You’ve Seen This Before

The same week I began my PhD, I traveled to Berlin for Soft Power Festival to unveil Memory as Archive, a large-scale mural made from photographs of the Lebanese Civil War placed alongside images from my own family archive: photographs of my mother, my father, myself as a child, ordinary family gatherings and ordinary moments that were never intended to become historical evidence. The photographs were found in a shoebox among the debris of our home after it was bombed in 1984 shortly following a special family gathering. My grandmother returned after the fire had subsided to recover the few belongings that remained.