In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, which was never completed. كیف لا نغرق في السراب / To Remain in the No Longer looks at how architecture operates in this failed state. By examining the precarity of the project site that remains to this day, the film reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis. Employing archival materials, interviews, and 16mm and digital film, the experimental documentary explores the political and cultural forces that have come to bear on the site—from its halted construction to its imposed abandonment and attempted reappropriations. How has architecture been instrumentalized in the ongoing construction of a national narrative? What is the role of architects in shaping society within corrupt ecologies of power and failed financial engineering? Film becomes a plastic medium to reframe the positivism of urban masterplans and architectural monuments and formulate a social critique. Modern structures under threat of collapse stand in as protagonists to tell the story of a promised metropolis that never came to be, while the fairground acts as a lens to look at implicit collapse beyond the perimeter of the site. “My work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis while specifically investigating the phenomenology of political performance, often rooted in my native Lebanon or diasporic experiences. Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, I attempt to create narratives that reimagine our relationship to past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. While I sometimes use fiction, I see this approach as a way to complicate our reading towards or against the history of a place in an attempt to critically contemplate an alternative state of being. In this vein, my work dissects politically charged spaces and collective memories that highlight the relations, power structures, and paradoxes embodied within them.”
Biography
Joyce Joumaa is a video artist and writer based between Beirut and Montreal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment. Central to her practice is an interest towards the political charge inscribed in spaces and the social psychology that unfolds out of this tension. In 2021-2022, Joumaa had her first institutional solo show at the CCA The Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her work has shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Fofa Gallery, the MUDAC Lausanne, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and in the 2024 60th Venice Biennale.