Lebanon’s past has left profound marks on the postwar present - the physical and psychological wounds of violence during the war, the slow recovery due to the resource reallocation of political, social, and material foundations, as well as the drastic demographic changes caused by mass migration and displacement throughout the war. We attempt through the notion of trauma, collective memory and history, to interpret the molding of the country’s urban fabric, the reallocations and inequalities that arise, the gross lack of public space and lack of expression of individual entities and of the collective.
A superficial reading of the recent history gives rise to the distinctive notion of time, a notion that the country is tied to the present, that it cannot progress forward, while being unable to look back. Upon observation of Beirut’s urban fabric, one can argue experiencing detachment from the past, from a traumatic abruption, followed by a culture of silence. Coincidentally, the future appears equally unattainable, as the continuous political tensions and the recurring acts of violence prohibit the formation of a consistent approach to the future of the city.
The deferred past resembles a prolonged and eternal present, as it is suspended between the past and future, with the latter two seeming largely unattainable. The word suspended gives rise to the feeling of deferment in a void, of suspension and, finally, of oppression of the individual.
The absence of public spaces in Lebanon -- and in a large extent in the greater urban fabric of Beirut -- as well as in its other cities; the fact that Beirut is renowned for its sex-tourism within the homosexual community; for the wider Middle East, the abandoned railway network with corroded carriages which encompasses the motorway responsible for intertwining the cities of Lebanon with Israel and Syria: all constituted the assemblage of motives behind Lebanon’s sexograph, which attempts to decipher the public space, by way of expressing an individual's sexuality.
The sexual utopia produced on an experimental scale through the aforementioned triggers, ultimately constitutes the subjective perception of the public space, through the expression of the oppressed, to an exorbitant extent. We consider the thematic park of sexuality, as the unique response to starchitects’ thematic parks of skyscrapers currently flooding the Middle East, as smaller scale interventions are suppressed at the infancy stage of design, without ever maturing to the stage of actual implementation.