The first chapter in a larger body of work exploring historically or personally significant locations within Beirut’s present, Lamia Joreige’s Under-Writing Beirut – Mathaf (2013) weighs the toll of war’s infiltration of cultural spaces.

The Arabic word for ‘museum’, Mathaf also refers to the neighborhood where one can find the National Museum of Beirut. During the Lebanese wars (1975-1991), the city was split in two by the Green Line. For this period, the museum’s Mathaf-Barbir Crossing served as an important checkpoint that allowed people to pass between East and West. Over the course of the conflict, the museum suffered heavy structural damage and much of its collection disappeared. In the wake of this loss, Joreige’s project reflects on the accessibility and inaccessibility of documents, objects and information[1] , revealing how erasure and fragmentation—whether by time, conflict or deliberate omission—shape collective memory.