Abstract

Critical of the governments’ response the the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975-1990), artist, photographer, filmmaker, and archivist Akram Zaatari is among a generation of cultural producers working to oppose the politics of amnesia sponsored by the state in post-civil-war Lebanon. This thesis examines three film-based works by Zaatari and their function as a form of critical memory practice that engage with archaeological imagination and material culture to offer a space for reflection on micro-histories of the civil wars. I look closely at Red Chewing Gum (2000), In This House (2005), and Letter to Samir (2009) which focus on a particular material object and work to chip away at the state structures of forgetting. To do so, this thesis takes an oral history approach, drawing on personal interviews with the artist, in conversation with scholars of visual arts, film, archaeology, memory, and history to examine the role of material objects in engagements with the past. My analysis of Zaatari’s practice is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, drawing largely from Laura Marks and her conception of the recollection-object and the auratic object in film, Michael Shanks and Dieter Roelstraete writing on the archaeological imagination, and the artist’s own conceptualizations of memory, excavation, and objects, often informed by Gilles Deleuze writing. I argue that Zaatari’s films display a form of memory practice which employs objects as a placeholder for past relationships, people, and time, creating an avenue to revisit an unresolved past, an archaeological practice driven by desire and care to resist forgetting.