THE ATLAS GROUP

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Louis Lau Joey Chung

The Lebanese Civil War 1975 - 1990

• Lebanon is in Western Asia, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

• In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War lasted 15 years.

• The war devastated the country's economy, and resulting in massive loss of human life and property.Approximately 150,000 people killed and 200,000 wounded.

• The war ended in 1990 with the signing of the Taif Agreement and parts of Lebanon were left in ruins.

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The Atlas Group

• A non-profit cultural research foundation based in Lebanon.

• Was established in 1999.

• Its Goal:To research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon, especially the Lebanese Civil War.

• Its Theme:The continuing effect of all the individual & collective experience that constitutes history.

• Its online archive:http://www.theatlasgroup.org/

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Disclosure

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A documentary guise

Fact of the Atlas Group

• Imaginary foundation

• Semi-fiction done by Walid Raad

• A 15 year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon

• Imaginary archive> created characters> found/produced notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs, and other documents composed the “contemporary history” of Lebanon

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Walid Raad

• Born in 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon

• Contemporary media artist

• His works include video, photography and literary essays

• The ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence

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The EndeavorWriting a history of The Lebanese Civil War

• The understanding and interpreting Lebanon's recent history is important to him

• Grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 to 1991 (not a self-evident episode)

• Shed light on some of the unexamined dimensions of the Lebanese civil wars

• Questions about> experience and memory> authenticity and authorship> how history can be depicted

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The Aim of the Project

•Composing an archive of a fictional nature to:•Explore the constant slippage between historical

and fictional narration which occurs in the performance of memory

•Criticize the feigned objectivity of historical discourse

•Dismantle the supposed autonomy of artistic workby not claiming an authenticity of the representations based on a special artistic gaze

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First Start

• First started with a project titled <<The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs>>

• Disseminates the group and its precuts through exhibitions in museums, galleries

• Via a performance/presentation titled <<The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Case Studies from The Atlas Group Archive>>

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Raad’s History Writing

• No chronology of events

• No dates

• No personalities

• No massacres

• No invasions

Which offer a cause and effect perspective onto historical happenings

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Raad’s History Writing

• “These tapes do not document what happened, but what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable and thinkable about wars.“

• Do not represent what actually "happened"

• Constructed through the filter of artistic license

• "Theoretical musings" on the question of history and memory

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Raad’s History Writing

• An abstraction constituted by various discourses>> video, photography, documentary, nationalism and war

• Blurred distinction between the real and the imagined

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A Project of Narration

• Disrupted the dominant mode of thinking about the Lebanese civil wars

• Constitute a process of reconstruction through practices of memory of small stories

- As each of the small stories interrupts the process of laying claim to a complete, historical understanding of the Lebanese civil wars

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Grounds the act of memory in narration

• Tying the projects of The Atlas Group with - psychoanalytic treatment of traumatic memory- Freud's theoretical writings on hysterical symptoms

• Through a narration of the stories of Dr. Fakhouri, Operator 17 and Souheil Bachar, the audience is made aware of the hysterical symptoms of forgetting through the talking cure

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Raad as a Psychoanalyst

• Refrain from commenting critically on the material, Raad establishes his own emotional distance from the project

• "I have nothing to say only to show."

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History as Art

• Performance of memory's involvement in the construction of all narrative forms

• Art, conventionally perceived as inhabiting a more aesthetic value in fictional representation

• Allows Raad to ask the question of what can be imagined about historical reconstruction, and more specifically about the traumatic experiences of the Lebanese civil wars

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Truth behind the Authored Works

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Hostage: The Bachar tapes

• Played by a famous actor in Lebanon

• Lebanese hostage is sort of real as every American hostage mentions such a man

• Western media's domination of events necessity of tell Bachar's story, even as a fictionalized account

• Speaker's authority

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I Only Wish That I Could Weep

• Operator 17, the security agent, is in fact Raad himself

• Filmed the Beirut sunset for years without knowing how or if he would ever use the footage

• "Didn't you know there are security agents filming from those vans?" said by Raad’s firend

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Creative Methodology

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The fictional and the factual

Methodology

• Use of primary documents as the basis for a reconstruction of historical events within the context of a museum, website or as a lecture

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Mimicry of the Archive

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Creative Presentation Format

• Puts found photographs from newspaper archives in a narrative context

• Feigns historical materials with a link to well-known events – the civil war

• Allegedly made available by eyewitnesses: videos and notebooks with commented photographs

• Audience's background knowledge, primarily derived from the mass media

• All media combined that makes the reality but by uncovering of the fake renders doubtful

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Imaginary Events

• Constructed out of innocent and everyday material

• Phantasies erected on the basis of memories

• Focus on un-examined effects of the wars>> hysterical symptoms

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Fictionalized Fact & Factualized Fiction

• A fiction can still be convincing, even if from the beginning one knows that it is false

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Questions Raised through the Project

• How do we represent traumatic events of collective historical dimensions when the very notion of experience is itself in question?

• How do we approach the facts of the war, not in their crude facticity, but through the complicated mediations by which facts acquire their immediacy?

• How does one witness the passing of an extremely violent present?

• What particular conceptions of experience, of modes of assimilating the data of the world can we presuppose when we speak of the physical and psychic violence of the civil war?

• What conception of time, evidence, testimony, history, and writing do we invoke?

By Walid Raad

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Photography

• The expressive power of a photograph and its susceptibility to be manipulated by historians.

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The Atlas Group in Exhibitions/Museums/.etc

• The Atlas Group participated in major international exhibitions like:Documenta 11Whitney Biennial 2002

• Lebanese contemporary history can be seen in Paris, Germany,…

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