The Place That Remains. This concern syncs perfectly with the theme of Freespace, set by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara for the Biennale Architettura 2018.”

Hala Younes

The exhibition area of focus will be a terrain highly at risk and intensively surveyed: the watershed of the Beirut River. The material employed will use several formats that traditionally reveal the nature of a given territory: relief maps, photographs of the landscape, and aerial surveys. In order to evaluate the place that remains, “the place that could still host our dreams and expectations”, the main installation will be a cartographic inventory, consisting of a series of maps projected on a wooden, 3D topographic model.

This cartographic inventory will be presented according to two milestones :

• 1956, and the related aerial photographic survey, which occurs a few years before the first series of large-scale topographic maps at a scale 1/20 000, created by the Lebanese army in 1963.
• 2015, the date of the first systematic updating of the topographic maps by the Directorate of Geographic Affairs. 

The Pavilion will also feature the work of six photographers living and working in Lebanon: Gregory Buchakjian, Catherine Cattaruzza, Gilbert Hage, Houda Kassatly, Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi and Talal Khoury, whom common concern is a critical point of view on the relation of the Lebanese to nature and landscape, and to what remains in the valley of Nahr Beirut.

Texts from exhibition press release.

“The Place That Remains, recounting the unbuilt territory”, From May 26th till November 25th.
Lebanese Pavilion – Arsenale, Venise
Curator: Hala Younes
Organization: Lebanese Ministry of Culture