Trembling Landscapes - Beirut (Paysages Tremblants - Beirut)

An ongoing part of Ali Cherri’s research, which he pursues through film, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance, is an investigation into the effects of catastrophe—both man-made and geological—on his native Lebanon and its neighboring territories. Trembling Landscapes—Beirut (Paysages Tremblants—Beirut) belongs to a series of aerial maps representing Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Makkah, and Tehran. The cities that Cherri has selected are situated on active fault lines, the coordinates of which are marked with red stamps. The precarity of these landscapes is paralleled by the social and political unrest that has come to characterize their locations. Cherri’s restrained cartographic diagrams offer an alternative to the media’s explicit representations of disaster by investigating the region’s geologic fissures.