workshop: memory mapping part two

Media: photography
Date: June - July 2007
Location: Zibquin
Facilitators: Eric Gottesman

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I visited Zibquin in November 2006, a few months after the war, and asked youths there to make photographs of their memories of their village before the war. They reenacted their childhood memories for the camera in the rubble-laden landscape that their village had become. Seven months later I returned to Zibquin– a year after the first bombs fell – to see what had changed for youths in Zibquin in the intervening months.

When I returned, I asked the workshop participants to write a letter to someone they had lost in the war, updating the recipient on what he/she had missed in the previous year. When I proposed the assignment, the kids looked around at each other with frowns on their faces. "We can't," said Fatmeh. "We would all write to the same person."

Naim was nineteen years old, handsome, athletic, intelligent. He was the most popular kid in town. On July 13, 2006, he was going to travel to Syria with his father and was on his way to his grandparents' house to bid them farewell when the bombs began to fall.

Naim was one of many who died in Zibquin– a loss that the participants were trying to forget. My aim, through this workshop, was to ask them to try to remember what they lost, and to find ways to creatively express this loss. I framed the workshop around the concept of change and transformation and asked the participants to make photographs about how their lives had changed during the past year.

Each participant had a different way of conceptualizing change. Fatmeh made beautiful landscape photographs of spaces of refuge: in nature, in the place she had a birthday party, in front of the store where she used to smoke sheesha with her friends, in the mosque where her friend used to sneak away to meet a boyfriend, in the place she used to sit with Naim under a tree. Fatmeh described them as safe spaces but the way she photographed them, always without people, led me to ask her how safe she felt there now. She could not answer this question – a reflection of the continued uncertainty and vulnerability that people living in the south feel.

Mohammed's school was destroyed in the war. In the last twelve months he has had to go to a different school and, consequently, has lost touch with many of his old friends. He made a photograph of two arms reaching for each other, almost touching, above a sofa. He told me it was about pain of losing old friends and having to make new ones. I told him that the image reminded me of a famous picture from Michelangelo. He agreed and mentioned that he also thought it looked like the Nokia and Western Union billboards on the road between Tyre and Beirut.

Baneen wrote: " …I miss you mom. After you went, I miss your food so much, I don't know how to make your cookies, I loved how you make your cookies…". She had lost her mother the year before and spoke quietly about it, with watery eyes, during our first meeting. She came back to the second meeting with pictures of her mother's photograph on the couch; of her reading the Koran for her mother and of the construction work and the graves that were not in evidence a year ago. I asked her about what was different for her and she again mentioned food: her mother's favorite dishes— kousa , mujaddara , kibbe . Now Baneen and her family buy prepared foods from town. For Baneen, speaking about cooking and the social rituals that food preparation involves, became a means of talking about the terrible loss of a parent and the transformation of family life. In one of the assignments, Baneen asked her sister how to prepare these dishes and she photographed the results in a series of pictures. In the written description of the piece, she described the photographs as akin to recipes that she was writing for her mother.

At some point during the workshop the participants grew tired of talking about the war. This seemed to be a change in itself and so I asked what they wanted to photograph instead. We listed all the things that they wanted to focus on that were opposed, in their minds, to the destruction and devastation of war. This theme guided the subsequent assignment in which participants photographed things that represented beauty (flowers, the sky), health (yogurt and kebab), peace (tranquil landscapes, signs made from olive branches), and friendship (conversation between friends). In one series of images, which focused on the subject of "love," Mohammed drew the face of a woman on the banister of a destroyed railing and posed for pictures with his imaginary "wife."

These creative assignments, which were set apart from the visual tropes of violent conflict and their experiences of the year before were reminiscent of some of the themes that had come up in the first workshop that we did together. A number of the participants that had worked with me on the earlier theme of memory mapping had documented experiences of their childhood, focusing on the vitality of village life as they remembered it, rather than on the losses that they had endured. From our group discussions, it seems that it is a revival of this way of life that was lost last year to which participants are looking forward.

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