Material Neighborship and Land Imaginaries

The panel presents artists Sabine Saba and Batoul Faour latest works taking as a point of departure borderlands and their weaponization in the context of Lebanon and how cartography and other architectural layouts are deployed to advance, erase or reconfigure specific relations.

Sabine Saba’s intervention will look into the implications of Lebanese borders on locally nested imaginaries of land, and landed relations. Geographic proximities produce landed relations upon which social and political imaginaries are built, a material neighborship. However, such intimate vicinities are often subjected to shifting land laws, and governance that perpetually reconstruct our georealities. 

Batoul Faour will present The Bunker, The Barracks, and The Base, a portrait of collective remembrance in a landscape where invasion and occupation have shaped the lives of generations. The project reflects on the recurring geopolitical realities that impact life in South Lebanon, the intimacy of living at this borderland, and the ways in which both architecture and the landscape embody these politics.

The panel is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Earthly Praxis, on view at the Twin Galleries until December 31.

Sabine Saba is an artist and a researcher. Her work is focused on contemporary modes and technologies of territoriality, both institutional and individual. She deploys tools from the esthetic regimes of futurity, to observe ancient, ongoing struggles and disputes. She is currently a researcher in the Febrayer/ Forensic Architecture lab, based in Berlin.

Batoul Faour is an architectural researcher, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersection of politics, spatial histories, and media–blending a journalistic, documentary approach with the empirical and the architectural. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut and a MArch from the University of Toronto.