GREGORY BUCHAKJIAN

Gregory Buchakjian is an interdisciplinary artist and art historian. He is director of the School of Visual Arts at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). His research and practice deal with Beirut and its history. From 2009 to 2016, he explored the city, collected vestiges and encountered passers-by, scholars and artists in a process that generated his PhD dissertation at Université Paris IV Sorbonne; the exhibition “Abandoned Dwellings, Display of Systems” at Sursock Museum in Beirut in 2018, curated by Karina El Helou; and the book Abandoned Dwellings, A History of Beirut (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018). He also participated in the first Lebanese Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Georges Didi-Huberman. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016.

Based on Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, this monumental, multilayered essay scrutinizes the substance and the process. Didi-Huberman relates theories of Renaissance art, deciphering the pathos of Mantegna and Botticelli’s nymphs with the movement of their draperies and the curl of their hair. These curls that can be compared to a serpent, an octopus, a fabric of knots or more broadly a rhizome, lead us to the mesmerizing apparatus Warburg conceived. From the artwork to its reproduction to its classification and eventually to its ruin and disappearance, The Surviving Image ends with the question of whether can we predict what, from the past, is destined to survive and haunt us in the future. The Surviving Image had a strong influence on my work as a scholar and even more as an artist, from the use of photography in the suspended ruins to the display of systems of inventories, typologies and archiving.

Stephen C. Pinson (ed). Monumental Journey: Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019.

The study of derelict structures led me to gathering a body of artworks depicting ruins in Lebanon. The corpus spreads from 17^th century European travelers to the practices of Walid Raad and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Around 1842-44, Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey a painter and practitioner of the daguerreotype, traveled across the Mediterranean. His pictures, among the earliest photographs taken in Lebanon, include a view of the Great Portal of the Bacchus temple in Baalbek. What fascinates me is the physical condition of the silver plate that itself became an archaeological object. Among the things I learned from this exhibition catalogue is the fact that after his death, the photographic archive of Girault de Prangey remained under the dust in his deserted residence for decades. Ultimately, a distant relative of his, Charles de Simony, acquired the property, “salvaged a ruin on the brink of destruction” and recovered the invaluable work of this pioneer of photography.

Oliver Rohe. Vacant Lot. Translated from French by Laird Hunt. Denver: Counterpath Press, 2010.

The story is set in an unnamed city. Thus, Rohe, who often plays with geographical ambiguity in his books, depicts post-war Beirut with clinical accuracy: “There isn’t a single part of the city, a single street, a single building, nothing that resists the permanent disaster of reconstruction.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, artists, writers and researchers were examining our capital’s transformations. In this short novel, the author digs deep into how it affected our humanity: “I no longer recognize anything and no one recognizes me. I cross the city as a ghost. Completely transparent.” Rohe witnessed the horrors of war during his childhood and teenage years. It took him decades to turn trauma into an incisive writing whose pathos has something of Benjamin’s legacy. Vacant Lot is a text that stays in our minds, even when we have forgotten it. It was one of my guides when I started investigating forsaken spaces.