Cadavre Exquis Lebanese, Rotterdam Biennale
A speculative project for downtown Beirut, Cadavre Exquis Lebanese proposes to recreate the city by embracing – rather than rejecting – its shifting and unresolved reality. The project responds to the post-civil-war reconstruction of the city center by the public-private consortium Solidere, which led to its privatization, Disneyfication and exclusivity. But in the wake of repeated occupations and protests in 2005, the center city became once again the site of political struggle and social compression.
Refusing to bury difference, conflict, surprise and complexity behind the singular narrative of an instantaneous masterplan, the proposal instead re-creates Downtown Beirut as a temporal Cadavre Exquis. Sequential projects or “epochs” engender new situations in the city’s evolution. Their ultimate, multilayered combination makes a fictionally re-created complexity, willed into being through the power of the imagination.
The project was commissioned for the 2007 Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture.
