Postponed Utopia: Niemeyer's Fairground, Tripoli

The distance from my little family run pension, Hotel Koura which is situated in the busy old center of (Center of Koura) Tripoli to Oscar Niemeyer's fairground is short but the social layers are huge. I did arrive just after a bomb in public space where the life was normal then ever. Tried to catch Knut Asdam, an artist whom I collaborate since years as a writer. When he headed to Lebanon from Oslo to shot in the fair place in Tripoli, he asked me simply to go with him there. To follow an artist one week there... the spots, places, corners of the fairground is more than to understand the "image" what we will get there... it is more about following the foot steps of the artist who really struggles how to deal with the uncanny feeling of (somehow) a leftover modernistic heritage which make you feel sad, solitude, romantic, curious but also free in a "space" that is totally unconnected to the spatial, urban environment. How an artist can get the visual image of it, without feeling the heavy exoticism of an "object" of architectural modernism?


Preserving, intervening, misusing, distraction...all forces me to consider, to understand the relationship between subjectivity and space in a postponed utopia (which is -even- intervened by the civil war)

Knut's work on this space that is on the movement of the relations of the individuals...the narration of the space and subjectivities try to multiply the uncanny feeling of the fairground. A kind of no relation to space. A intentional failure of emphaty of space.









(Tripoli market)

photos: Pelin Tan, 2010, Tripoli, Lebanon