I. It Slipped my Mind... - ...مرجعيون! هل تذكرين؟
12,854 Homes for an Olive Tree
What Happened? - Searching for Identity in Marjaayoun
> Home 3358 - Maximum Security Chicken Coop
“There is never a single trusted source we can rely upon, but I do believe there's always a translucent history, which seeps through the cracks of time”
— Edmond Nasr, driving up to Marjaayoun
In a world of made-up realities, information shapes perception, it is an object of order & control. Its storage & transmission are then nothing more than a tool of that control; the Archive is not as stable as it seems.
Marjaayoun! Do you recall?... - ...مرجعيون! هل تذكرين؟
> Home 3793 - بديشاهم جوق يشا
‘Careful what you scrape around here... these walls have energy’
To tell our ultra-local truth, we look inwards, to the olive tree, an age-old symbol of Marjaayoun’s identity.
Combining crushed olive-pit refuse with locally sourced soil, we quickly and easily erect structures of varying rates of decomposition. A new non-archive, the town is dotted with self-built, single-use “homes” to physically manifest its embedded identity, preserving what cannot be archived by traditional means.
Above and below: Olive trees and rammed olive pit blocks
At the core of these homes lies anticipated ruination; they live only to fulfil their purpose, decaying over days, seasons, or decades. Since regular archival sources aren't reliable anyway, these tell a story of their own, celebrating the ephemeral complexities of identity.
> Home 4162 - House of fulfilmentDecomposing back into fertilizer for the olive tree, they leave behind traces of human creation & intervention, all while minimizing the permanence of our impact.
‘As a true spring which never dies... such are the memories of Marjaayoun’Allowing each individual to speak of their own reality, a subjectively honest truth, we hope to reach a larger, translucent collective truth. As new homes are born, and old ones fade, identity is affirmed, without allowing the long past to loom over as a limit or a tool for control.
> Home 2956 - Living room
> Home 4612 - Gerdak Decoy