How can a collective future be imagined without trying to look at the past together? The French Institute of Lebanon & UMAM Documentation & Research invited nine Lebanese and French creatives, with different artistic backgrounds, to take part in a five-day hackathon, a collective workshop. Divided into three teams that met from 16 to 20 January, they shared their contemporary vision of the history of Lebanon based on Lebanese archives.
The corpus of archives currently available is composed of images, sounds, objects and documents.
According to Guillaume Duchemin, deputy director of the French Institute of Lebanon, the question was essentially the following: how could we offer artists, filmmakers, narrators, illustrators, developers, sound engineers and creative people to take over the image of the past in order to give us their own vision of the future?
This hackathon will result in an exhibition that will run until 2 February.
The participants: Pierre Grangé-Praderas, Julien Stiegler, Nasri Sayegh, Ahmad Naboulsi, Patrick Abi Abdallah, Mahmoud Merjan, Alaa Mansour, Delphine Saltel, Kamal Hakim.
Photo: copyrights Ricardo Labaki / L'Orient-le-Jour.