There was a time when the modern West did not only embody colonialism and values to be rejected. And this, despite the process of decolonization and independence of many countries invaded militarily or economically by Europeans and Americans… A large number of cities and states in the so-called “developing” world believed that this modernity, symbolized among other things through the architecture of the great cities of Europe or North America, was also to materialize on their territory. The West then seemed to be the economic and aesthetic model of development to follow. This was also in keeping with the spirit of a tourist network, which in the post-war years was expanding considerably. This model, which is far from having disappeared, is of course increasingly questioned nowadays, as much by ecologists as by urban planners or economists, attacked as being a race towards disaster…
Joyce Joumaa, video artist and emerging curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) for the year 2021-2022, explores a project related to this imaginary. In the octagonal room of the CCA, in an exhibition featuring a 38-minute short film at its heart, Joumaa tackles a story that will encourage reflection on the socio-cultural issues of modernity, among other things, architectural.
Niemeyer in Lebanon
In 1962, the famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) received from the Lebanese government the mandate to set up an international fair in the city of Tripoli – not to be confused with the capital of Libya – in the north of the country. , city near the border with Syria. The goal of this project was to ensure a worldwide influence in Lebanon and to attract investors. Lebanon and the city of Tripoli are then confident in their future, while being holders of a heritage past that inspires dreams. Work began in 1964.
The site of the Rachid Karameh International Fair, named in honor of the former Prime Minister, who was assassinated on 1er June 1987, was of gigantic proportions. This complex was to include a hall for exhibitions, three museums, an experimental theatre, an open-air theater and could even, according to Niemeyer’s wishes, contain dwellings…
Let us recall that at the time, Niemeyer had become famous, with the urban planner Lucio Costa, as project manager of Brasília, the new capital of Brazil, built ex nihilo in the center of this country between 1956 and 1960. Then nicknamed the “capital of hope”, Brasília embodied for some an exhilarating modern epic, but for others a project without real memory ignoring the Brazilian reality… Brasília was then presented as a model in order to create a prosperous world for the countries poorer, which was then called “Third World”.
The fair was supposed to open in 1967, but Niemeyer’s Tripolitan project was delayed, postponed to an inauguration in 1969. It was finally abandoned and never revived, among other things because of the civil war in Lebanon, which began in 1975. he Syrian army occupied and ransacked even this site. Since then, the buildings have not been maintained. But many architects and artists wanted to draw the attention of the Lebanese authorities and the whole world to the importance of preserving this exceptional complex. Note in particular how the photographer Alexandre Guirkinger documented this place in 2019, showing both its beauty and its decrepitude.
A symbol
Joumaa returns to this project with, among other things, a film addressing the paradoxes inherent in this type of grandiose modern vision. One of the narrators explains, for example: “The Rachid Karameh fair is truly a symbol of the failure of urban planning in Lebanon. In a way, town planning, as it has been applied since the 1920s, was a tool developed in the West with the aim of erasing local customs, traditions and methods of construction. He got rid of all the references that people had of their city and its construction. […] Placed in our context, of course he failed. »
In an interview given to Joyce Joumaa, the architect George Arbid, director of the Arab Center for Architecture, founded in Beirut, also explains how ” [l]he Arab world in general is full of modernity, but unfortunately, retrograde ideas lead people to think that heritage is only old heritage”. Indeed, in a colonizing and folkloristic spirit, we have often forgotten how modern architecture belonged as much to the cultural heritage of this country as Greek, Roman, Byzantine or Ottoman architecture. There are also examples of art deco architecture…
Fortunately, since January this year, UNESCO has urgently inscribed the “70-hectare land between the historic center of Tripoli and El Mina port” on the List of World Heritage in Danger. It was time. On this ruined site, several buildings are collapsing. But this exhibition is not intended to be reassuring… In Joumaa’s film — whose title in Arabic means “How not to drown in the mirage” — another narrator goes so far as to say that he sees in this architectural project ambitious that failed an echo of the negligent management of the country by its governments for several decades. A management that does not seem to give much hope.