Visualising resilience: the city of Beirut between conflict and care

Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, represents a paradigmatic context for exploring the theme of marginal, wounded, forgotten, and conflict—ridden landscapes, proposing representation as a tool of analysis, interpretation, and sharing. Indeed, Beirut can simultaneously be a “locus amoenus” and a “locus horribilis”: more than any other city, it embodies the tension between a wounded landscape and a resilient one, between spaces marked by war, explosions, urban destruction, and traumatic memory — and other spaces in which micro—practices of care, public art, and communities that resist and regenerate begin, sometimes timidly, to emerge. The Lebanese capital is a city of opposites: at once Eastern and Western, modern yet deeply rooted in history; a city that bears within it traces of ancient traumas but also of internal crises and very recent conflicts, such as the current Israeli—Palestinian one, which in Beirut has manifested in several attacks — among them the one in which the leader of the Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, lost his life. Despite its modest size, Beirut therefore has a complex and layered history which, over the years, has nourished a vast imaginary, prefiguring the hybrid and multicultural essence of the major cities of our time. This contribution investigates the visual dimension of the city of Beirut, underlying in the end how the photographic medium — even when amateur and participatory — can constitute a non—procedural yet highly effective instrument for carrying out a shared accounting of the city’s history and values, oscillating between conflict and care.