Works

Multi Channel Sound Installation
16 speakers. Variable dimensions

One cannot but questions the promise of a place meant to be connected with the rest of the city; a place meant for trading and leisure, a public space. The fair didn’t fulfill its expected program and never functioned in any other sustainable ways. Today, although used in rare and irregular occasions, the quiet and empty site remains inaccessible to a large public. Indeed, only a few people can enter it, yet its scale is so big, that no one can ignore its existence. It’s like a void within Tripoli. The fair’s architecture and scale are visually striking and create a sense of fascination, which the artist – when invited to work on this site, has tried to resist in the past, by refusing to produce any visual work, aside from mere documentation on what has now become a monument.

This situation triggered the idea for the multi-channel sound installation of Lamia Joreige, where she proposes to reconnect, through a poetic gesture, the bustling life of Tripoli with the almost secluded site of the fair. She recorded sounds in various landmarks and mundane places in the city such as: the fishermen’s auction at the harbor of Mina, the successive muezzins’ calls for prayer heard from the citadel, the lively old souks and children’s voices from Bab al-Tabbaneh.

These sounds were then played and recorded again inside the impressive spherical structure of what was originally designed by Niemeyer as an experimental theater, only impregnated this time by the physicality and materiality of its architecture. As the dome remained uncompleted, any diffused sound creates an echo and reverberation. The installation presents the variations on these soundscapes of Tripoli, through scattered speakers across the fairground. They are inter-spaced by the recordings of voices reading documents on the fair’s history: its promise of modernity and prosperity, which echoed that of a newly born nation; as well as the war, which prevented its completion, putting a halt to many dreams.