Liberation or emancipation? Counter-hegemony,performance and public space in Lebanon

‘Before’ and ‘after’ the Arab revolutions: the cultural politics of art in Lebanon

In 2011–12, Lebanese of all generations watched and cheered from the sidelines the momentous changes taking place in the larger neighbouring countries of Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Libya. The mass activism and broad social movements that swept across the region inspired especially the younger generations in various Arab countries to agitate against their own stable but equally contentious and largely resented ruling elites. Despite the limited forms of protest, located mostly in the capital Beirut, an entrenched political elite, relying on sectarianism and clientelism to maintain control over public resources that facilitate trade, real estate, construction and banking, quickly thwarted the early rumblings of a bottom-up, horizontally organized Arab Spring-inspired anti-sectarian movement centred on public appeals for social justice, higher wages, and the need for electricity, running water, and other basic necessities that the state has consistently failed to provide (Hermez, 2011). The inability of the Lebanese protesters to effect any real change in the structural foundations of their clientelist and sectarian state (Brynen et al., 2012) did not amount to a complete failure however. The revolutionary movement that was sweeping through the region at the time affectively and intellectually inspired a generation of activists, including those in Lebanon, who had been witness to and agents in what has been described as the emergence of a sequence of cognitive ‘reorganizations’ of historically designated spaces, identifications and modes of thinking ordered along the axioms of age, class, gender, sexuality and religion to rethink new ways of doing resistance and imagining their futures anew in the wake of the protests (Al-Samman and El-Ariss, 2013). Even if they do not, for the moment and thus far no longer, seem to carry the threat of mass-based anti-regime uprisings, the protests have arguably broken the ‘fear barrier’ and pushed artists, writers, intellectuals and activists to think about their role in public space and vis-à-vis the public (Salamey and Pearson, 2012).

A remarkable feature of the 2011–12 uprisings was the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances in almost all cities that experienced some form of revolutionary fervour. It was perhaps the creative dimensions of the Tunis and Cairo protests that garnered the most media attention. But the protests in cities like Beirut, Amman and Manama similarly gave rise to cultural renaissances worthy of study in their own right, especially because the protests in those settings did not bring about even the partial breakdown of regimes that survived for decades. That one of the legacies of the Arab Spring has been the creativity it unleashed on the streets is testament to the unrest, in all domains of society, that been decades in the making. But how was that reflected in works of art consumed with public space and the publics even before the revolutions?

The post-Cold War era witnessed the emergence of a new breed of artist in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean. The Lebanese artists Mroué and Saneh belonged to a group of artists who emerged in the immediate aftermath of the 1975–90 civil war. This group, who came of age during the war and later became known as the post-war artists, along with their local supporting networks and organizations – such as Ashkal Alwan: The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, founded in 1996 and now well-known in global art circles – rose from the ruins of internecine conflict to react in their work to a very specific post-war scenario. This propelled them, first, to subvert understandings of how the history of the Lebanese civil war might be read and narrated; second, to interrogate and challenge the traditional role of cultural institutions and the commercial gallery system in the creation of art by conceptual and physical intrusion into public space; and finally to probe prevalent and accepted understandings of hegemony and ideology in identity formation. By the early 2000s, this scene of contemporary artists and artist networks was growing parallel to international cultural funding organizations operating within the rubrics of Washington’s broad and far-reaching ‘civil society and democratization’ framework in the aftermath of 9/11 (Toukan, 2010, 2015). At the turn of the millennium, prior to the impending revolutionary process that would soon unfold, the internationally funded pockets of cultural spaces and production that increasingly came into being were located at the heart of tense public debates on the nature of international support for artistic production. These debates tended to conflate foreign-supported democracy with neoliberalism and imperialism. Consequently, a generation of artists, writers and poets, were lauded for their post-ideological character and, at the same time, criticized for proposing seemingly normalized and elitist a-political cultural practices more generally. These practices, which paralleled the global art world’s tendency towards conceptual approaches that rejected totalizing theories, emphasized a strong sense of individual (rather than communal) identity and often dealt with the thorny issues of the capriciousness of memory and its representation. This was a time when the process of arts production was largely defined by an arguably growing top-down dynamic, driven by internationally funded civil society projects channelling funds to local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These worked according to the criteria and priorities of donors in order to complement the new international development agenda, which began to include culture and the arts as a bulwark against a rising Islamism post-9/11. Along with this came a flourishing of what are often – and arguably – referred to as ‘independent’, ‘alternative’ or ‘counter-cultural’ art spaces, artist-run and -led projects, biennales, festivals, exhibitions and other events understood to be self-organized structures operating adjacent to and resisting the official apparatuses of the state. Yet well before Mohammed Bouazzizi burned himself alive as a form of protest in Tunisia, as early as 2003, one could already observe a context where an increased visibility on the global art platform found little impact locally, leading to what has been referred to as ‘inflation’ of the postwar art scene (W Sadek, 2010).

The outburst in cultural production that accompanied the early phase of the revolutionary process – ranging from a boom in the creation of political cartoons, to hip-hop and rap, to graffiti, public art performances, art installations as well as video and internet art, poetry and literature – only reinforced the investment of international funders and the art market in art for social change (Demerdash, 2012; Wilson-Goldie, 2011). What arguably changed, however, was the idea among activists and artists alike, even in countries that did not experience regime change, that art no longer needed an institution (in the form of funding, critique, a gallery, a theatre or cultural NGO) to contain it as the Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine, shows. In artist Tania el Khoury’s words, speaking about her experience as part of an all-women artist collective (Ftouni, 2017):

We enjoy borrowing tools and methods from all [these] scenes while comfortably existing on the margins of institutionalized art and knowledge production. Just like a soldier at an army checkpoint would perceived the three of us as apolitical beings and unthreatening good girls, we found that the art or academic world can share similar misconceptions regarding our work.

The following sections propose that the mood in 2012 became one of countering neoliberal hegemony through the site of the body and through actual interaction with publics in public space, rather than dissenting by conceptually contemplating the ways in which the sectarian state eclipses personal freedoms – a change embodied, as I argue, in the two instances described below.

Active spectatorship: the screen, the body and public space

Writing in the journal Afterall, Beirut-based art journalist and critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (2010) draws an analogy between Mouffe’s agonistic sphere and aspects of the work of Mroué and Saneh in their piece Photo-Romance. The performance addresses the tumultuous period after the assassination of the construction and real-estate billionaire and Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who was assassinated along with 21 others in his motorcade in 2005. Hariri’s assassination was the culmination of tensions that had been brewing between Syria – which had long occupied Lebanon – and the emerging Lebanese anti-Syrian coalition. The assassination divided Lebanon into two opposing political camps, the 8 March and 14 March camps, and triggered what would become known as the Independence Intifada or the Cedar Revolution. Mroué and Saneh’s play is aesthetically and conceptually inspired by Italian neorealist Ettore Scola’s 1977 film A Special Day, in which a young housewife and mother of six and her neighbour, a homosexual who has just been fired from his radio job, befriend each other while the rest of the neighbourhood come out on the streets of Rome to celebrate Hitler’s famous state visit to Mussolini in 1938. The event enjoyed an enormously enthusiastic reception from the public, along with the king, members of the diplomatic corps and a military parade. Although it is only ever alluded to and never directly stated, in Saneh and Mroué’s 90-minute piece the original story is transposed onto the events in Beirut in the spring of 2005, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, when hundreds of thousands congregated in the centre of the city to demonstrate either for or against Syria’s presence in the country. Like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroniani, Mroué and Saneh, who each play a character from the two opposing camps, end up for different reasons left behind that day and meet to talk against the backdrop of crowds of people taking to the streets to partake in a political parade where collective nationalist and communal feelings are running high. For Mroué and Saneh and their audience, the discussion on-stage revolves around the script of a film adaptation that is slowly being pieced together and projected on an enormous screen that forms the mise-en-scène of the piece. In line with their larger body of work, which is often composed of a series of conversations that take place on stage screens and projected images, the conversation, in this instance, about piecing together the script and the images, asks fundamental questions concerning the writing of a script and the role of theatre and its rapport with cinema, mainly in relation to the idea of a so-called ‘original work’ and the impossibility of representation in theatre. Since the mid-1990s, Mroué and Saneh have been probing different ways to perform without the physical presence of the human body on stage, asking the fundamental question that drives their whole body of work: what is theatre? Questioning the absence of the body by projecting the conversations (Figure 1) between the two actors and their bodies (Figure 2) on screen metaphorically probes the lack of individual identity in Lebanon, where the rights of singular citizens are cast aside in favour of the rights of communities. As explained by the artists, the work is an attempt to create a third dialogue, an alternative discourse, in a direct nod to the stalemate that resulted from the 14 March versus 8 March division that engulfed the country. The answers to some of the questions the artists raise are probed through the story they tell, which touches on some of the most difficult issues confronting modern Lebanese society, cohabitating in the grey zone that falls between conflict and coexistence: religion, politics, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, freedom, individuality and communitarianism. Confounding the boundaries between theatre and the visual arts Photo-Romance probes its audience to conceptually rethink the spatial and cultural sites they inhabit in a deeply divided society such as Lebanon’s, in order to imagine how emancipation from the norms that come with these divisions might be realized.

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Figure 1.

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, Photo-Romance (still from a performance)

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Figure 2.

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, Photo-Romance (still from a performance)

In her contribution to Afterall, art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie draws an analogy between Photo-Romance’s main stage prop – the white screen onto which different projections of sound and image are made – and Mouffe’s agonism. The white screen, Wilson-Goldie (2010) argues, is a version of the public space the political theorist imagines as a site of agonistic confrontation, where an individual – she writes citing Mouffe (1993: 97) – ‘is inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities, and participants in a plurality of collective forms of identification might reclaim his or her role as an active protagonist in political life’. Speaking specifically of art’s role in pushing forth agonism as a form of dissensus, Mouffe (2007: 4), a familiar voice and face in the travelling global arts circuit, has the following to say:

The real issue concerns the possible forms of critical art, the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony. . .. Clearly those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces, where the objective is to unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus. are going to envisage the relation between artistic practices and their public in a very different way than those whose objective is the creation of consensus, even if this consensus is seen as a critical one. According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.

As Mouffe makes clear in her statement, this active protagonism may take on the role of either exposing what the dominant consensus seeks to conceal, or the role of reinforcing this concealment that politics permits even further. In this regard, Mouffe (2000: 22) highlights the distinctions between antagonism and agonism. For Mouffe ‘antagonism’ is a relation between enemies who seek to destroy each other, while ‘agonism’ is a relationship between adversaries who do not intend to overcome each other (2000: 22). Towards that end, agonists respect the notion of difference and build on its potential to attain a radical democratic community that responds to the politics of a neoliberal hegemony that seeks to eradicate difference in the name of consensus.

In Photo-Romance, how do Mouffe’s considerations of the possibilities of an emancipatory politics playing out in an agonistic public sphere fare? A work like Photo-Romance, in which different projections of sound and image blurring the lines between fact and fiction are made on a white screen, may be read as a metaphor of the interrogation of the dominant hegemony that seeks to devour individual consciousness along ideological and identitarian lines. This is because it prods its audience to resist the temptation to read the artwork as a representation of a particular contentious moment that demands that they declare their allegiance to one of the two camps, the 8 March or 14 March movements. The performance asks its audience to explore their roles as spectators and thereby active citizens in the making of history. In other words it seeks to emancipate the individual rather than liberate the collective. Yet the white screen, with its animated projections, along with the mix of theatre, cinema, photos and music, is not a reclamation of an ‘active protagonism in political life’ in the agonistic sense (Mouffe, 1993: 97). What the white screen represents, in these terms, along with the two actors, the musician on stage and every single audience member, is an antagonism within a limited and pre-determined agonistic space, one ordered according to aesthetic and conceptual standards set out by – to borrow from Rancière’s (2010) political terminology – the global art world ‘consensus’. When it comes to the sphere of cultural production, Mouffe (2007: 3) tells us, ‘according to the agonistic approach, public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces’. Yet the repercussions of Lebanon’s divisions, based on confessionalism, reinforced by class and then reinforced again by a sectarian and divided public space and geography, also reach into the secular and liberal domain of civil society. Both Mroué and Saneh, as well as the internationally well-known and funded contemporary arts organization Ashkal Alwan, which first put on their piece as part of its 2010 Homeworks Program, occupied these spaces comfortably. This means that even the publics, about and for whom this piece speaks may have limited access to it. Viewing the performance, which is nominally open to everyone, is limited and conditional upon cultural capital, class belonging and political affinity. Thus, even if the artists themselves encouraged an active spectatorship through their work, it was in effect limited by the structural challenges of art practices in Lebanon and the discourses of cultural and political identity that they were wrapped up in (Hamadeh, 2018; von Maltazhan, 2018). This pushes us to think about the resistant act in art. Specifically, is every expression of dissent, necessarily an act of dissent?

The relativism and faith in the subject’s agency to overcome structure through the resistant artistic act that Mouffe describes in her comment above is relevant to an art sphere in Lebanon, in the decade before 2011–12, that had to contend with contested understandings of art’s relationship to aesthetics, politics and publics, and art’s physical withdrawal from the public space that came with it (S Sadek, 2007). But it does not address how the resistant act in what appears to be counter-hegemonic art should not be defined solely by its ability to represent what hegemony appears to conceal, but also its ability to go a step further and implicate the role of the local art world in perpetuating this very concealment. For if the Arab revolutions exposed anything at all, it was how much the systems of thought that were in place, which attempted to organize how resistant and dissenting art practices were to be framed, were in fact rejected. In other words, counter-hegemonic art practices and how we read them are, like theory, part of a long history of war, revolution, colonialism, liberation and resistance in the region that need to be read against the backdrop of that context (Seikaly, 2017).

Interactive spectatorship: redistributing the sensible on Beirut’s shoreline

In the artist collective Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine (2012), participants from the public are invited to board a small motor-powered fishing boat to explore the nature of ownership on the Beirut seafront, the laws that govern it, and the political practices of those that utilize those areas (Figure 3). Once on board the participants are taken on a boat journey along the shoreline of Beirut from the Ein el-Mreisse fishermen’s port to Dalieh and then Ramlet el-Baida beach. During the journey, the boat stops at each resort to reveal detailed accounts of the particularities of land ownership, the laws that govern them, and the practices of its users (Figure 4) . This is achieved through a playful and informal interactive approach that takes seriously the role of research and archival work in relation to the spectators it seeks to engage. In the words of one of the three well-known activists and artists of the all-women’s collective Tania el Khoury: ²

is not about me talking to a passive audience who listen and clap at the end. With every boat ride we get new stories from participants who share their own experiences with the sea, fishing, walking on the Corniche, lovers’ lanes, the urban myths about a group of female bandits who hid in one of the caves, and the infamous suicide point facing the Pigeons Rock. With every new boat ride we hear new stories that get added into the performance. (El Khoury, 2012) ³

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Figure 3.

The Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine (2012) (still from a performance)

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Figure 4.

The Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine (2012) (still from a performance)

Almost as if purposefully breaking with tendency of Saneh and Mroué’s generation to dismiss representation, El Khoury insists that, in order for resistance to happen, not only is (re)presentation of the historical fact of urban erasure necessary, but it is central to the very act of collective liberation itself.

The public performance, what has been described as a work of live art by the artists of the collective, is based on an interdisciplinary and interactive research method that takes the contested site of urbanism and those publics that it most impacts as its main focus. Relying on ethnographic work that included collaboration with several fishermen, a collection of oral histories in addition to an analysis of the theory and praxis of controversial legal texts on the subject matter as well as the interactive potential as opposed to merely active spectatorship in relaying this information to members of the public the project tackles the meaning of everyday space in Beirut through a critical action-oriented, site-specific and interventionist mode that relies in great part on research and archival material. Appended to the site-specific performance is a printed booklet that includes all the research findings and oral narratives, as well as the maps produced, in addition to an audio as well as YouTube videos of the performance, all thrown into public circulation.

As its title suggests, Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics posits that ‘[p]olitics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society’ (Rancière, 2004: 51) In other words, politics for Rancière is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order, the basis of which is democracy. Aesthetics is intrinsic to this battle for democracy, Rancière argues, because the strife it involves is addressing the image of society: that is, what has been determined as possible to act out and express. As such, the concept of equality becomes the raison d’être for politics. Based on a reconceptualization along the lines of an emancipatory radical democratic politics, Rancière proposes looking at equality as an animated field in flux, whereby politics is happening when what he calls the ‘demos’ – in reference to the unrepresented segments of society – seeks to disrupt the order of domination and distribution of goods ‘naturalized’ by what he refers to as the ‘police’, that is, the set of conventions and interactions in place which enable this process of naturalization to take place (Rancière, 1999: 21–42). For Rancière, art and politics take on the same task; that of reorganizing accepted perceptions of reality. And, in the sense that art allows for a reconceptualization of the world around us, it is innately emancipatory. Accordingly, for Rancière, the emancipatory potential in art is not in the messages and feelings it transmits about the state of the world, nor is it because of the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. Rather, art is emancipatory in the radical democratic sense, because it has the ability to propose novel ways of reorganizing designated space, challenging the forms and systems of authorized discourse defined and policed by governmental politics. ⁴ By the same token, the ‘emancipated spectator’, also the title of his 2009 book, is not a passive one influenced by consumerism’s ability to alienate people from the power of their judgement, as understood in the classic sense set out by Guy Debord (1994) in his Society of the Spectacle, but rather an active democratic subject. This active democratic subject, in turn, is involved in the non-passive act of challenging the traditional opposition between viewing and acting and saying by disrupting the relations between each of them and recognizing the structure of domination and subjection that has ordered the relations between each of these acts. Hence, for Rancière, politics emerges through the formation of a mode of subjectivity, a reworking of the established ‘distribution of the sensible’ that begins to speak for itself, through the insistence on being heard and being seen in a public space controlled by what he terms the ‘police’.

The connection of This Sea is Mine to Rancière’s aesthetics and emancipation theory can be found in the extent to which the project proposes this ‘distribution of the sensible’ through its interrogation of the public’s interaction with what is inherently its own (public space on the city’s shoreline), but of which it has been robbed by the state and private property developers. The Sea is Mine proposes, through emphasizing active spectatorship, to interrogate what we think we see and therefore experience, in the same vein Rancière proposes radical democratic politics as a site that encompasses ‘what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ around ways of ‘doing and making’ as a shared sense of the ‘common.’ (Rancière, 2004: 12–13). But it goes a step beyond Rancière’s aspiration for an emancipatory politics. Inspired by the heady and hopeful early moments of the Arab Spring, the artists of the Dictaphone Group literally went out to sea to make their point in the aftermath of that moment in 2012 when it quickly became clear that the spectre of the autocratic postcolonial Arab state and the geopolitical dynamics in which it was embedded in will not be easily left behind (Figure 5). The myth, legend and symbolism of the sea evoked in the project, along with the affective encounter the project’s participants experienced through the magic of the Mediterranean Sea, added a new, perhaps even more radical dimension, to what Rancière proposes, even if a more symbolic one. Borrowing its title This Sea is Mine from one of the lines of legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s famous and much loved poem al-Jidariyya (Mural) (1999), about his own brush with death, what he possesses and what is transient, between being and non-being, the live art performance embodies how the struggles for collective liberation in the Arab region are real and ongoing, with all their lost opportunities, shattered dreams and broken promises, in both the very individual as well as the public sense. More, like al-Jidariyya, where poetry triumphs over death, This Sea is Mine refuses to simply muse or play a part in a gestural poetics and politics of emancipatory public space, but rather, literally embodies and then enacts it, as powerful act of liberation from the distorted politics of a lingering postcolonial state and its ruling elite in Beirut. It does so by approaching the city as a conceptual structure of the creation of social space by participants together that is reminiscent of Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City (1996 [1968]). Equally relevant, it transgresses institutional boundaries and the set of practices that govern them, both in the art world and outside of it, by making the sea the stage set and the general public the active participants in producing and disseminating the knowledge which the state and real estate development agents actively work to keep away from them. It does this by demonstrating that it needs to be in the sea and in touch with those it purports to speak to in order to liberate itself.

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Figure 5.

The Dictaphone Group, This Sea is Mine (2012) (still from a performance)

Ultimately, the piece transcends the act of emancipation by subsuming expressions of freedom within a larger and longer history of liberating Arab societies and individuals from their oppressors, be they imperial, neoliberal, state or from each other (Tripp, 2013). This act, in turn, may be described as an art institutional critique of the third generation type. ⁵ The latter, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage or ‘the notion of transversality’, refers to the assemblages that link actors and resources from the art circuit to projects and experiments that extend themselves outside of the art institution and into the social world (Deleuze, 2004 [1968]). It is this transversality that gives This Sea is Mine its liberationist as opposed to emancipatory quality. The art institution, as understood in the context of Lebanon described above in the case of Photo-Romance mandates emancipation rather than a liberation of art. As Walter Mignolo, asks: ‘Who are the agents and intended targets of emancipatory or liberationary projects?’ (Mignolo, 2010: 308).

It is apt to ask in this context to what extent artistic practices – in their broad conceptualization including the formal and the informal – that allude to, reflect on or enact emancipatory practices, manage to do away with the contentious bifurcation constructed out of postcolonial nationalisms, in their violent secular and religious forms, versus the equally violent twin effects of imperialism and capitalism embodied in western liberalism? This article alludes to the understanding that emancipation and liberation have different genealogies and histories several times. In proposing this difference, and arguing the case for it, Mignolo asks a series of questions. These include: ‘who needs emancipation, who needs liberation? Who benefits from liberation and who from emancipation? Who are the agents and intended targets of emancipatory or liberationary projects?’ (Mignolo, 2010: ??). Inspired by Mignolo, I ask: What subjectivities are activated in these projects? Should and does the distinction even matter when emancipation is supposedly a universal construct? These questions are central to how we read the journey of travelling literature on democracy and emancipation, especially once it arrives at its destination.

Rancière’s post-Marxian theorizing, featured centrally in much of the literature that has emerged on art and revolution in the Arab region in recent years, holds that the very act of expressing resistance is an emancipatory one precisely because, as Hannah Arendt described it earlier, it disrupts liberal democracy as it is practised today: that is, within the boundaries of rule and order that oppose revolutionary action. By the same token, however, it steers clear of interrogating what happens before or beyond the affective encounters experienced as emancipatory moments that render the invisible visible through the act of dissensus. For instance, Asef Bayat’s (2012) concept of a non-movement, which looks at the resistant practices of the subaltern in what he describes as the ‘neoliberal city’ in the Arab world, provokes us to rethink emancipation not only in terms of an affective radical politics of democracy in the heady moments of toppling a regime, but rather as everyday discourse and action by people in the many different public settings (what he terms ‘the street’) of postcolonial cities with their histories of struggles for independence. How this discourse and action unfolds demonstrates that a work like This Sea is Mine is a political act that not only captures but also contributes to the unfolding and unfinished business of the revolutionary project that attacks the ramifications of a neoliberal world. Hence one of the most commonly repeated mantras on the streets and graffittied walls of the revolutionary Arab world, that is, ‘freedom, liberty and equality’, draws on revolutionary slogans of times past and present. This underscores the idea that the aspirations of the current struggles against the failed postcolonial state and imperialist present are in fact part of a longer revolutionary struggle that has spanned most of the 20th and 21st centuries. To return to Mignolo, the genealogies of emancipation and liberation then, along with their epistemological implications, become central to the project of travelling theory. For the aim of liberation from oppression is part of the Arab region’s history of dealing with the colonial past and present. The emancipatory moments embodied in the ‘bodies and spaces’ of the Arab Spring become, retrospectively, from where we stand today, years after the onset of the revolutionary process, only singular instances in a longer struggle of liberation.

Reclaiming public space has been a recurring theme for Beirut-based activists, architects and artists since the end of the civil war, even if this was not necessarily the case for those artists most closely tied to the global sphere of funding, exhibition and critique. In that sense, the Dictaphone Group built on a capacity that was already set in motion by citizens who had begun to agitate against the Lebanese state by reclaiming the right to access space in the city. But in the aftermath of the Arab Spring these matters became even more urgent, with the aggressive downward spiral that has come with increasing deregulation, the withdrawal of the Lebanese state and the disruption of the social contract that has historically managed the relationship between state and society. Previous attempts at activism were arguably anchored in a belief, albeit one tinged with cynicism, in the normative and transformative role Lebanese state institutions should and could play in terms of political representation, economic development and a semblance of peace. Yet, as Bayat argues, the upsurge in inequality and the violent ruptures brought about by neoliberal planning, as epitomized in the corrupt post-war rebuilding project SOLIDERE, have also engendered a new form of politics in the city. This politics pre-dated, but was later fuelled by the Arab Spring. One of the main architects behind the Civil Campaign to Protect Dahlieh, a civil society-led initiative to resist the privatization of one of Beirut’s most open and loved public spaces, is also one of the active members of the Dictaphone Group, whose archival and ethnographic research also fed into the campaign’s mobilization and planning through its artists’ interests and activism. This anti-establishment and anti-institutional art, which moves beyond a conceptual approach to interrogating citizenship and space in an art institutional set-up, be it a gallery or festival, represents a divergence, an alternative possibility that struggles for more than just emancipation as an act in and of itself.

Conclusion

I argue in this article that Photo-Romance and This Sea is Mine are two instances that perform and enact distinct forms of counter-hegemony. In the former, the emancipatory and therefore resistant dimension of the piece is to be found in its potential to provoke critical thinking about collective consciousness, public space and sectarianism in Lebanon. It does so through an anti-representational critique. Relying on an active participant approach, which demands that the public audience critically engage with the piece, the artists, Saneh and Mroué insist that the body on stage and on the screen does not represent a critique of the sectarian political system that, at the same time, defines the legal codes of conduct related to matters of civil status and personal status. Instead the use of the body, or rather its absence on stage, is a metaphor for the tendency of collective sentiment to eclipse individual experience and desire in Lebanon’s public spaces. I argue that, in practice, when taken in isolation, this paradigm reinforces a gestural politics, or a tendency to frame the resistant act as merely an ontological exploration of emancipation from dictated mores. In the This Sea is Mine, the collective of women working together choose to physically and intellectually embody and unabashedly represent the reality of the public space in which the public live to them, and ask them to engage head-on in the discussions that are fundamental to their survival as citizens. Their approach insists on interaction as one step more than being active citizens. As the recordings of the piece demonstrate, the public who joined the project were both critically reflecting on, as well as participating in the making of, the project and the archival material it worked from. There were papers and pencils, and discussions and maps to look at, redraw and reimagine. It is apt to query in this context the extent to which artistic practices in Lebanon and the region at large manage to do away with the constructed yet bifurcated experiences of postcolonial nationalisms versus the twin effects of imperialism and capitalism. The idea that emancipation and liberation have different genealogies and histories inspired this article. Yet it is how we use historical context to frame dissent and resistance that is being interrogated. What counts as liberation or emancipation, and whether there is in reality ever a single locus of the hegemony against which people struggle, may be decided in advance of context and in advance of an examination of the balance of forces in a particular situation.