Oh Dad, little did we know as we waved you off to work that morning that it would be the last time we would see you again for a long time – if ever again. To the world, you are a number, but not to us. You have a name and a life that awaits! If you are alive, dad, hold to your dreams.
From Alia to her father Edward
This is an unfinished story, the story of a life locked in pause.
Thousands of people disappeared during the Lebanese Civil War. And for more than 40 years now, their families and loved ones have been fighting to preserve the contours and the colors that shaped their life together. In the home – the stage of this battle – the preservation of objects, small rituals and habits have become an emotional bookmark to safeguard the place of a life that awaits.
But memories are not stagnant. Between the fear of forgetting and the violent drive to remember, memory becomes a distorted, fragmented, and flawed accumulation of sounds, smells, voices and images. This exhibition is designed to show how each of the five senses, when impacted by such a trauma, becomes fiercely obsessional and volatile, both preventing families from escaping a purgatory of waiting and yet failing to restore the physical presence of those who are missing.
In addition to reinforcing the fragmented memories of the victims, this exhibition is also a contribution to the larger efforts to enhance an alternative narrative on the events of the Civil War in the public sphere. Art and legislation are tools with the power to exhume individual trauma, ascribe it with collective meaning and, ultimately, archive the event. Until then, the past will continue to live in parallel with the present as embodied by the families of the missing.
The missing file is one of the last concrete chapters hindering the closure of the Lebanese Civil War. The Law on the Missing will establish a solid legal base for a humanitarian mechanism to give long-waited for answers to thousands. The law has passed Committee of Justice and Administration and awaiting ratification. The International Committee of the Red Cross requests that the Lebanese Parliament passes the Law on the Missing and gives closure to the families living in a state of interrupted grief.
This is the story of the thousands who are still missing, and the thousands more who are still missing them.
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