Project by: Dutch Art Institute
Designer: Rutger de Vries
Format: 170 x 240 mm mm
Price: € 7,00
This publication starts in 2011 in Beirut’s Sassin Square, close to the Green Line, where some of the most severe fights of the civil war took place. In the backyard of one of the area’s buildings I discovered a piece of graffiti that read: “Behind this wall in 1988…nothing happened”. Within the context of Lebanon’s history and Jalal Toufic’s lecture on surpassing the disaster of war, this sentence cast a poetic spell over the unspeakable. What happens behind the wall tells the story of meeting its author, Phat. In so doing the book touches upon the general interpretation of historical events and our own expectations, while reflecting on ways of codifying memories and building individual historical narrations, leaving the reader with no easy answers.