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      <title>
		Art after crisis
	</title>
      <link>http://www.submarinechannel.com/</link>
      <description>
      www.submarinechannel.com
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      <language>en-us</language>
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      <ttl>60</ttl>
      <item>
         <title>first</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10115</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10159;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2007 08:49:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10115</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Fairytale</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10275</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   A new TICA exhibition at Tre Kullat
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10305/fairytale_uitnodiging.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:45:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10275</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>New Flag</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10322</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   A new country, but where is the flag?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10366/flag_1.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:43:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10322</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Why does gravity make things fall?</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10263</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The results of the first artists in residence program
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:27:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10263</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Does it hurt?</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10336</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The first Balkan Dogma film 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10361/does_it_hurt.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:57:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10336</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>TICA, one year later</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10252</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Back in Tirana, I find out that TICA is up and running, but still has no permanent space
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10333/1.60._erik_goengrich._houses_form_tirana.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:12:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10252</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Rizoma Space</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10128</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   A new centre for visual arts
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10334/rron_qena.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:33:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=10128</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Edi Rama</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9506</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   'Of course Tirana needs a centre like that,' says mayor Edi Rama (42). It is midnight in the lobby of the Sheraton. I've just seen him at work during a live talkshow on tv. It was supposed to take ninety minutes. The interviewer hadn't finished his first question or Rama, nowadays also chairman of the Socialist Party and arch-enemy of populist prime minister Sali Berisha, took the microphone and let loose a two hour rant. Even without understanding a word of Albanian, I caught the words terrorist, fascist and gangster. Tall and bald, with heavy brows and a trimmed beard, you would take Rama for a classic Balkan politician, one of those intolerant, selfsatisfied bullies - if you didn't know he was the immensely popular cleaner of the city. 
:image(medium) edirama:
Afterwards, he posed for two middle-aged groupies and dragged me into his limousine. In the Sheraton, he first spends fifteen minutes talking non-stop into two cellphones. Then he bends over to me and replies to my questions in precise, almost tender English. 'That centre will open wherever Edi Muka unpacks his bags. That boy is a genius. When he started the Biennale I feared the chill of such trendy events. But he took care that Tirana didn't turn into a pretentious village. I don't know why the big foreign musea haven't bought him away yet. Maybe he appreciates the freedom here. But everything is still so fragile, so temporary...'
What made Muka to be the only man in town capable to do this work? 'His mother.' He stares at me without blinking. 'Exactly. His mother.'
Will he support the new centre for contemporary arts? 'Our means are modest, but we will do our share. Muka no longer needs to convince me. I have no time to read his project proposals, listen to his dreams or even visit his exhibitions. But if he has a concrete question to ask he is welcome. He asks, I reply and then I will tell him to fuck off.' 
The mayor looks at me.
'Enough?'
Enough. On the way back, passing by the centre of the future, I peer through the glass walls and see the silhouettes of sacks of cement and the hungry fingers of electricity cables sticking out of the walls. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9578/edi_rama.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Apr 2006 18:54:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9506</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Edi Hila</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9490</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   For paintings like 'Planting Trees', Edi Hila (now 61) was sentenced to forced labor in the seventies: for six years, he lugged sacks of chicken feed on a poultry farm. Today, he is the only painter of his generation who enjoys the full respect of the young. 'Because he has the courage to develop,' says his old student Edi Muka. 'He is brave enough to be insecure about what he is doing.' :image(medium) edihila: In the spacious studio he built above the apartment reserved for artists in communist times, the maestro with the infinitely sweet eyes arranges some of his recent paintings for us to see. The dancing tree planters seem very far away now. These are painted impressions of photographs he took and manipulated of anonymous spaces and people about to disappear into them. 
'We see them from behind,' says Hila. 'They are not moving towards me, but away into the distance. What are they looking for? Our new reality is so uncertain, one question follows the other. And who am I? If I would know the answer,' he says with the tristesse of someone who has lost years of his life, 'I would not still be painting.' 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9579/edihila.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:29:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9490</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Suela Qhosja</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9475</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   In a white doll's dress the girl slumps on the black marble tiles, lips smeared grotesquely red, eyes lined in black, a bunch of leaves in her hands. The life-size photograph was one of the eye-catchers in the last Tirana Biennale. Suela Qhosja (25) took her own picture in her living room the day after the girl next door had been taken away by trafickers. 'It could have happened to me,' she says in the garden in front of cinema Millennium. In the shadows next to the fountain the smartly dressed artist keeps on her sunglasses. 'When I was growing up those kind of guys were always hanging round. During the nineties girls like me were disappearing every day. I wanted to show that vulnerability.' :image() suelaqhosja: Because artists in Albania work without subsidy or market, Qhosja lipsynchs children's movies to get by. Her giggle is pure Disney. Her new series of photographs is about a man. 'They are always looking at us. The only thing that interests them is the outside. Now I'm turning it around. It's me who is watching, fascinated and fearful at the same time.' She shows me prints of a boy draped on a sofa, his fingers playing with prayer beads, the light hairs on his chest uncovered, the eyes cruel and lips seductive. 
Photography is new to her. Earlier, she made a name for herself with a ten-yard cartoon of the Tirana bus: a crowd of sad, insane or hip passengers bustling behind the windows. She has painted selfportraits with Nietzsche's autograph enscribed on her arm. There are watercolors, woodcarvings, monoprints and installations. 'One Minute' shows a table strewn with hundreds of tiny paper puppets strewn between the wine glasses and snacks. 'In just one minute, everything changed and the Albanians poured into Europe.' In all of its diversity, Qhosja's work shows a mind brimming with imagination, reaching out for whomever might happen to look. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9580/Suela_Qhosja.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:19:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9475</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>TICA, the new centre</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9456</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The parallel art system is getting a name and a place: TICA, Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art. For too long now, contemporary art has been drifting through the city. An art climate cannot flourish just on nomadic exhibitions and the incidental visits of curious foreigners. That is why Melin, Finn�s, Ljungberg, Muka, Romano and Q�ndro have joined forces to open up a new place. The TICA will be a space for exhibitions, workshops, lectures, archive and residencies. A place to stay. Open daily and active throughout the year. Key word: gender. 'Here, art can only be of value if it is related to the social and politicial context,' says Muka. 'In this society, the balance between men and women is lost. We want to change that.' Between the six traveling curators, they will run the centre like an estafette. 
The TICA team faces a paradox: if they want to create space for developing plans, art under construction and the search for answers to the missing balance between men and women, then they will need a fixed, outlined and recognizable place. A city without an arts centre is not a city. While in the West, art centres are very often temples for the establishment and tradition, here they find their necessity in the daily imagination of the city, public space and tomorrow's society. The new art in the Balkans, especially that in the Albanian atmosphere of permanent unreliability, discards utopia but is at the same time so burdened by responsibility that almost each photograph, video or installation can be read as a design for the future - if only by countering a society that shrugs its shoulders in chaos and lack of perspective by images of personal initiative. So a new centre for the arts will simultaneously unmask the fiction of an ideal society and replace it by a new one. Utopia has been disqualified, but utopian thinking is alive and kicking. 
Muka and Qendro stamp their feet in approval on the floor of the empty space they want to rent. Concrete, no marble tiles. The art here will need no frills and ornaments. The men like the glass walls: much light and few hidden corners. The round terrace outside invites visions of summer nights with open air projections. :image(medium) tica trio: There are two adjacent spaces on the ground floor of a recently built apartment block, 400 square meters in all, on the edge of the city centre. Behind the delapidated football stadium, close to the arts academy, next to the gigantic Sheraton hotel and looking out over the sloping city park. Three of the luxurious cafe's and restaurants that are a Tirana trademark - Juvenilja, Valentino and Greta Garbo - are just around the corner. 
TICA is counting on a budget of approximately two hundred thousand euro per year. They will ask the municipality to pay the first six months rent. That will give them time to convince foreign foundations, like the Swedish SIDA and the Dutch NCDO and Prince Bernhard Foundation, that after project-based contributions it is now time for structural support. 
Does this place have a history, too? Muka nods. 'Last year someone blew up the elevator here, when the former president of the boxing union, who was thought to be involved in organized crime, stepped in to go up.' Luckily, grins Qendro, the centre will be on the ground floor. 'We don't need the elevator.' 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/10197/tica_plan.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 15 Apr 2006 18:01:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9456</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Miss Wet</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9446</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Cafe Zanzibar, located on the ground floor of a wildly postmodern building, is hosting Tirana's art crowd. Between the murals of African savannahs three young Sweden-based artists are handing out blue t-shirts. Miss Wet, they say. The shirts are absolutely dry and only available in extra large. Monica Melin en Joanna Rytel from Sweden and Tina Finn�s from Finland are up against Albanian patriarchism here, just like their work in Sweden and elsewhere is often concerned with human rights and the equality between men and women. 
Their yellow manifest counts 38 demands: '1. Demands the right to speak and be heard. 2. Demands to be taken seriously. 3. Demands the same status as men. 4. Demands the same wages, or more! 5. Demands to be seen as a human being.' The artists make their cheerful rounds through the cafe, tiara's in their hair, holding a microphone up to everyone to hear what they think. Stainless feminism in party dress: the newest event organized by 1.60insurgent space. Every month, local and international artists are invited by the Italian curator and love migrant Stefano Romano to choose a spot in Tirana and turn it inside-out. 
Among the earlier events: a living statue at a factory gate where for years, a bronze Stalin greeted the workers every morning; a disco in a student apartment measuring six square feet where the hunger strikes again the communist regime started in 1990; a walking marathon with no winners through the neighborhood where Enver Hoxha and his apparatsjiks used to live. 
Melin, Rytel and Finn�s were here first during last year's Biennale. Now they are infected by the Tirana virus. 'The chaos here opens new possibilities,' says Monica Melin. 'And that's attractive,' confirms Tina Finn�s. 'A society without structure, but full of creative energy, and just like in all societies going through big changes this opens questions and ideas about the future, but it can also make people want to return to the past.' In the Biennale catalogue Zdenka Badovinac, guest curator from Zagreb, put it this way: 'Tirana is different, not just like an isolated society is different, but in a modern way. Everything revolves around the nomadic and the survival. Albanian society is characterized by the absence of rights and values, so it can hardly be taken to be an alternative for developed democracies. Many things still absolutely have to change, but in the meantime it still remains to be seen if all those temporary, parallel strategies of survival are worth less than the formal structures of power. These kinds of parallel systems represent important forms of individual creativity.' 
Melin, Rytel and Finn�s are hooked. In the talks they record with the visitors of cafe Zanzibar, we hear varying reactions to their feminist approach: the men sometimes with a sense of guilt, the women proud and defiant or simply resigned. Albania is traditionally a man's world: the traditional clans are strictly patriarchal, during communism Hoxha's men had full authority and today politics, crime and business are fortresses of machismo. 
That it takes outsiders to confront these patterns goes almost without saying, and the three women from the North, while cautious not to behave as art neo-colonialists, sense that there is much to gain here, with this promising mix of sophisticated art, feminism and activism. 'We consider art as a universal language and human rights as a universal concern. Of course things are different in different cultures, and in our missWet project we looked and are looking for these differences, but we have also found a lot of common issues and concerns... There is still a lot to do in Sweden and elsewhere, and for us art is one way to deal with these questions and concerns.' 
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:40:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9446</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>National Gallery</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9387</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Why does Tirana need a new space for young artists like Suela Qoshja, Anri Sala and Adrian Paci, who have been shown in the outside world but haven't had a solo exhibition yet in Tirana? The answer lies in a visit to the National Gallery. The elegant modern building on the main boulevard had its last serious opening night in 2004. Upstairs, the space has remained practically untouched since Gzim Qendro quit his directorate to work on his thesis in Paris, about the socialist realism that was obligatory in Albanian art during the fifty years of communist rule. Qendro is a dreamy man with grey curls, the thinker next to Muka the maker. Before he took over the National Gallery he had studied in Amsterdam for six years. In the fascinating room with the classics of socialist realism, which he designed because the memory of a black past is better than a black hole in the memory, he points out the small digressions the painters permitted themselves. 
:image() partizans:
At night, gathering round the open fire, the partizan commander tells a peasant family - during the resistance against fascism - about the communist paradise they are fighting for. The hierarchy is visible: the commander and the father of the family do the talking, the women keep silent, the soldiers concentrate on their arms. 'But take a look at the fire,' Qendro points out, 'the faces have been painted blank and according to rule. The censorship committee, after all, could always demand corrections. But in the stove and the flames the painter showed his mastery. They have been doen precisely and with feeling.' In two paintings by Sali Shijaku, emblematic for the Albanian adoration of war heroes, Qendro points at the surprisingly Christian use of symbols, absolutely taboo under communism. The martyrdom of the boy on the gallows, looking beyond the horizon towards the day of his resurrection, and the young partizan throwing a hand grenade into a fascist tank: the avenging angel, cape billowing around his shoulders, coming to punish the forces of evil. Standing on the dark, iron tank he symbolizes the victory of faith over rationalism - a notion absolutely alien to communism. 
:image() aliahoxha:
And there is the weird painting by Ahmeti from 1989: Enver Hoxha and his successor Ramiz Alia, walking alone through a dreamlike landscape. No cheering crowds in sight, no factory chimneys as proof of Albanian technological superiority, just an empty land, a small portrait of national poet Naim Frasheri on the wall, and the two leaders - one already dead at the time of painting, one on the verging of seeing his regime collapsing - walking with an air of guilt, apologetic. 
:image() plantingtrees:
The highlight of the short Albanian spring was 'Planting Trees' by Edi Hila in 1971, when young men suddenly started wearing moustaches and bellbottoms and listening to rock music. 'Was it really spring,' Qendro asks, 'or did the regime just want to see who was showing anti-revolutionary behavior? After 1974 Edi Hila, just like many others, had a high price to pay. At first sight, the painting is innocent enough: cheerful boys and girls, wearing red scarves, are digging holes and planting trees to make their country even more beautiful and green. 'But look closely,' says Qendro, 'do those kids look normal? It is the theatre of the absurd! This girl screams as if she's seeing a ghost, the other is just skipping around with a branch on her shoulder. This boy just kicks against a tree that another girl leans against, clearly dreaming. It is a delirium, completely non-functional behavior, and then all those impressionist colors!' 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9582/National_Gallery._Peasants_and_Partizans.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Apr 2006 12:03:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9387</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Return to Identity</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9377</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The old capitals of communism are easy to recognize. Broken see-saws and swings without a seat. Grass grows high beneath rusty merry-go-rounds. The legacy of decades of collective neglect is a wasteland for a generation that gets to learn as kids that public space belongs to everybody and thus to no one. The question of property is suspended in thin air. In between state property and private ownership whole cities wait in stalemate.
But in Tirana the see-saws sparkle and the merry-go-rounds whizz without a creak. Even the small amusement park in the centre, in other Balkan cities by definition a ruin from the days of worker's relaxation, is freshly painted. On cool spring nights the ferris wheel rotates gracefully. Six years ago, both sides of the canal that cuts through the city was crammed with slums and shops. The trees were cut for firewood and the water was an open sewer. People walked in the streets because the sidewalks were stuffed with the kiosks of wild capitalism.  
Maybe it's no coincidence that it was an artist, a man with an sense for the moral boost that beauty can bring, who returned the city to its inhabitants. Edi Rama, former basketball international and painter, was going nowhere in Paris when the government called him back to duty in 1998. He became minister of culture and then mayor of Tirana. He had the sidewalks cleaned up, swept both sides of the canal and had trees planted, drenched the central Skanderbeg square in hallucinatory blue light and made his claim to fame with the buildings he released from their greyness by having them painted in patterns of wild color. His motto was: Return to Identity. It gives the city a strange innocence. The paranoia of fifty years of communism and the violent cancer of the nineties keep the inhabitants at guard, but still, they are walking around in a city that is ready for a future. Which future, that is anybody's guess. On the road to god knows what, much remains to be done, but on the road they are. 
Back in the eighties, Rama was Muka's professor at the art academy. Today the mayor is the honorary president of the Tirana Biennale. The new artists have taken over his mission: the city needs its identity back. Guests of the Biennale have painted buildings, Lego City became an exercise in civilian initiative, the central location last year was an empty parking garage in a shabby neighborhood that is now being opened up with a newly paved road. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9784/de_stad_en_F4.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2006 11:58:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9377</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Tirana Biennale</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9351</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Last summer, when I first met Edi Muka at a conference in Sarajevo, he was working hard on the preparation for the third Tirana Biennale. The first two, in 2001 and 2003, had broken with anything the traditional Albanian arts field knew. More and more international artists and curators came to participate and watch. Young Albanian artists found their first serious platform. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9583/Olafur_Eliasson._Lego_City.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:43:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9351</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Edi Muka</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9343</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Early morning in the Pyramid. Way up in the glass and metal monster, in a drab little office, Edi Muka spreads out his plans for the new Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art on the table. He and Yoa have been writing all night. His eternal stubbles are darker than usual.
It's great to see him here. Back in 1999, his name was all over the art mailinglists in the West, because of the Pyramid. Built as a tomb for dictator Enver Hoxha after his death in 1987, a last gasp of self-congratulating communist architecture, it was turned into a centre for arts, music and performances after the fall of the regime in 1991. Building a pyramid was fitting epitaph for the leader who had made himself into a myth. The immense labor of countless workers in honor of the single man at the top was echoed in Ismael Kadare's haunting novel. And the irony continued when Albania spun into a violent chaos in 1997, after the collapse of the so-called pyramid lottery scheme. 
Edi Muka was barely thirty when he was appointed director of the Pyramid in 1999. He had made a name for himself as a young painter, and especially by being the first to start curating art shows which were a radical break with the older generation, that had morphed from obligatory socialist realism to almost just as wide-spread abstract painting. One of the ground-breaking events he organized was a conference for syndicate, the critical art&amp;amp;media list that connected new artists en theorists across Europe. Internet art in Tirana, where you were lucky if the phone worked, let alone your modem? Edi Muka did it. 
He hardly lasted two years. The prime minister's wife knew someone who needed a job. They gave him the Pyramid. Edi Muka was out, no matter how loud the outcry across the internet, which delivered hundreds of concerned signatures to the prime minister's office. 
In the meantime, he has become a curator with a world-wide reputation and no office. Three times, he has now organized the Tirana Biennale, an ambitious overview of Albanian and international art spread out across the city.  When he first applied for foreign funding, in 2002, the reply was: 'We are sorry to inform you that we cannot support the Tirana Biennale, for the simple reason that we do not believe that such an event can take place in Tirana.'
Muka is the nomadic survivor of Albanian contemporary art. A small man with pointed ears, stubbles and an army dump coat that he probably even wears under the shower. For the time being, he?s back in the Pyramid, renting a small office from his friend who runs an advertisement agency here in the building that now hosts senseless tv-shows and commercial fairs. But Muka is ready for something new. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9785/Edi_Muka.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9343</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Dead spots in the city</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9332</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Petrit Selimi is a slender, jumpy young man playing life like speed chess: switching from board to board, competitive, always looking for the next opportunity to beat the opposition. He studied urban psychology in Norway, did summer school at Stanford, edited Express newspaper for a while, owns the popular and comfortable Strip Depot cafe and is about to open a small place called Barbie-Q in a middle of a sidestreet where the lost old men meet, and he should be finding time to write about the city and the arts. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9584/Erzen_Shkololli._Flag.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Apr 2006 21:05:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9332</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Peja</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9322</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Mehmet drives me through the hills of Kosova, past the gas stations and motels that can impossibly make any profit if not for prostitution and illegal trade, past the houses abandoned halfway through reconstruction, past the sloppy beauty of a countryside washed with grim memories. We reach Peja, the city that survived especially hard shelling during the war. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9585/Erzen_Shkololli._Transition.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:29:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9322</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>The new video artists</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9292</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The national library is a miracle. Originally designed by a Croatian architect for Kuwait, the leaders of federal Yugoslavia thought it would be good idea to put it here, on the slope above the city centre of Prishtina. It is a true example of socialist imagination, simultaneously impressive and ridiculous. Covered by white glass domes on different levels, the whole building is wrapped in iron netting, making it look like some noble, giant insect. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9586/soqol_beqiri._superman.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:32:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9292</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>The Music Academy</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9222</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Just around the corner from the Grand Hotel, which Timothy Garton Ash famously called the worst five-star hotel in the world, stands Prishtina's music academy. Like many state-run cultural instutions, it's in a bad shape. The hallways are mucky, the stairs dilapidated. Upstairs, twenty kids crowd into a rehearsal room and unpack their instruments. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9587/schilderij.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:11:00 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=9222</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Kosovar Identity</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=5726</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   This is what I love about Prishtina: early morning, blue sky, black coffee, a colorful caf� and one by one, most of the people I was looking for drift in by themselves. Nowhere else is it so easy to be a cultural explorer. 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9588/identitybookcover.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Apr 2006 10:50:32 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=5726</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Colofon</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4816</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Colofon
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Mar 2006 11:36:45 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4816</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Serail / Gemmayzeh</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4339</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8991/Serail1.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:45:11 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4339</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Chiyah / Ain Errommaneh</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4335</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8992/Chiyah1.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:44:08 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4335</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Khandaq Elghamiq / Monnot</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4325</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8993/Khandaq1.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:40:16 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4325</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Ras Ennabeh / USJ</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4315</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8994/Ras1.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:32:56 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4315</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Barbir / Hippodrome</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4294</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8995/teaser_image_for_Barbir_-_Hippodrome.jpeg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:24:32 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4294</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Ring / Tabaris</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4285</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8996;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:11:34 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4285</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Akram Zaatari</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=5470</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Akram Zaatari, an artist whose work is shown around the world, is a poet of the video documentary. I visit him at the Arab Image Foundation, where he and his colleagues collect huge archives of photography documenting the Arab world entering modernity over the past century. His own stunning 90 minute documentary, 'This Day' (2004), took him three years to finish. It presents, in a delicate montage of still and moving images from Beirut, Amman, Damascus and the Syrian desert, a history of old photographs capturing the stereotypes of desert life (with the inimitable image of his own attempt to hold a microphone under the nose of a camel, in order to record its language) through the sounds and pictures and diaries he kept during the war, up til the Palestinian propaganda songs and scenes of empty city streets in Beirut today. 
:image(float) homeworks169:
	His work captures all the fascinations I have encountered during my stay here among the young artists of Beirut: an obsession with the city, a reworking of the war experience, a subtle play with reality and fiction, and a tendency to remain absent, out of the frame. 'It speaks for itself,' Zaatari says, 'that I am the camera. It makes me more reliable. I tend to keep a distance from the current documentary world, in which tv-attitude is taking over. More and more festivals are going for the personal story. Me, I prefer to stay out of the image, while my personal preoccupations speak from what I show.' His choice of material never claims to be objective. 'I don't believe in neutral archives. I work only with material I collected myself, including the propaganda, which takes on a different meaning shown out of its original context. These patriot songs and images should be conserved for the future - one day they will be taken out of circulation, once a peace agreement has been reached, but I want them to be available, without necessarily sharing their accusations.' 
	Since the assassination of Hariri, he records whatever he happens to see on tv about the ways in which he is commemorated. 'This really dominates our screens. I remember once, two months after his death, that the regular program was interrupted at midnight for a live broadcast of his widow visiting his grave in utter silence. It's interesting, this modern iconography of the muslim saint.'
	Interesting, indeed. Ancient traditions transformed into modern rituals, captured by urban artists, innovating the language of their arts, reclaiming the streets of their estranged city - Beirut's young art scene is grasping for a new reality, beyond the traumatized, destroyed and reconstructing cityscape of their country where the fear of death returning hovers over ruins and highrises alike.
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8997/homeworks169.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2006 15:22:29 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=5470</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Bilal Khbeiz</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4458</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   One of Tueni's former colleagues is Bilal Khbeiz, cultural critic for An-Nahar and regular coffeedrinker at Wimpy's. In his book 'Globalization and the manufacture of transient events', he quotes Augustine to explain Lebanon's current predicament: 'Expectation is the present of the future. Attention is the present of the present. Remembrance is the present of the past.' 
But, writes Khbeiz: 'We in Lebanon live in each of these states separately. Our past is not a remembrance, for it is sacred and mythical. Our present is not attention but a complex mixture of our past and the past of advanced nations. And our future is not expectation, for it is stagnant and overwhelmingly visible.' 
:image(float) bilal:
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8998;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:50:30 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4458</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>The youngest martyr</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4418</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The oblong plain of Martyr's Square, lined by excavations, looks out over the Mediterranean. Until 1975 it boasted movie theatres, hotels and palm trees. Since the civil war, in which it became a lethal no man's land between the christian east and the islamic west of Beirut, it lies waiting for a new destination. On March 14, shortly after the assassination of prime minister Rafiq Hariri, two million Lebanese stood here shouting for independence from Syria, the one-party state that governed Lebanon for thirty years, under the cloak of pan-Arab unity. Gebran Tueni stood on the stage, a well groomed man in his forties with unmistakeable charisma. 'Take the oath with me!', he shouted to the masses at his feet. 'We, christians and muslims, pledge by God almighty that we will stay united until the end of times, to protect our beloved Lebanon.' The crowd chanted the oath word for word after him. Right behind him, the sparkling new An-Nahar building rose into the air, home of the newspaper of which he had been publisher, chairman of the board and columnist since 2000. Now his portrait, larger than life, hangs above the entrance: dressed in a handsome suit, a scarf in the Lebanese red and white loosely around his neck, under his thin moustache the steely smile of a leader in times of crisis, the right hand beckoning in the air. Was he one of the new democratically thinking leaders the Arab world needs? Did he have the blueprint of a sovereign state with space for all the different denominations in his head? Did he know how to leave a century of power dynasties, nepotism and sectarian politics behind? Or was he an example of the new phenomenon that Turkish author Orhan Pamuk observed recently: the new non-Western elite, who 'justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West', while responding to criticism by their countrymen of ignoring tradition 'by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism'? 
:image(float) beirut1110: Early Monday morning, December 12th, Gebran Tueni drove from his home in Mkalless, on the hillside north-east of downtown, to his office. In a curve of the road sixty kilograms of explosives detonated when he passed. His armoured limousine was blown right through the guard-rails. Georges Nassif, editor of An-Nahar's religion supplement ('christians and muslims, everyone is represented'), was about to leave for work when the telephone rang. 'I burst into tears,' the likeable chain-smoker recalls. 'At the newspaper there was an atmosphere of bewilderment. The fifth deadly attempt since the killing of prime minister Hariri in February. And all the victims were greek-orthodox: the bridge-builders of the new Lebanon, christian and Arab at the same time, open to the East and to the West.' The next morning, Ghassan Tueni arrived at the newspaper. The eighty year old eminence of Lebanese journalism and diplomacy - former ambassador at the United Nations, long-time editor of An-Nahar - had returned from Paris a day after his son, where he had received the Legion d'Honneur from Dominique de Villepin. After having lost his wife and two sons he now grieved the death of his last child. Breakable, lightly stooping, he addressed the gathered staff. 'Gebran is not dead. An-Nahar will continue. That will be tomorrow's headline.' That was all he said. Then he went home to rest. An-Nahar is one of the two main newspapers of Lebanon, and a model for Arab media in the 21st century. Founded in 1933, at the time of French rule, by grandfather Gebran who literally went from paperboy to millionnaire, the newspaper made the Tueni's into one of Lebanon's prominent dynasties. Outside of the country itself the paper is distributed in the Gulf states and Paris. Most important articles are available on the bi-lingual website. The building, which opened eightteen months ago, is a wonder of space and light. The round editorial offices are full of flat-screen monitors. The cartoonist produces his daily drawings inside a glass pillar in the middle of the workfloor. In the fully equipped training centre young journalists from all over the region follow courses in all aspects of making a newspaper. On his frequent trips Gebran Tueni kept an eye on the work through webcams. Even now he's omnipresent, on posters, buttons and screensavers. Georges Nasif, of the religion supplement, grins when we catch him with a pen in hand. 'We of the older guard received an ultimatum from Gebran. A year from now, writing on paper had to be left behind. He was a man of the future. Rooted in the newspaper's history, but determined to lead An-Nahar into the age of new technology. Since he took over from his father in 2000, he was constantly pushing for innovation. The design of the building, open and inclusive, was his in all its details. Beirut is a meeting-place between cultures, he said, the Martyr's Square is its new heart and so An-Nahar should also express this openness. Until the end of the civil war this paper was regarded as christian, right of center. Gebran brought a new generation of journalists inside. Muslim columnists were hard to find immediately, so he began with leftist christians like me, Elias Khoury and Samir Kassir, who was killed in June. Former marxists, all of us, who wanted a newspaper for the new Lebanon, which counts 65% of muslims. Starting with the large demonstrations in March the paper became the voice of the new movement for Lebanese sovereignty. We spent as much time in the square as behind our desks. An-Nahar is more than a newspaper. It is a movement, and we are its warriors. For us this is not a job, but our whole life.' A few glass doors away the editor of the literary supplement resides, Elias Khoury, the great novelist of the war and the Palestinian exodus. On his desk too there are suspiciously high piles of paper. But Khoury, with his grand reputation, magisterial pen and the investigative distance of his eyes behind glasses, he does not seem like a man to whom one puts an ultimatum. He shared Gebran Tueni's pursuit of a sovereign country. But where Tueni's tirades on every Thursday's front page aimed at the Baath-regime in Syria, Khoury thinks larger: to him, an independent Lebanon is a contribution to a new, democratic Arab world. 'We can be the model for the Palestinians to end the occupation and for true democracy in Iraq. The fate of the whole region is in suspension, and Lebanon plays a key role. That started with the demonstrations of March 14: the Americans called it the Cedar Revolution, I prefer to speak of our own intifadah. For the first time in 75 years we knew consensus in Lebanon. Gebran Tueni then joined the national coalition, leading to his place in parliament as the representative of Beirut. That coalition is necessary, whatever differences we might have had on social and economic topics.' After the assassination he quoted in his supplement Pablo Neruda's poem of the Spanish civil war, about the blood that flowed through the streets. 'With the killings, the Syrian regime is trying to creat a political crisis in Lebanon, so they might resume control over the country. Their influence on the army and the secret service is still strong. It is no coincidence that they are attacking writers and journalists: we defend democracy. And it isn't over yet. We are all targets, but it would be unwise to start writing more carefully now. We cannot afford to lose this battle. That would mean the end of the nation. When under fire you have to shoot back, so I learned during the war.'
:image(float) beirut246: (video) As far as Arab journalists go, Gebran Tueni was uncharacteristically direct. No shadowy sentences, no space for ambiguous interpretations. According to his last columns Syrian president Bashar Assad was a war criminal, who kept Lebanon in a stranglehold through his two 'Trojan horses': the maronite president Lahoud, whose second term he pressed through during the last unfree elections, and Hezbollah, the shiite party that hasn't put down its arms since the withdrawal of Israeli troops from South-Lebanon. 'Does Hezbollah want to be part of the offensive that is trying to destabilize Lebanon?', Tueni asked. 'Is it acceptable in a democratic system, based on dialogue and consensus, that the parliamentary majority is being held hostage by an armed minority?' When I ask Elias Khoury if Tueni, in the fire of his campaign for national unity, wasn't on the verge of excluding whole parts of the population, the writer perseveres in subtle diplomacy. 'You can exclude a political party, but not the whole shia community. The coalition will keep the door open for Hezbollah, even now their ministers have refused for months to fulfill their role in cabinet. After all, they have been vital in the resistance against Israeli occupation. If Hezbollah decides to follow the Syrian line, or the Iranian discourse with its racist denial of the holocaust, well, then they will have to take their responsibility. I count on the wisdom of people, even if history often proves their ignorance...' :image(float) beirut061: 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/8999;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:25:22 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4418</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Gebran Tueni</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4414</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   The youngest martyr is Gebran Tueni, the editor of daily newspaper An-Nahar. Here is the story of his life and death, in two parts: 
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:23:35 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4414</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>The youngest martyr 2</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=6447</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   During the funeral service, in the orthodox church right behind the An-Nahar building, the old Ghassan Tueni spoke reconciliatory words. &amp;quot;We must bury the mistrust between the warring parties. Let there be an end to bloodshed. To reach the Lebanon of tomorrow, we must turn the page.&amp;quot; The sadness deeply engraved into his face, he reminded one of Marlon Brando as the old Godfather speaking to the gathering of mafia-chiefs after the killing of his son. A heavy responsibility rests on his shoulders. For the time being he has taken over his son's duties at the newspaper, and in the parliamentary elections of February 5th, he will be candidate for Gebran Tueni's vacant seat. More and more people see him, with the moral authority that a life of non-sectarian tolerance has given him, as the president of the new Lebanon. 
:image(float) beirut421: An-Nahar hasn't skipped a day, but those who were closest to Gebran Tueni still move around as if numbed by shock. His office is now occupied by Khalil Chammas, a sandy-haired man who served as his personal assistant since 1981. Since December 12th he has hardly slept. His voice is practically gone. He explains almost mechanically how the company is financed: the main shareholders are the family of the killed prime minister Hariri, the Lebanese-Saudi prince Walid and the Tueni's themselves. When he starts about the personal support Gebran Tueni offered to people who couldn't pay their hospital bills or the tuition fees of their children his voice falters. About the succession issue he can't afford to have any doubts. Gebran's daughter Nayla will take over from her grandfather as soon as she is ready. I meet her later that day, after a press conference: a recently graduated journalist, 23 years old, who can't help but repeat the requisite phrases as in trance. &amp;quot;Personally I might want to quit, but I will continue for him. We must realize his dream of an independent Lebanon. The newspaper has to keep appearing. The only losers are the murderers themselves. They are the weak ones, if they were so afraid of what he wrote.&amp;quot; Her eyes, deeply exhausted, are past crying. Je t'adore papito, it said in girlish curls on the card she had put on her father's grave. &amp;quot;He is with me every day. We repeat the oath that he pledged on Martyr's Square every morning, almost as a prayer. I have no fear. I don't need protection. I laugh at the threats, just like he used to do.&amp;quot; Afterwards, she indeed walks into the street alone, an elderly gentleman at her side, and steps into an unblinded car. 
:image(float) beirut490: The streets of Beirut read like the psyche of the city. One period supersedes the other brusquely. Bullet-riddled houses, in their macabre beauty, rest in the shadow of the gleaming highrises that shoot up from the sloping streets. There is a strange rhythm in the changes the organism of this city is going through, a nervous inertia. Demolition, reconstruction and self-destruction follow each other with sudden starts and stops. The unsteady elegance of houses with balconies and high windows, having survived the time that this was called the Paris of the Middle-East, is flaking off in the shadow of office buildings that snap at the globalization that remains just out of reach. Its dynamics are seductive, but also obscuring. What happens to the ruins? When they are not being rebuilt, why are they left standing? &amp;quot;The insistence to forget,&amp;quot; writes architect Tony Chakar, &amp;quot;is a symptom of the catastrophe itself.&amp;quot; In Beirut, he claims, only the present counts. It is not so much that there is a taboo on the memories of war, but that people refuse to see how deeply that past still affects their life. The loser's perspective - and this war had no winners - still has no place. Is not allowed a place: the fear of losing everything once again is still too deeply entrenched. Maybe that explains the ritual habit of making a martyr out of every victim, a saint, and the tendency to withdraw into the secure community of faith and family, in times of feverish insecurity. It is the paradox of the Tueni's: frontrunners of the new Lebanon, but they worship the dead leader as a saint and his successor is looked for in the bosom of the own dynasty: anti-modern reflexes, however understandable, at a moment when the future is at stake. 
:image(float) beirut1094: Gebran Tueni was no saint. As a young journalist he was more militant and biased than his father. During the terrible eighties he chose sides with Bashir Gemayel, the extreme-right phalangist leader. After his violent death he became the spokesperson for Michel Aoun, the marionite general with messianistic traits. After the threats on his life became too frequent, he moved to Paris, where he started the internationl Arab edition of An-Nahar. He gained a reputation with merciless editorial comments. Robert Fisk, who's been the chronicler of Beirut for thirty years, called him &amp;quot;cantankerous&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hard to take&amp;quot;. But, he wrote in the Independent after the killing, &amp;quot;he was a courageous man and would have been my friend, had we had the chance to be friends.&amp;quot; Joseph Samaha, the editor of the main competitor As-Safir, also carries mixed feelings. He receives in his much less luxurious offices saying: &amp;quot;You must understand that it is hard for me to speak about a man who I detested all my life, both professionally and personally, now that he is dead, the poor man. I disagreed with every line he wrote. But in the days after his death is was hard to tell the difference between our newspapers. We condemned the murderers just as strongly. It was an attempt on freedom. Gebran Tueni was a good manager, he was open for different voices in his paper, he followed the developments in technological innovation closely. He has payed far too high a price for his convictions, which were absolutely sincere.&amp;quot; 
:image(float) beirut862: On the wall in his office, there is a picture of Nasser, relic of the socialist-inspired pan-Arab thinking of days gone by. Samaha, who calls himself &amp;quot;a self-hate Christian with a cultural muslim-background&amp;quot;, used to edit the paper of the communist resistance. From 1984 to 1995 he lived in Paris, where he started writing for the traditionally left-islamic As-Safir. It was there he first met Gebran Tueni. His father Ghassan was a great journalist, who studied a great deal before he started publishing. Gebran just fired away immediately. He didn't read political or economical theory. He wrote like he spoke, in a weak, superficial style. It was of an endless intellectual mediocricy. At first he preferred a strong, imperious leader above democracy. In a famous article in 1999, he called on general Aoun, who he followed in his dream of a sovereign Lebanon, to &amp;quot;rule us if need be with the clubs of a military regime!&amp;quot; During a civil war one cannot blame a journalist for his bias, but he preferred the mobilising effect of his words above the truth. His articles didn't leave space for questions, you were simply for or against.&amp;quot; That populist style worked well on Martyr's Square during the mass demonstrations in March. Was he a leader of the new movement for independence? 'He was its face and its voice, but the leader he was not. The mobilisation of the masses was done by others. I disliked that famous oath. Can one ask a million people to repeat something out loud when they don't know what will follow after the next sentence? Moreover, even at that historical moment, facing those hundred thousands, he spoke about &amp;quot;we, christians and muslims&amp;quot;. There and then he should have erased that distinction. He should have said, we Lebanese, period.&amp;quot; 
:image(float) beirut880: Through friends I receive an e-mail for a New Year's eve party on Martyr's Square. Get together in front of the Dome, it says, the burnt-out cinema that looks out over the square as a monument to the war. &amp;quot;Bring along any musical instrument,&amp;quot; it says, &amp;quot;box, hammer or anything you can make noise with and join the fun. Admission is free, a smile, wink or kiss will be more than enough!&amp;quot; At midnight the square is deserted. Apart from the honking taxi's there is no sound, not even a vague echo of the masses that stood here last spring. I had been warned. The last assassination has discouraged even the famous party people of Beirut. Everyone says there's a death list going round, the enemies of Syria are being dealt with one by one. The killers of prime minister still haven't been identified. UN-researcher Detlev Mehlis points at Assad and his Baath-regime, but hard proof still isn't on the table. A team of Dutch forensic experts has been flown in again: the UN-research has now de facto been expanded to include the clarification of the attempt on Gebran Tueni. The youngest martyr still beckons across the square, where now soldiers are hanging listlessly against their tanks. The struggle for a sovereign Lebanon isn't over yet. The Baath-regime in Syria falters under international pressure, but it won't let go of Lebanon just like that. The two countries are so interconnected that a triumph of democracy here will inspire opposition there too. So the future of Lebanon still lies in the hands of outside powers. The parties that are fighting each other out of government each have their own loyalties across the borders. Will the country ever find a common language for all Lebanese? Will the war ever become a shared history, instead of an ugly memory that grows rank in the fight between the old dynasties? Gebran Tueni smiles his steely smile. 
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	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:31:27 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=6447</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>The dead will return</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4204</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   On high walls and street corners in the city, you can find clocks and signs counting the days since Hariri was killed. People are still waiting for the truth about the perpetrators to emerge. His face, huge and well-fed like a satisfied walrus, stares at us from countless posters. Somehow, this face and those of other victims like the journalists Gebran Tueni and Samir Kassir, mingle with those of the smiling politicians from the last elections - and, in the shia neighborhoods, of the martyrs who fell in the war against Israel. Spooky, all these lifeless faces gazing out over the streets. 
:image(medium) hariri: 
Tony Chakar describes Beirut as a city living in fear for the return of the dead. 'Just compare, for example,' he tells me, 'ten buildings from the architectural boom of the sixties to ten recent buildings. There is at least 30% less glass in them. People don't want to live in unsafe houses anymore. So the war still exists in the buildings of now and tomorrow. It isn't over yet. People are still insecure of what exactly happened. The war has not been made into a shared history. Deep inside people fear that the horror will return. It's a catastrophe: an innocence has been lost, the darkness lies in waiting, only to come back one day. The survivors live in an eternal fear of the dead.'
:image(medium) martyrs: 
In one of his texts, Convulsive Fables, he describes a hardly imaginary city in which the inhabitants stick photographs of their dead family members on the walls. When one troubled man starts removing these pictures and painting the walls white, stricter measures are taken: 'The inhabitants took the following decision: They would no longer hang photographs of their dead on the city walls. They could not risk some other inhabitant going mad and risk a repetition of the same sequence of actions. But what is to be done? They couldn't separate themselves from their dead, who gave them such a strong will to live, to remember. One of their holy men found a solution: The photographs, he said with that stupid, authoritarian, loud voice that religious men often have, should be suspended in the air. In addition, the photographs should not remain as they were, ordinary black and white photos of dubious quality. No, an individual
coloured portrait of each dead person had to be drawn separately. From that moment on, innumerable portraits of dead people hovered in the air above the city, over the heads of the inhabitants - an almost absurd an intolerable situation: One cannot have a dialogue with something so far above one's head.' 
:image(medium) tueni: 
Standing on Martyr's Square, in front of the An-Nahar building, home to one of the two main daily newspaper in Lebanon, it feels uncanny to look at the giant portrait of journalist and editor Gebran Tueni hanging above the entrance. The enshrining of the dead, the insistence in calling them martyrs, their glorification - it looks like Tony Chakar is right when he suggests that Beirut lives in the permanent fear for the return of the dead and the horror that produced them.
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9001;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2006 10:19:58 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4204</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Ghassan Salhab</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4197</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   One of those returnees who spends a great deal of time observing the city and how it changed in his absence is film director Ghassan Salhab. And he too is preoccupied with questions of presence and invisibility. This afternoon in his sparsely furnished apartment, he offers us a viewing of his last movie, Terra Incognita, which had its first showing in Cannes in 2002. A story of another returnee drifting through the city, trailing his former girlfriend, who spreads her desires thin over a number of unknowns and refuses to pick up her history with him. 
:image(float) terraincognita: 'The returnee waits at the edge of the company,' he says. 'Just like the film itself. It is hard to make a film about a city that is constantly changing, in a strange rhythm, a nervous slowness. You don't know in which direction it is moving, only that it'�s moving. That state is like a virus, it works itself into the structure of the story. How do you tell the story of a city that doesn't know its own history, and which story do you tell about yourself? Who are you anyway - it's hard being someone here, without being part of a community.' He hands me a dvd with some of his short video's, made over the past few years. 'My video's too are always concerned with borders, between you and me, between me and the group, between countries. But those borders are invisible, and that is why they interest me. That is what cinema is about: to grasp that invisible border, the skin being the first border.' His short video's often show himself: a handsome, if somewhat evasive man who has seen life. (He spent one day, he told me, during the war, pressed against a wall in the city next to a complete stranger, watching two people lying right in front of them, dying a slow and agonizing death, bleeding to death after having been shot by a sniper who will surely kill him too if he moves into the street. Only when night has fallen does he dare move away into safety.) Nothing much happens. His face slowly comes into focus, the wind tickling the hair above his ears, then fades away again, ever so slowly. In another video, out of two blurry shapes emerge the faces of him as a young boy and his mother, a pretty woman in the fashion of the Arab sixties, only to retreat again after a few minutes into the vagueness of shadows. Like his feature film, these video's give the viewer all the time he needs to wonder about questions of presence, visibility, memory, representation. His next movie, The Last Man, is fresh out of the editing room. Nobody has seen it yet. 'This one will be even slower,' he warns us with a smile, 'even less action.'
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	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:17:09 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4197</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Returnees</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4193</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   While having an excellent lunch at La Spaghetteria, an old-fashioned Italian restaurant with a splendid view of the Corniche and the ocean, which Robert Fisk calls his favorite restaurant in town, I read through Transit Beirut, a book of new writing and images, edited by Malu Halasa and Roseanne Saad Khalaf - two young women I have come across, of course, during one of those afternoons in the Prague. I am struck by a very honest description of the writing classes Roseanne Saad Khalaf has been giving at the American University of Beirut. From the very beginning, her students - often kids that had returned from the US, Canada and other places with their parents somewhere after the war - had been very eager to turn their experiences into writing. Reading her analysis of their work, I cannot help thinking this must be a portrait of many of the young artists I am meeting here.
:image(float) transitbeirut:
	A few fragments:
'Life in Canada', Ali explained, 'had proceeded normally without any major upheavals. It was not my country so it was normal not to fit in. Being an outsider did not bother me.' Now the situation is entirely different. His returnee status sets him apart from mainstream Lebanese society. He feels that he is viewed with suspicion, and as he does not particularly adhere to social convention, he is perceived as being 'different from the rest', especially by an extended family that he cannot identify with, and that prides itself in maintaining 'solidarity' or 'a unified front'. If Ali is 'absorbed in a book' or 'engrossed in writing', they become immediately agitated, fearing it might contain damaging or inappropriate ideas that he could use to 'disgrace the family'. With time, Ali has become a 'tempting target' even to well-meaning relatives who are concerned that he might make them vulnerable to social criticism within the community.
'Students were quick to reject the romantic and nostalgic views fed to them by their parents while still abroad, dismissing these stories as wishful imaginings of homesick exiles whose emotional needs are satisfied by clinging to a vanished past. Nesrine laments the desire of her parents to reconnect at the expense of ignoring the tragic reality of a country torn apart by factional strife. 'There is a part of me that accepts the need of my parents to reconstruct a perfect past, however, I wish they would stop living in denial and see how the war has destroyed Lebanon.'
'Juggling multiple identities, an inevitable part of the diaspora experience, means constantly losing and reinventing the self. Along with this comes isolation and confusion.'
I encompass a spectrum of personalities because my life has been interrupted so many times. I have never enjooyed continuity. My existence is choppy and disconnected. (Maha)
'Ironically, students have no desire to alter their suspended betweenness. In fact, in some inexplicable way, they welcome being kept off balance, presumably because it necessitates the constant and creative energy that accompanies reinvention of self. Increasingly, they grow accustomed to this condition of fluidity.'
'Students saw merit in the ability to remain detached; sustaining a high degree of emotional distance was viewed as an asset. The idea was not to shut out the rest of the world, but to observe from a safe distance. To achieve this, they place themselves in situations that are out of step with what is happening around them.'
When we moved back to Lebanon I was distressed by the political and religious conflicts. Luckily I like to be alone and witness what is happening around me. Often I prowl the streets at odd hours just to observe and I write about what I see. I  don't like to be seen. In fact, I wish I could be invisible. (Wael)
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	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Dec 2005 10:11:53 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4193</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Ali Cherri</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4183</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   We spend a pleasant night at home with Ali Cherri, one of those DasArts students. Originally a graphic designer, Ali has turned himself into a gifted, highly literate video maker, able to transcend the limits of the screen. His first work, Un cercle autour du soleil, was innovative in an unspectacular way: while Ali speaks of the unexpected feeling of unsafety he experienced after the Lebanese war was over, the camera very slowly pans down across the multi-layered, partly shell-shocked surface of urban Beirut. It takes the viewer a while to realize that this can impossibly be a true cityscape: in fact, he has been watching a montage of Beirut buildings, streets and walls, one added on top of the other, thus creating a perfect backdrop for the complex soul-searching of Ali's text. Here is a still from his video, accompanied by the full text of his voice-over.
Un Cercle autour du Soleil	
A video by Ali Cherri	
During my early years I loved darkness.
Especially during the fighting I used to close the curtains in my room, turn off the lights and get under the bed covers. 
It was my way to create my survival environment where nothing is necessary to me, and everything could be invented.
I went into a process of disappearing into a nowhere of my own making.
Bed
Desk 
Window
Room
...slow but ineluctable process of erasure.
In darkness things loose the connection with their names. Words no longer correspond exactly to the thing they describe. 
I used to feel that I could only have deep thoughts when plunged in darkness.
In there I can go in a vertical descent to the bottom of my soul.
It was my way to escape the deception of my body. 
Even should some eccentric idea require that I sprout a pair of formidable waxen wings on my back, they would obviously refuse to grow. In darkness I could forget how my body failed to meet with my ideas. I could recreate everything through words. 
I used to think that if my body could achieve perfect anonymous harmony, then I could possibly shut individuality up for ever, in close confinement. I thought my flat chest with its protruding ribs and these scars I have from an early disease were excessively ugly. To me, these could only seem acts of shameless indecency, as though I were exposing my genitals on the outside of my body. It was a type of narcissism I could never forgive. 
One night I read 'The sleeper of the Valley' by Rimbaud.
These words drew in my head an ultimate beauty far for me to reach. I was certain that any confrontation between my weak flabby flesh and death was absurdly inappropriate. I lacked the body suitable for a dramatic death. It deeply affected my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that permitted me to survive the war.
I was disappointed the day they announced the war had ended. 
I used to be elated by the idea of living in a city that was eating itself, like excess stomach fluid that digests and gradually eats away the stomach.
I remember that day when I reconciled with the sun. It was my biggest disappointment, the end of the war. I went with my father to Nejmeh Square to look in the ruins for the store he used to rent. The streets were hit by the merciless light of noon.  Despite a slight breeze, I was in a clearly hallucinating state. Everything seemed to be melting in the heat.
Standing there, in the blaze, I realized that now, the sun could take over the mission. The sun could precipitate everything into ruin. 
That same sun, as the days turned to months and the months to years, had become associated with the image of death. The image of dazzling blood flowing sparkling from the flesh, and on the silver bodies of flies clustering on wounds. 
Little by little I began to feel uncertain about the night in which I had placed such trust during the war, and to suspect that I might have belonged to the sun worshipers all along. 
Around me, people's shadows were attached to their feet. I was aware as I went of how the shadow that I would cast among them would lie isolated like a black puddle on the earth, untied from my body. At that moment I was, beyond all doubt, freed from my shadow. 
What is there, then, at the outermost edge?
Nothing, perhaps, save a few moldy ribbons, dangling down into the void.
When at every moment one's gaze is returned, there is no time to express things in words. 
You will never succeed in grasping the essence of a reality that returns your gaze. 
Ideas do not stare back, things do.
The only reality that stares back at you is death.
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9004;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
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      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:05:12 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4183</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Home Works</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4179</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Choubassi, Tony Chakar and many others of the visual artists I meet have just participated in Home Works 3, the ambitious art festival that took place in October. Run by the impressive Christine Tohme, this festival operates in nomadic fashion across varying locations throughout the city. Strangely enough for a city bubbling with arts, there is no museum for contemporary art and no real theatre for innovative performances. Only next spring, Tohme's Ashkal Alwan Foundation and a few other independent art organisations are going to move into their own shared space, an abandoned factory. Home Works' history illustrates the turmoils this region has been going through over the past years. As it aims to bring together artists from the Middle East, Europe and the US, it had to be postponed three times: first because of the Palestinian intifadah, then because of the Iraq war, and this year because of the Hariri assassination. And yet, it continues to survive. Judging from the catalogues, the publications and a selection of this year's films and video's, it isn't hard to see how this festival helps build up a regional identity in which memories are not suppressed, war is stared right in the face, and art crosses boundaries of ethnicity, religion and its own disciplines. And of course, this is very often city art. The different temporalities, truths and worlds of which every big city consists are the natural habitat of these artists. Seen in the context of all this work, I am starting to understand more about how serious the game of fact and fiction, history and memory is that I first encountered in the work of the young Lebanese staying at DasArts. Just a random example, picked up from the catalogue of Home Works 2, held in November 2003: two pages on Lamia Joreige:
:image(float) homeworks1:
:image(float) homeworks2:
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      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Dec 2005 10:03:47 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4179</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Tony Chakar</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4171</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   'This city eats its own flesh to renew itself,' says Tony Chakar at a small table outside Le Barom�tre. Born in Beirut in 1968, Chakar is an architect, writer and artist, living with his mother who owns a small shop, and a very gifted city thinker. His essays, of which I've read some in The Eyeless Map (2003), investigate the way this city's turbulent past haunts the consciousness of its inhabitants. With him, as with the video artists, it is often hard to tell when historical knowledge blurs into myth and the contortions of memory. As he is the first talking head in his friend Choubassi's The Other Orange, I cannot watch him without noticing the ironical flickering behind his glasses. Most evenings, when midnight approaches, he emerges from a long day of teaching and writing to poise himself behind the computer at Le Barom�tre, a glass of whisky at hand. Carefully unshaven, the lips visibly thirsty for liquor and company, the eyes piercing but unfathomable, he is a fascinating regular among the cultural community of the Hamra neighborhood.
:image(float) tracesoflife1: In the book Traces of Life (2003), the result of a research he did with colleague Naji Assi and their students of architecture into the maze of a poor laborer's neighborhood called Rouwaysset, he describes how densely populated slums like these create their own urban space. 'The relationship of a building in Rouwaysset with the surrounding buildings and spaces is a relationshiop of mutual and continually renewed violence - a violence that both defines the shape of these buildings and spaces and is defined by them.' 
:image(float) tracesoflife2: What strikes me is the use of the word violence. Building places for people to live, eat and make babies in is not usually associated with violence. And he is not talking about the violence that may come with the razing down of whole neighborhoods to create spaces of power (like in Ceausescu's Bucharest) or commerce (like the Jakarta shopping malls), he uses the word to describe the day-to-day push and shove of new additions to existing infrastructure, the perpetual festering of concrete, glass and iron that goes on so stubbornly in Beirut, that it makes it seductive - here more than in many other cities - to compare it to a living organism. Layer upon layer, it grows into a never-ending palimpsest of histories.
:image(float) eyelessmap1: In The Eyeless Map he compares Beirut to Paris. 'Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And he or she is not continuously offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments - each fragment producing its own meaning - seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to 'gateways to other worlds' so accurate). If one were to look at it from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.' Watching him walk away across the night streets after closing time, I understand how walking through the city is to him a way of understanding life, his own life. He has been walking Beirut all his life, and even the war didn't stop him. 'During the shellings I kept walking home by foot,' he tells me one night, 'always choosing the shortest way, as if I was invulnerable. As if they could never get me, as long as I carried on, denying the risk.'
:image(float) eyelessmap2: It reminds me of the appearance of angels in the streets during the siege of Sarajevo. Posters, drawings and photographs of angels somehow spread across the blasted walls of the city. A sense of the metaphysical, of holiness, hovered along the streets where a human being could be shot down at any given time. Wartime cities and the art of magical thinking, Tony Chakar can tell you about it.
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9006;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
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      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2005 09:55:51 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4171</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>The assassination of Hariri</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4165</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   On February 14 last year, former prime minister Rafik Hariri died in a massive carbomb explosion just around the corner of the Corniche boulevard, in the wealthy hotel district of Beirut. A self-made billionnaire in construction works, owning among others the company that rebuilt large parts of the historical city centre, Hariri had been prime minister of Lebanon from 1992 to 1998 and from 2000 to 2004. The country was in shock: accusations went out immediately to the Syrian Baath-regime of president Assad, which still controlled the main political decisions in Lebanon, keeping a tight grip on the military and the secret police. Hariri had been warned by Assad to give up his protests against the Syrian-appointed president Lahoud. 
:image(float) the place of the assassination: In the Independent, later that year, Robert Fisk recalled the blast: &amp;quot;How many months ago was it - just 10, I think, when I was walking along Beirut's seafront corniche opposite my favourite restaurant, the Spaghetteria, talking on my mobile phone to my old friend Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad, when a white band of light approached at fearsome speed like a giant bandage along the Beirut promenade. The palm trees all dipped towards me as if hit by a tornado and I saw people fall to the ground. A window of the restaurant splintered and disappeared inside and in front of me, perhaps only 400 metres away, dark brown fingers of smoke streaked towards the sky. The blast wave was followed by an explosion so thunderous that it partially deafened me. I could just hear Patrick &amp;quot;Is that here or there?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;I'm afraid it's here, Patrick,&amp;quot; I said. I could have wept. Beirut was my home.&amp;quot; A month after the killing, two million people gathered for a mass demonstration in Martyr's Square, the vast wasteland that remained of the wartime demarcation line cutting the city in half. Shouting for democracy and independence, the demonstrations resulted in the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. Since then, Lebanon has reached a level of sovereignty but still suffers from foreign meddling. The Syrian regime, still under inspection for being accomplice to the Hariri killing, has since been suspected in setting up a series of political assassinations which have kept the city tense and its main politicians confined to their quarters, moving around only under heavy security. On a wooden fence lining one of the many construction sites alongside Martyr's Square, I shot a video of a long series of enlarged photographs of the demonstrations, the waves of Lebanese flags and the portrait of Hariri. Even when just scanning the masses with a camera, almost a year later, the tension and the excitement are palpable. :video posters: 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9007;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Dec 2005 09:54:44 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4165</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Destruction &amp; Reconstruction</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4161</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Today, Beirut is an intoxicating mess of new highrises, deserted ruins and the shambles of beautiful but neglected architecture from French colonial times. I have never seen a city where destruction and reconstruction are lined up so intimately, almost at random, offering images from global commercialism next to emblems of a traditional past and vacant lots where the rubble of streetcorner shoot-outs have hardly been cleaned up. 
Darkly watching out over the city is the Mur tower, an empty skyscraper that was never finished when war broke out. During the fighting, it served as a hide-out for snipers who had a free view of the city centre from its empty windows. The story goes that enemy soldiers where thrown down from the upper floors after interrogation and torture. Since the war, its owner, interior minister Mur, took no action to either finish the building or tear it down. Only recently, it became municipal property. The fate of the Mur tower is still unsure. In the meantime, it serves as a lugubrious reminder of the dark years, impossible to ignore for anyone walking the streets of Beirut. 
:image(float) mur-tower:
:image(float) re/deconstruction1:
:image(float) re/deconstruction2:
:image(float) re/deconstruction3:
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	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Dec 2005 09:53:13 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4161</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Ripped Apart</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4157</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   On this bright sunny morning, we pay ten dollars for a giant balloon to take us high above Martyr's Square, in the heart of the city, to view the panorama of this ravaged and feverishly reconstructing city, sprawling up against the hills that overlook the ocean. Rising higher and higher, the bulletholes and crumbling walls of wartime ruins disappear from sight. What remains is the outstretched body of a city, in hues of hallucinating white and yellow, straining to resurrect itself from three decades of war, neglect and occupation. 
:video() ballon:
Impossible to fathom the horrors of the war that raged from street to street, from house to house in this city, starting in 1975 and ending with a patchy truce in 1990. I have been to Sarajevo during wartime. The shelling came from the hills around, the devastation was endless, but the danger did not come from within. Here, in Beirut, snipers and tanks and militia's were everywhere, around every corner, attacking each other from strongholds that were established one day only to be surrendered the next. The tapestry of a city that had been a harbor to travelers for ages, mixing sects and religions and ethnic backgrounds of all sorts into a permanently shifting, tense urban space consisting of layers of history, prosperity and destruction, had been ripped apart street by street and quarter by quarter. 
During my stay, two writers manage to convey something of what went on to me. The first is Yussef Bazzi, a poet and journalist, editor of Nawafez, the cultural supplement of daily newspaper al-Mustaqbal. In his short book Yasser Arafat looked at me and smiled, he has put down his memories of being a fearless, merciless kid fighter during the war. The matter-of-fact style, one episode of bloodshed and insanity following the other with no time for reflection or remorse, makes it a very tough read: days later, the scenes of senseless violence still gave me the chills. 
Here is an example, almost arbitrarily lifted from a small book packed with scenes like this one, that waste no time on looking any farther than simply surviving this day, this minute. 
:image(medium) bazzi34: 
:image(medium) bazzi36:
The other writer has to be Robert Fisk, the fiery journalist who has been covering the turmoils in the Middle-East for thirty years. Beirut is his home, and Pity the Nation, his book on the Lebanese war is a fierce, all-encompassing page turner. Fueled by rage against the cruelty of governments and madmen alike, this is an extremely well documented account of the tragedy, the hipocrisy and the humanity he encountered in the streets of Beirut. Here is just one sad page, bringing together the international powers that influenced the course of the war and the horrors of a city alive with corpses. 
:image(float) fisk443: 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9009;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Dec 2005 09:43:28 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4157</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>The Other Orange</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4151</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   In every caf� where we follow Choubassi on his daily tour, we spot people from the cast of his mindbreaking documentary The Other Orange. It serves as proof of the impossibility of reciprocal anthropology. He follows Marc Aug� in his claim for 'an anthropology of the near': old-fashioned research of far away and exotic cultures is now replaced by the study of everyday phenomena in the daily environment of the researcher. This, added to Edward Said's argument that Orientalism can only exist because of the existing relations of power and thus cannot be inverted as Occidentalism, led Hassan to the conclusion that his attempt to make a documentary about Amsterdam was bound to fail by definition and could only lead to him making a film about the city nearest to him, Beirut. 
The result: a fake documentary about Amsterdam, as described by citizens of Beirut, injecting the words Amsterdam and Holland when they were talking about their own city and country. Slight games with lipsync and the doubling of images unsettle the viewer. Watching it at home, it gave me a sense of how these stories indeed might belong to the collective memory of Amsterdam, a city of migrants and travelers who contribute memories of war, sea and faraway places to the subconscious of their new environment. And here they are, chatting and joking at the tables of Beirut nightlife: the historian, the city planner, the mime artist, the refugee worker. 
:video() orange:
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:36:52 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4151</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>The Magic Triangle</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4139</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   Choubassi introduces us into his magic triangle: Le Prague, Wimpy's and Le Barometre. Three famous meeting places in the Hamra neighborhood, a lively, artistic square mile in the West of town. If he is not at work teaching arts at the university, this is where he spends his afternoons and evenings. Choubassi seems an archetypical Beiruti: in love with his city, fed up with shocks and changes, quietly addicted to his comfortable routine. The afternoon is for Prague: a large, softly lit and loungy cafe, with newspapers and a wireless network. This is where you take your laptop if you have a deadline to meet and don't feel like writing: there will always be somebody to distract you with the new gossip and ambitious plans for some time later. Then, around six, the local intelligentsia drifts to Wimpy's: the legendary sandwich bar on Hamra Street, brightly lit and definitely uncosy, with formica tables and stern waiters. The high windows look out on the bustle of the shopping audience, and when the weather is good you can sit on the sidewalk. To someone from Western Europe, where the Wimpy chain gave way to MacDonald's decades ago, it's puzzling why professors and intellectuals would choose this place for pre-dinner coffee. But the pictures on the wall tell the story: this place is a myth. Yussef Bazzi describes the episode in Yasser Arafat looked at me and smiled. Diary of a fighter, his tough little memoirs of a kid soldier: 'That day, Mahmoud was at the corner of the Modca Cafe and Kifah at the door of the Piccadilly when Khaled walked up the sidewalk facing the Wimpy Cafe and fired his infamous shots at the Israeli officer and the two soldiers accompanying him. This incident became known as the first act of national resistance and marks the date of the start of the national resistance movement against the Israeli occupation.' That was 1982: loyalty to one of the defining moments in the Beirut war carries a long way. :image(medium) Barometre: Finally, when it's time for food and drinks, the artist crowd moves a few blocks down to Le Barometre, a tiny bar hidden underneath some conrete office buildings. On the wall a fading tourist poster tells us to 'Visit Palestine', showing an artist's impression of Jerusalem. The cook is Palestinian, his choice of small dishes is incredibly tasty. In the course of the evening, while the music flows from Feiruz to Bob Marley to Oum Kalsoum, the place gets packed. When everyone is finally in, with city thinker Tony Chakar playing card games on the cashier's computer, the music is turned up high and people are dancing between the tables to the Arab megastars. 
:video() barometre: 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9010/visit_palestine.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
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      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2005 09:11:14 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4139</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Beirut Metro Map</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4128</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   :image(float) metromap: Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them? 
		     <img src="http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/mmbase/images/9011/BeirutMetroMapFront.jpg;jsessionid=EC6759A60BDAAF954A4474C5EE2D21FF" border="0" align="right" />
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      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:58:14 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4128</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Arrival</title>
         <link>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4126</link>
	   <description><![CDATA[
	   After midnight we arrive at Beirut airport. The line at the border police is long: a flight carrying some twenty cheaply dressed-up young women with blue mascara from Ukraine has landed just before us. Seduced with jobs in entertainment, ending up in prostitution? Hassan Choubassi is waiting for us and drives us home in his mother's Lincoln Continental. Hassan was one of the young Lebanese I met last year at DasArts, the post-graduate art laboratory where I mentored. Hassan, Ali Cherri and Rima Kadissi had a few things in common: fluent English, able video artists, obsessed by their city and not hampered by respect for the boundary between fact and fiction. As if they were following orders: Beirut will be your subject, but no straight-forward documentaries! This is what brought me here. In a city with an almost inescapable history of sectarianism, cosmopolitanism and civil war, is there a new generation of artists at work who are inventing a new parallel reality of images? During his year in Amsterdam, Choubassi chose to fortify his personal sense of being lost in the modern metropolis of Amsterdam, where he sensed everything revolves about transport and movement (of people, vehicles, information and capital), by reading the work of philosophers of the technological age like Jean Baudrillard and Marc Aug�. Here, he found confirmation for his mental state of 'urban solitude', in an environment where man is no longer defined by his public image but by the observation of himself. Having no clear such observation of himself, Hassan started out by portraying himself as a non-person in a non-space. One of his works immediately seduced me: a Metro Map for Beirut. In reality, of course, no such thing exists. But he worked it out meticulously, producing a detailed pocket-size map of metro lines and stops modeled after the famous one from Paris - the city that to many Lebanese is still their second place of reference. Ri�tte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them? 
	   ]]> </description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:54:39 GMT</pubDate>
         <guid>http://roadtrip.submarinechannel.com/content/view.jsp?itemid=4126</guid>
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