Marta Bogdańska, Heaven and Garden

While working on the exhibition, we talked a lot about the extraordinary state of fragility, as Marta calls the condition of Lebanon and of the human and non-human organisms that inhabit it. It is a state of permanent uncertainty, exhaustion – with crises, wars, and inept policies of successive governments. With time, the state of fragility started to refer in our conversations to other parts of the world torn by conflicts: Ukraine, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Palestine, to the climate crisis and the resultant natural disasters, the tragedy of refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border, and to ourselves, who are confronted with the reality that offers no respite. When we talked, the Lebanon from Marta’s photos was always in the background. I began to think of it as a distant, only half-real land – a slightly hazy, sometimes chaotic mix of different orders persisting in a fragile state, as if the gesture of photographing it could save it from crumbling down. I would return to the pictures again and again, finding solace, a confirmation that the world can exist in an unchanged form. When viewing the Lebanese reality portrayed by Marta, I saw the resilience of the people and things. I saw their strength and perseverance in dealing with the tragedies that have hit them one after another for years, for decades. I admired their resourcefulness, their ability to build on rubble, or even out of rubble. I saw vegetation grow relentlessly out of cracks of fractured concrete, sprout from garbage. At first, I concentrated only on the saved beauty.

Sometimes, I even lost myself in our persistent search for hope, for a story where Lebanon would feature as a neat metaphor, a symbol of perseverance. Obviously, the Middle East is perfectly suited for such narratives, with its picturesque views of contemporary ruins – car wrecks, abandoned furniture, layers of today’s and past lives covered with dust, illuminated with warm light. However, the point is to take your perception further, rather than stop at the surface and be seduced by the ‘pretty’ scenery. Together, we strove not to follow the paths marked out by some 19th-century Romantics, for whom oriental countries were just a means of finding hidden analogies between Europe and the distant exoticism. But it was not always easy for us. After all, you want to believe that, though depleted, the Lebanese cedars will survive (there is only 17 km2 of cedar forest left in Lebanon), and you want to see the quintessence of the Mediterranean and a harbinger of better times in the olive trees, as in the Book of Genesis, where an olive branch brought to Noah’s Ark by a dove is a sign that the flood is receding. But clearly, a hopeful narrative ended for Lebanon long ago, if only for the Palestinians who are living in Lebanese refugee camps and whose olive groves have been gradually wiped off the face of the earth by the Israeli colonisation. Palestinian’s gardens have been burned down and replaced by cypresses and pine trees, which have become tools for appropriating further territories. Nor will you find relief by looking at the Lebanese sky, which is often lit up by exploding missiles, inhaling the dust raised by the explosions and heavy smog. Under the sky, in a space marked by traces of violence, life goes on. It is governed by the deformed environment, which consumes resources and strength, amplifying the fear of the destructive pressure of everyday life. These are not romantic ruins or symbols of the will to survive. This is someone’s world that has turned into oblivion. It is a lack of electricity, water, fuel, medicines.