An unbound critical lived-built environment

Introduction

This article argues for the thresholds of distinction between environmental and conflict-based violence to be unbound. Instead, I posit research-based practice and analysis, which investigates complex and long-established conditions of violence, perpetrated and experienced across Lebanon’s critical lived–built environment. This is developed in an attempt to engage pragmatic possibilities for dismantling the power structures contributing to the ongoing perpetration of this violence. Currently, violence is experienced as a limit-condition ¹ of risk, which evades certain legal, political and architectural frames of accountability. This article reasserts risk as a human-made artefact, the collective processes and technologies of which have produced (un)natural separations across environments, lived and built, across the cumulative and leaky effects of slow, structural and spectacular violence (Nixon, 2011). As discourse on ‘built environments’ is more traditionally found in reference to the field of architecture, this is broadened in this article to point to a complex of violent legal and political processes that produce a lived–built environment of human and non-human forced dwelling and participation (Bou Akar, 2018; Kazan, 2018). Further, ‘lived’ has been added to the phrase ‘built environment’ to emphasize agency in the nuanced subjective experience and analysis of this condition.

Though many references can be pulled into this short article to help form my argument for an unbound critical lived–built environment in Lebanon, my analysis is focused through the research-based practices of Jessika Khazrik, Fadi Mansour, Mhamad Safa and myself: a method adopted in the formative entanglement of our work in recent years, each drawing from and engaging the fields of architecture, law, art and cultural production. The choice in this close selection comes from my engagement with feminist, de-colonial, critical legal theory and method, which seeks to dismantle the inherent asymmetric power structures producing and produced by such violence (Heathcote, 2019; Jones et al., 2018). Through engaged sensitivities and a politics of care, the intention is to activate the revolutionary potential of feminist and intersectional critical legal methodologies in the attempt to produce a more expansive and inclusive framework of affectivity in international law (Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020). Each research-based practitioner draws on their own distinct knowledge and experience of particular moments in the history of violence in Lebanon. Each makes the decision to use all tools afforded them – whether objective, subjective, poetic, forensic or analytic – in order to communicate, analyse and investigate the ongoing perpetration of this violence and the power structures that enable it to continue. In analysing the connections and overlaps in our work, I aim to form a cohesive argument for the dismantling of temporal and spatial boundaries produced in the existing study of this violence. My goal is to unpack current limitations of accountability for the limit condition of violent risk in Lebanon’s lived–built environment.

The term ‘critical’ has also been added to ‘lived–built environment’ in this article to bring a critical intersectional framework on race, gender and law in further analytical discourse with critical theory on space, ecology and conflict-based violence (Crenshaw, 1991). This intersectionality across a critical lived–built environment might work in the further dismantling of (neo)colonial strategies that produce distinct borders of separation, exclusion and governance on the ground (El-Enany, 2020), as well as abstract boundaries across the disciplinary analysis of violence (Kellner, 1989). This article attempts the complex task of analysing violence taking place across the critical lived–built environment ‘unbound’ by abstract geographic, material, theoretical and disciplinary frameworks (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2018: 1). Through this, I seek to evidence the danger and harm that comes with the continued compartmentalization of conjoined violent conditions, born through violent extractivist and colonial histories and methods. In specific response, this article asks: What are the possibilities of averting environmental violence, whilst normalized forms of state-perpetrated conflict-based violence continue to operate and be deployed beyond the reach of human control?

Section 1: Risk beyond all frames of accountability

Risk as a limit-condition often becomes visible through such spectacular moments of violence. However, beyond the spectacular optics, such conditions are produced through what Nixon (2011) describes as slow and structural violence: as less evident cumulative processes building towards a rising wave of spectacular violence, becoming visible in its moment of rupture. The Lebanese Revolution that began in October 2019 – following a ‘perfect storm’ of causation – formed collective resistance towards dismantling a developing situation, produced through an ongoing history of international and state-perpetrated corruption and violence (Daleel Thawra/Lebanese Revolution, 2019). On 4 August 2020, this corruption became devastatingly apparent through an explosion that shook the city of Beirut, receiving worldwide media attention. The timing could not have been more conspicuous. Wide speculation began as to the immediate causes of the explosion of immense quantities of ammonium nitrate, stored illegally in the city’s port. As a result, a series of ongoing domestic and international legal investigations began attempting to bring justice to bear on the inconceivable violence that took place. The historic and structural scope of this violence makes legal accountability particularly challenging, revealing the limits and corruptions of the law itself, and the ongoing perpetration of slow and structural violence in Lebanon (Kazan, 2020). Over a year later, following economic collapse and further political instability, Lebanon is experiencing unprecedented and catastrophic shortages in food, water, electricity and medicine, producing chronic and widespread deterioration across the lived–built environment (Houri, 2021). This article investigates how the unnatural temporal and spatial compartmentalization of this ongoing violence further exacerbates the legal and political difficulty of placing accountability for this devastating ‘accident’.

The accident in its many guises is particularly present in the early con-ceptualization of risk. It is observed in the question of accountability with regard to ‘acts of God’, ‘perils of the sea’ and human (in)action (Levy, 2012). In short, the history of risk is bound up with the history of colonization. Observing the precarious nature of cargo in transit, risk – and the attendant principle of insurance – was conceptualized as a mechanism for trading commodities across turbulent seas. Colonial merchants from North America were the first to refashion their collective insecurities into a new form of private property called ‘risk’. This cooperative process isolated risk as a separate commodity so that risk itself could be shared, exchanged, or sold, thus detaching and distributing accountability for the loss or damage affecting the goods in transit – whether object, or human or non-human subject. The perception of risk, in relation to turbulent sea travel, catalysed a series of actions that enabled the financial and legal management of known and unknown threats in the future (Rupprecht, 2016). Through this mechanism of transference of risk, the principle of insurance was born, meaning individuals and organizations could purchase financial compensation in anticipation of their property being lost to ‘perils of the sea’ or ‘acts of God’ (Levy, 2012). Conceptualizing risk enabled not only a collective strategy for economic security against the recognized dangers of trading, but allowed the application of a profit-making logic to risk itself (Baucom, 2005; Hameed, 2014).

This transformation of risk into a separate, commodified object engendered an unequal distribution of its effects, enacted through colonial understandings of value in relation to resources, commodities and human life. This technology was not restricted to controlling the risks that confronted merchants at sea, but became a powerful mechanism for conquering lands, resources and peoples. The colonial merchant could take on risk – by shipping cargo such as tobacco and sugar or ‘human cargo’ in the form of slaves – and profit from whatever situation that object or subject was placed in, regardless of whether the intended destination was reached safely or not (Harney and Moten, 2013). The maritime history of risk and insurance directly facilitated New World slavery, giving colonial merchants the ability to endanger, as they saw fit, the black and brown bodies of slaves and the encountered other (Andrews, 1984; Baucom, 2005; Klein, 2010; Mbembe and Meintjes, 2003). The case of the slave trading ship, the ‘Zong’, whose owners attempted to claim insurance on 130 slaves intentionally drowned at sea, gives an indication of the inextricable connection of commodified risk to violence (Hameed, 2014; Walvin, 2011). From their conceptualization, risk and the insurance principle were both products and productive of colonial ways of thinking about value in relation to human and non-human life (Butler, 2010[2009]; Hartman, 2007: 6).

Colonial merchants and institutions could place the lives of whatever and whomever they encountered in situations of mortal risk, whilst insuring themselves against any threat or accountability, instead profiting directly from this collective action (De Sousa Santos, 2015; Hartman, 2007). This article maintains that, whatever shape it takes, the commodity of risk maintains its connection to its foundation as a colonial technology. Therefore, in their many guises across a spectrum of fields, risk and the insurance principle remain active mechanisms for the enactment and distribution of power and control as a mode of governance rooted in violence (Foucault, 2008[1979]). Their effects, which continue to unfold in temporal and spatial terms, give licence to those in positions of power to benefit directly from placing the lives of others in positions of risk (Keenan, 2018; Tsing, 2015; Yussof, 2018).

In the design and use of weapons, natural elements are harnessed and deployed as destructive technologies with plastic effects. In the use of weaponry to engineer an accident, plastic destruction takes place as violent force affects human or non-human subjects, shattering their elastic ability, becoming irreparably changed (Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller, 2015; Malabou, 2012). What occurs in the process of deploying such harmful technology is that human accountability for the use of force is distanced from the weapon’s engineered purpose. This distancing of accountability, for example in conflict-based violence or aerial bombardment, makes the weapon’s effects seem almost beyond all scope of human control. Further, in the ongoing development of the technologies of warfare, international law falls short of deterring the effective use of weapons and is instead manipulated by powerful states to legitimize the legal engineering of the violent accident (Jochnick and Normand, 1994).

However, a limit condition produced and perceived through risk creates a state of exception, engaged through the direct violence of conflict, and then followed by a process of what Mitchell (2013) describes as the ‘separate development’ of the lived–built environment. Bhandar (2018) further points to the colonial and racialized legal processes of separation in the commodification of property from dispossessed land. Adding lived to the term built environment is therefore necessary to focus attention on the violent processes that force a subject’s participation in the to-and-fro of legal and geopolitical tension, engaged through the commodification of risk, land and the built environment. Produced through conflict and capitalism, this condition is observed through transformations of the lived–built environment and the perceived restrictions of risk: spatial, material and psychological (Harvey, 2006). This article attempts to unbind the strata of this experience of violence across the lived–built environment, as well as the understood nature of its perpetration across critical environments often separated along environmental and conflict-based terms (Tavares, 2014; Weizman, 2015).

In ‘From historical chains to derivative futures: Title registries as time machines’, Keenan (2018: 15) argues:

New forms of ownership generated by contemporary finance are derivative of property’s past. Securitisation and the legal means innovated to support it are based on a familiar formula of taking human relationships with land and turning them into distinct, seemingly independent and history-free assets to be traded and insured. The dephysicalisation of property in modern Anglo-American law has become more extreme with financialisation, and the new temporalities that accommodate this dephysicalisation have racial consequences.

In pointing to the racialized consequences of dephysicalizing resource commodities as property, Keenan foregrounds the connection between risk as a capitalist financial system and the modes of conflict legitimized through international law. Resource commodities become disconnected from bodies, land and context in order to enter financial markets that rationalize capital value.

By the end of the First World War, battlefields of armed conflict had extended to include civilian domains and environments. This practice of total war, which had begun through targeted bombing of strategic sites of key importance, expanded during the interwar period to include the home, the city, the forest and the desert. The non-military lived–built environment became an international battleground as military forces took full advantage of the new technological capabilities of aerial bombardment (Duffield, 2011). The industrialization and totalization of war meant that, following the end of the First World War, belligerent forces could deploy its extra-technological capacities to engage a mode of governance. International laws of war and aerial bombardment become the violent processes and actions undertaken by powerful states to secure sovereignty, control and power over bodies, land and resources (Venn, 2009).

In this way, international laws of war came to mirror the collective mechanism for profit and security conceptualized by colonial merchants in the risk and insurance apparatus. These processes allow powerful states to act in their own self-interest to normalize and legitimize certain modes of violence, seen for example in the normalized use of military aerial bombardment against the civilian lived–built environment. Whilst we continue to compartmentalize these forms of violence and the issues that give rise to them, it becomes very difficult to avert or even address their full effects and outcomes, as true accountability continues to be evaded (Hulme, 2017; Jairus, 2019). This underlines my argument for an analysis of this lived–built condition beyond the differentiating thresholds of violence as environmental- and conflict-based, as well as beyond disciplinary bounds. Distinctions across this critical environment provide space for impunity against the history of human (in)action resulting in its collective violent outcomes (Kazan, 2018; Khalili, 2020).

Section 2: Research-based practice and the critical lived–built environment

In 2019, I invited research-based practitioners Jessika Khazrik, Fadi Mansour and Mhamad Safa to participate in an inter-disciplinary and multi-media conversation on ‘Sensing Violence: At the Intersection of Art, Law and Architecture’ at the Birkbeck Annual Law Conference, entitled ‘Dystopias Here and Now: Critical Thought at the End of Time’ (Birkbeck Annual Law Conference: 2019). The panel was in continuation of our conversation as part of ‘Points of Contact’ (2018), an exhibition and public programme I curated in Beirut. ² Our ongoing discussion and analysis of what I frame as the limit condition of risk all take place through a complex of methods, which sense and trace slow, structural and spectacular violence in the context of Lebanon. Each work approaches issues affecting the lived–built environment in Lebanon from slightly different critical directions, which quickly intersect in their aim of undoing the temporal and spatial distance constructed by distinguishing violence as environmental- or conflict-based. Brought together under this shared intent, our research-based practices interrogate an aspect of Lebanon’s lived–built condition that currently falls outside of the law’s conceptual framework of accountability. At the time of our intervention at the Birkbeck Annual Law Conference, our intention was to bring an answer to the questions: Is it easier to imagine a destroyed or dystopian present and future than it is to imagine or effect change in the man-made technology of (international) law; and How can we conceive of averting environmental violence, whilst normalized forms of international conflict-based violence (such as aerial bombardment) continue to operate beyond the conceptual bounds of human (legal) control?

Alongside critical legal scholars, I have previously underlined the argument for an historical turn in international law, proposing that a better understanding of law’s colonial legacy can help us understand its current failings (Kazan, 2020; Orford, 2012). International law’s colonial and imperial history has engendered a method for legitimizing the uneven distribution of the violent force of armed conflict, specifically aerial bombardment (Brady and Garver, 1991; Jochnick and Normand, 1994; Wilke, 2018). The long-term effects of this as a lived limit condition of risk, observed through the ongoing potential of conflict-based violence and its environmental effects, have become a mode of governance. This is particularly true in an analysis of this condition in the context of Lebanon.

My research based-practice investigates the use of governance through totalized and industrialized warfare by the British to control the sites of oil extraction across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, with particular focus on ‘Operation Exporter’ – the Allied invasion of Vichy French-controlled Syria and Lebanon in 1941 (Kazan, 2020). Though my archival research on these events has been extensive, the broad neo-colonial effects of this strategy were brought to my awareness through three key reports uncovered in the archive of General Spears (the first British Minister of Lebanon and Syria) at the Middle Eastern Centre, Oxford University. The significance of these three reports, all internally distributed between 1942 and 1943, is that they outline the neo-colonial strategies being deployed through ‘Peace Terms’, ‘Post-War Settlement’ and ‘Agricultural Development of the Middle East’ (Glubb, 1942–1943), understood to be of equal and conjoined importance in the advance of power across the territory. This neo-colonial strategy launched a new phase of globalization: one connected to a developing extractive racialized capitalist systems, operating not only through economic mechanisms but also through international law (Bhandar, 2018; Robinson, 2019). These reports point to the harmful consequences of separating out these fields of investigation, particularly in attempts to avert the ongoing operation of these neo-colonial strategies and their violent results.

In order to draw out the historic entanglements of this regime of racialized capitalism and armed conflict, I developed ‘Frame of Accountability’ a research-based multi-media project, realized through film, installation, writing and public engagement. ‘Frame of Accountability’ (Figures 1–3)  tells the story of events that took place in the Allied invasion into Vichy French-controlled Lebanon and Syria in 1941, as two foreign forces – under the legal construct of ‘military necessity’ – fight for control and access to natural resources in the territory. The work foregrounds the contract of ‘risk’ created by these events as a colonial technology, imposed in the racialized consequence of decontextualizing resource commodities through capitalist financial systems and industrialized violent conflict. Re-contextualizing risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate effects of this lived limit-condition. The research is retold as ‘legal fiction’ in a speculative attempt at dismantling the continued capacity of law functioning as a mode of structural violence.

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Figure 1.

The destruction of Damascus in 1941 from British bombardment. Film still from ‘Under Multiple Suns’, Helene Kazan, 2019. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 2.

Retracing the on-the-ground impact of the Allied invasion into the Lebanon and Syria in 1941. Film still from ‘Frame of Accountability: (Un)touching Ground’, Helene Kazan, 2020. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 3.

Reading and modelling the noise levels of an archive image depicting a violent scene from the Allied invasion into Lebanon in 1941. Film still from ‘Frame of Accountability: (Un)touching Ground’, Helene Kazan, 2020. Reproduced with permission.

Connecting to my analysis of the coloniality of law and its ongoing lived state of exception, Mhamad Safa’s work describes how the ‘event’, as produced through spectacular violence, should be understood as an occurrence inseparable from its ‘residual structural granulations and resonances’. ³ In his argument, Safa draws on Gilles Deleuze (1992) to contest the ontological definition of the event, elaborating the idea of the event not being held as a singular action, but constantly bleeding across temporalities:

Multiplicity and variety of inflections produce ‘events,’ or vibrations, ‘with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples.’ Movement of a concept that has bearing upon a subject’s impressions of the physical world does not elevate according to a spiral plan, which belongs to philosophy. But radiates or ramifies everywhere in the geography of experience. Such that we can imagine movement of light and sound, together, as folds of ethereal matter that waft and waver. (Safa, 2019)

Safa engages Deleuze’s theoretical frame through sonic investigations of aerial violence deployed during the 2006 War in Lebanon. In his work he outlines how technologies of warfare ‘calibrate the scalability and temporality of military assaults’ (Safa, 2019). The ever-expanding frame of the ‘event’ allows constant possibilities for adaptation through international law’s legitimizing capacities, which undoes the means of legal accountability. Safa exposes the fact that violence is made elastic through its ‘applied manoeuvres and interchangeability’ across the lived–built environment. Through his investigations into the sonic shock of the bombardment in 2006, Safa argues that: ‘the experience of it as an event travelled beyond the urban thresholds of the capital city, as the diffused vibration of airwaves create an intense prolonged experience for much longer afterwards’.

As part of his presentation for the legal conference in 2019, Safa diagrammed the physical and ideological impacts of the 2006 bombardment, showing how the territorial migration and reflection of the vibrations produced through the spectacular event created affective reverberation across the lived–built environment (see Figures 4–6). His work illustrates how the violent force of these events pushes or leaks beyond the bounds of material thresholds, deconstructing matter to the state of molecules and force, reverberations as ongoing waves of human and non-human affect (Safa, 2021). The arguments of Safa and myself stretch and interact across non-linear temporal frames, outlining and prophesizing the continued abilities of destructive cycles, produced through conflict-based violence, legitimized through international law. Our argument holds that, even if a limit condition of risk becomes visible through its spectacular eruptions across the critical lived–built environment, its force still finds ways to escape, slip, seep and explode beyond the net of international law’s framework of accountability as a continued potential condition.

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Figure 4.

Image showing the depth of the impact, Dahyeh, Lebanon. © Mhamad Safa, 2019. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 5.

Sound level simulation of the impact in Dahyeh, Lebanon. © Mhamad Safa, 2019. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 6.

Reverb simulation of the impact in Dahyeh, Lebanon. © Mhamad Safa, 2019. Reproduced with permission.

In the observation of expanded boundaries of unaccountability through a history of violence in Lebanon, Fadi Mansour joins the discussion with his research on the municipal waste crisis that came to a head in Lebanon in 2015. ⁴ The Lebanese waste crisis is a concrete example of how an ongoing state of exception, instigated through the Lebanese Civil War, has produced a limit condition of slow and structural violence. Mansour’s project investigates issues around waste management and urban development produced through the corruption and toxicity of the post-civil war political period. Sites used to collect debris produced during the conflict evolved into sites of collection for municipal waste. In the neo-liberal development of the centre of Beirut, some of these sites ‘transformed from a trash dump mixed with rubble of war destruction, to a flat plane dubbed the “Beirut Waterfront District”’ (Mansour, 2019). In conversation with Safa’s argument on the reverberations of conflict-based violence through its sonic impact, Mansour’s work points to the human and non-human permeability of the toxicity produced through the ‘ecological dysfunction’ of Lebanon’s waste crises. In connection with the analysis of (neo)colonial strategies and the continuation of their present effects outlined in my own work, Mansour points to how the displacement of toxic waste in Lebanon is part of the ongoing operation of such extractivist technologies. The work of Mansour and Khazrik becomes testament to the interconnected nature of this slow and structural violence produced through capitalist logics of destruction, development and profit. Mansour unpacks the failures of definition and context that prevent accounts of spectacular violence from conveying the slow unfolding of a cumulative condition, leading to moments of rupture. Drawing on Demos’s (2017) argument, for Mansour (2019), the optics in these accounts contribute ‘to an ideological mechanism of reassurance through the creation of before and after media fictions, where the illusion of returning to normalcy is fed back’.

In response to these issues, Mansour’s film Dreamland (2017) illustrates how corrupt political systems in Lebanon have produced a recurrent problem in solid waste mismanagement, highlighted from this point in 2015 (see Figures 7–9). The waste crisis is depicted as part of complex ongoing problems produced through the state of exception and corruption from the civil war period. Repeated planning failures exacerbate increasingly toxic critical environments, which leak between urban, rural, human and non-human bounds. Mansour (2019) outlines how

the toxic residues produced by municipal waste as a form of slow violence, spread with visible and sensorial impact at landfill sites, meaning vulnerable human and nonhuman bodies that become affected by this condition, stretch its impact towards uncertain futures. Waste, the residues of our techno-selves, is not going away, as we perpetually attempt to displace the toxicity our relentless consumption generates with temporary waste deposits for imagined futures to address.

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Figure 7.

Burning piles of trash in Beirut, Lebanon. Photograph from EPA/Nabil Mounzer, 2015. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 8.

Dismantling the old Bourj Hammoud Trash Mountain. Film still from Dreamland, Fadi Mansour, 2017. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 9.

Plastic waste and plankton. Film still from Dreamland, Fadi Mansour, 2017. Reproduced with permission.

The film depicts the slippage in toxicity between human and non-human social parameters, across the critical lived–built environment, through the transference of violence between waste sites and sites of new neoliberal luxury development in Beirut. Mansour draws on a method in Davis’s (2015) framework of ‘toxic progeny’, described as finding ways to live within this frame of potential violence. I argue that the development of this research-based practice points to the complex of methods required to depict and engage this discourse of violence, which is otherwise indistinguishable when distributed across distinct fields of critical practice.

The reverberation of this non-linear and affective condition across the critical lived–built environment in Lebanon is also addressed in the work of Jessika Khazrik. ⁵ Khazrik’s project ‘Mount Mound Refuse’ (see Figures 10–12) began as a multi-lingual poem (as part of the project Blue Barrel Grove, 2013–ongoing) exploring encounters of the bodily and global economy, imparted through ‘memories of toxicity, adolescent love and computational connectivities’ (Khazrik, 2016, 2019). Growing up with the promise of reconstruction and the internet in the post civil-war period, Khazrik addresses the industrial violence of toxic waste being stored and buried in a quarry very close to her home in Lebanon, through the ‘indisciplinary’ platform ‘The Society of False Witnesses’. Participating in the interdisciplinary frameworks of both the exhibition and the legal conference, Khazrik (2017) frames her work in critique of the limits of this methodology, adopting Rancière’s framing of ‘indisciplinary’ practice as a further breaking beyond disciplinary bounds (Rancière, 2006: 3; Rancière and Baronian, 2017). In conversation with an argument for an unbound critical lived–built environment, Khazrik also engages the use of decolonial methods in the production of knowledge and in critique of the law, to move towards greater possibilities of enactment and potentiality (Guha and Toto, 2021; Khazrik, 2017). Her testimonial account of a complex toxic condition is elaborated upon as the poem reverberates through Khazrik’s ongoing investigations into ecocide in Lebanon. The literary–sonic work ‘Mount Mound Refuse’, written and performed simultaneously in Arabic and in English, engages the ‘acronyms of the chemical formulas used in the intoxification of the quarry, as a site of political engagement’. Encountered as verses of poetry, Khazrik (2019) extrapolates the chemical formulas in order to bring their toxic materiality into the mimetic forces of language. In this regard, Khazrik states:

These exchanges remain mostly hidden because of their antithetical relation to the law and/or the informal pacts of intimacy that beset them. The young, secretive lovers haphazardly find themselves on the same grounds with poisonous trades that are secretly legitimized by the domineering dynamics of global politics and law. In this way mediating material semiotics playfully re-assert their presence through the limits of translation and falsification.

Khazrik’s complex performances, made in the context of both the exhibition and the legal conference, are a practice-based argument towards the complexity of this condition of violence. Here, Khazrik and her work embody theorist Katherine Yussof’s (2018) ecological argument of entanglement between rock, body, building, memory and pixel. As no fixed boundaries can be distinguished across the presentation of her project, Khazrik’s work evidences the lack of such thresholds in the experience of this violence.

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Figure 10.

Image of quarry in Lebanon with chemical formation. From ‘Mount Mound Refuse’, Jessika Khazrik and the Society of False Witnesses, 2018. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 11.

Image of canister with toxic waste found in the quarry in Lebanon. From ‘Mount Mound Refuse’, Jessika Khazrik and the Society of False Witnesses, 2018. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 12.

Documentation of ‘Mount Mound Refuse’ performance and poetry, Jessika Khazrik and the Society of False Witnesses, 2018. Reproduced with permission.

In my argument for a methodological imagining to dismantle the inherently asymmetric power structures continuing to produce such conditions of violence (Kazan, 2021), I outline that this may only be possible through sensitive readings and understandings of the complex, interconnected human and non-human histories and potential futures visible in its wake (Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020; Haraway, 2016). Through this ‘Frames of Accountability’ and ‘Mount Mound Refuse’ I embody my proposition of poetic testimony: the necessary engagement of radical forms of poetics in expressing, translating and decoding the experience of violence beyond disciplinary boundaries (Da Silva, 2014; Kazan, 2018; Khazrik, 2019; Otomo, 2016; Spivak, 1988). This work comes forward as poetic, scientific, legal, bodily and environmental, in intersection voice, labour and human/nonhuman interaction. Drawing on the etymology of poiesis, from the Greek term meaning to make, poetic testimony alludes to a process of building on and from an experience, as a necessary development of its becoming, as testimony (Kazan, 2020).

In working with Safa, Mansour and Khazrik across these projects, a noticeable tension is observed in the use of different methods and forms of knowledge production while bringing light to this complicated condition of violence. My proposal is that none of these methods – poetic, forensic, analytical – should exclude or lessen the credibility or necessity of any other. Instead, an attempt is made here to uphold and make use of all their strengths and possibilities, across methods, forms of knowledge production and critical fields. Such complex methods are necessary in order to work towards the dismantling of limiting frameworks. This is my argument towards an unbound critical lived–built environment, where such practices of investigation and inquiry allow a cohesive coming together, to uphold and transform, towards possible political and legal intervention and accountability.

Conclusion

This article addresses the increasing difficulty of determining differences between environmental violence and the effects of war in the context of Lebanon; the long and interconnected history of both means they are indistinguishable. Engaging investigations that began well before the catastrophic explosion of August 2020, the projects introduced in this article intertwine collectively through molecular, material, human and non-human subjects, across Lebanon’s lived–built environment. Our conversations reverberate with range and velocity, accelerated by political, legal and violent forces. In interwoven solidarity, in frustration and in continued attempts, each practitioner makes decisions to use all objective, subjective, poetic, forensic and analytic tools afforded them. We reveal the ongoing perpetration of violence and the power structures that allow it to continue. In bringing these projects together, this article argues for recognition of the complexity of a violent limit condition of risk and its materializations, in the proposal of a progressive methodological imagining and investigation: an unbound critical lived–built environment.

Models of this dismantling of boundaries across the critical lived–built environment continue in Lebanon today. Examples include and are not limited to: ‘ArtEvolution Impulse’ (2021), a recent programme curated by Marie-Nour Hechaimé, from September to November 2021; and ‘Art, Ecology, and the Commons’, a programme that took place between 27 August and 5 September 2021 organized by Temporary Art Platform and its founder and director Amanda Abi Khalil (temporaryartplatform, 2021).

With no satisfactory answers on the horizon, such practices might offer a way to begin to answer the question: What are the possibilities of averting environmental violence whilst normalized forms of state-perpetrated conflict-based violence continue to operate and be deployed beyond the reach of human control?