Psychogeographic Maps and Mobility in Tony Chakar's Alternative Urbanism Approach

Abstract

Thinking about cities, producing ideas or presenting a new mise en scene, the process of city formation, impressions, fragmentations, traces, architectural designs, non-uniform view, mobility, fluidity, heterogeneity, dissolution, transformation, lifestyle, conflicts, wars, the connotations-contradictions it evokes, begin in proportion to seeing and confronting them. In this context, the works of architect and contemporary artist Tony Chakar, which produce an alternative history against the state-supported amnesic official narrative around the crisis of representing the experienced violence history and social trauma of “missing” subjects who are effectively silenced or rendered invisible by the neoliberal denial policies and narratives of Beirut and Beirut city center (Downtown), which is likened to an incubator of religious-ethnic conflicts in the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, will be discussed. In this study, which is shaped around the relationship between war, city, space, memory and architecture, the lost image of the city divided by the civil war, the missing persons of the war, mass graves, modernity and neoliberal economic policies, and the temporarily suspended amnesic existence of the Downtown, which was transferred to the population of the real estate company Solidere (Societé Libanaise, le Développement et la Reconstruction de la Centre Ville de Beyrouth), will be evaluated through Chakar’s works Eyeless Map, Yesterday’s Man and The Sky Over Beirut. These works of the artist, which are an effort and expression of recovery after the civil war, are analyzed by discussing whether the Downtown causes individual and social dissolution, contradiction, anxiety, uncertainty and displacement, accompanied by architectural structures, memories, narratives, mapping, imaginary representations and city walks, around the themes of space, memory and trauma. In addition, the question of whether there is a Lefebvre and Situationist influence on Chakar's work on Solidere's demand for the right to the city in response to new memory spaces is discussed and answered.