2024-ongoing
Thesis, performed at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union
Author: Ralph Karam
Advisor: Nora Akawi
Maskful: Failing to Memorialize the South Liberation Army
to the right: poem script as slideshow.
The presentation will start with a loud reading, one that aims to build, on sounder, more coherent grounds, a foundation of affects. The project’s trajectory documents the failure to memorialize a story of betrayal on the South of Lebanon’s colonial lines as guilt, shame, childhood and hardship kidnap the architect from their traditional site of action.
I crafted a serious proposal:
On Qal’at Shkif or Belfort Castle or Chateau de Beaufort:
Memorializing the South Lebanese Army’s Double Betrayal
I thought a building would successfully memorialize the points of control torture & liberation that marked the people and their landscape under the Zionist Israeli invasion and its Christian proxy militia, the SLA, while anticipating a lugubrous and anxious future.
But everytime I crafted a space it crumbled, everytime the sound of a bird meant to close a distance it was shot far away by a hammer or a stick of dynamite.
Windows could no longer reflect the sights I had seen.
An open slit meant to reveal the location of betrayal only showed grasslands water ponds and mountains. Could landscape ever land a hand to a soul relinquising its bloody heritage?