Southern Lebanon. A so-called buffer zone, occupied by Israel between 1978 and 2000. The Israelis withdrew two years ago. What is happening today? Nothing at all. The Lebanese army has not yet returned to southern Lebanon. It has practically been absent from the region since 1978. Back then, the way had to be cleared for the Palestinians. Nowadays, the army relinquishes its prerogatives - in favour of the Hizbollah. Syria, on the other hand, does resist the development in the south. The players have changed, but the south is still exposed to peril.

People seem to want to keep southern Lebanon as a battlefield. It is therefore possible to ask oneself how a battlefield is constructed.

On one side of these - defenceless - territories, the border is marked by a precarious cease-fire line that is constantly in danger of being flown over and bombed by Israeli planes; the area surrounding the farms of Shebaa, which is occupied and claimed by the Lebanese, is threatened by sporadic bombings. This area is in the grip of a decline in agricultural activity and a general economic crisis. The Israelis had previously made a part of the population dependent: work in Israel, army replacements, all sorts of black-market activities.

For a whole generation, it has been made impossible to work on the land. No development seems possible. Who is going to invest in an area in which the state refuses to ensure that its laws are kept? What's more, these territories are full of mines.

There are certain aspects of the south that can only be perceived when the current struggles of the populace are taken as a point of departure. The same goes for the strong sense of this region's abnormality. This is something the people in the south also feel clearly - people who are at the mercy of Israel's despotism, abandoned by the Lebanese state, and exposed to the consequences of occupation as well as to the effects of global changes in working conditions in the rural sector. In their isolation, they try to resist these various forms of repression. With all the means at their disposal, they reject any branding of the south as an exceptional region.

So what sort of access can there be for those of us who do not live in southern Lebanon? It is at any rate certain that the »expressiveness« of the territory has no »author.« But this expressiveness makes it possible for us to work using the form of an exhibition.

We are interested in aesthetic practices, regimes of the gaze, that are located outside of the artistic sphere. In our work, we are particularly concerned with a sort of »intrusion«: the intrusion of elements of architecture, of landscape. We want to point out incongruous shifts. For example, one could ask why - looking from Lebanon - the border to Israel is not visible. We are thus concerned with making this view possible.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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