The Shatila refugee camp was established in Beirut for Palestinian refugees in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In 1949 it had a population of approximately 3000. In the intervening years that number has increased exponentially. In particular, the civil war in Syria has led to a rapid increase to over 20,000 people today. To accommodate this influx, apartment blocks are crudely built on the dense and claustrophobic space to the east of the Sports City stadium. With no building regulations, growth is vertical, with new storeys added to existing structures with minimal tools and at incredible speed. Shatila is now closer in its composition to a densely populated urban slum than the refugee camps we commonly visualise. It also bears the deep physical and psychological scars of terrible atrocity. As Shatila’s built environment has increased in complexity, so too has its social profile. It is now a vertiginous mix of political factions, controlling interests, NGO’s and, more than anything, ordinary people devastated by conflict and war.
The tiny school in Shatila operates a programme titled “Peace Education”. Young people are encouraged through activities to use physical action, visualisation and breathing techniques to create a space of calm within the chaos. The Rope Game is one of these therapeutic exercises, designed to address mental health issues in young people who have experienced trauma, most commonly in war zones and sites of conflict. In the exercise, participants close their eyes and visualise a specific fear or event. They then open their eyes and run under, or symbolically ‘cut’ the rope, evoking a moment of psychological transcendence.
Shortly before I made the photographs for this project, my father died. The last weeks were visceral and brutal. In the small village in Italy where he lived, the temperature soared in the heatwave called Lucifer. My first action was to cancel the project, but was persuaded otherwise by my wife, mother and the writer Meike Ziervogel, with whom I was to collaborate on the book "Shatila Stories." It was painful and disorientating. The first night I lay on the bed in my hotel room in west Beirut, wondering why I was there, not knowing what to do. I recall the room was tiny. The walls were a deep and oppressive red, yet the ceiling was absurdly high. There were two underpowered table lights and a single window that looked out onto a car park.
I found an effective way to manage the trauma of bereavment was to meditate. Another was to connect openly and authentically with others. A third was to photograph. When making the work in the chaos of Shatila, it was cathartic to spend time with its people in all their complexity and with all their generosity. One young man I photographed lost his father in Syria a few days later. He couldn’t go back.
At its emotional core this work is a meditation on the notion of trauma across three dimensions: historical; collective and individual.
Basmeh & Zeitooneh