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January 2020, in the streets of Beirut, history was shedding its skin. The air was thick with bitter smoke, the city’s pulse erratic—caught between an unrelenting past and an elusive future. I walked those streets not as an observer, but as someone gathering evidence of a rupture, collecting fragments of a moment that refused to settle.

The composition emerged as an assemblage, not just of objects, but of forces, tensions, and unresolved narratives. Four wooden panels, salvaged from the remnants of revolution, became the foundation. They were not pristine canvases but discarded boxes, already imbued with the weight of their past. On them, I placed the debris of confrontation: bullet shells, the husks of spent tear gas canisters, parts of shattered doors, fragments of shattered vehicles, all objects propelled by violence, now frozen in reluctant stillness.

Yet these were not merely objects. They carried the imprint of hands that had thrown, of feet that had run, of voices that had screamed. They were both medium and message, form and formlessness. In assembling them, I was neither glorifying nor condemning, but giving shape to a moment that had no resolution, an image of paralysis, of a country at a standstill.

The composition itself was joined yet fractured into four quadrants, divided like the consciousness of a nation unable to cohere. The structure was neither accidental nor premeditated, it was a truth that imposed itself. Lebanon, in that moment, was not a singular entity but a collection of irreconcilable fragments, each carrying its own burden of history, its own weight of uncertainty. To unify them artificially would have been to impose a fiction; to let them remain disparate was to acknowledge reality.

The act of composition became an ordeal. At one point, a fuse—dormant, yet still potent—detonated in my hand. A sharp explosion of heat, an injury seared into flesh. Even in stillness, these objects resisted pacification. They were not artifacts; they were still charged with the energy of their former function. Their temporality was not fixed—they existed between past and present, between what had happened and what had yet to unfold.

When the piece was finished, it resisted finality. It remained raw, its surfaces exposed, its scars unhealed. I considered cloaking it in black as to impose unity, to dissolve its divisions into shadow, but that would have negated its essence. Black would have flattened its dissonance into a singularity. Instead, it remained what it was: a structure of rupture, a meditation on irresolution, a portrait of a city caught in the liminality between rupture and repair.

In the end, this was not an artwork in the conventional sense. It was an assemblage of contested realities, a composition of discordant forces, a moment crystallized in disorder. It did not seek to explain, nor to resolve. It simply stood as it was: fractured, unyielding, true.