How has architecture been instrumentalized in the ongoing construction of a national narrative? What is the role of architects in shaping society within corrupt ecologies of power and failed financial engineering?

Employing archival materials, interviews, and 16mm and digital film, the experimental documentary produced by 2021–2022 Emerging Curator, Joyce Joumaa, explores the political and cultural forces that have come to bear on the abandoned site of an international fairground conceived by Oscar Niemeyer in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon. By examining the precarity of the project site, from its halted construction to its imposed abandonment and attempted reappropriations, the film reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis. Modern structures under threat of collapse stand in as protagonists to tell the story of a promised metropolis that never came to be, while the fairground acts as a lens through which to look at implicit collapse beyond the perimeter of the site.

Screenings include:

• Unmasking Space, ETH Department of Architecture, Zurich, Switzerland (30 April 2024)
• Together? Together!, Instituto Svizzero, Milano, Italy (12 April 2024)
• Images Film Festival, Toronto, Canada (12 April 2024)
• 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (November 2023 – March 2024)
• redeem رديم, Linz, Austria (April 2023)
• Which Human Rights? Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey (December 2023)
• 35th Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale, Ljubljana, Slovenia (16 November 2023)
• Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, United-Kingdom (September 2023)
• Of Stories and Places, Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna, Austria (August 2023)
• St. Moritz Art Film Festival, St. Moritz, Switzerland (August 2023)
• The politics of ruin, Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland (June 2023)
• Écrans du réel, Beirut, Lebanon (May 2023)