In her project 'Under-Writing - Beirut', the Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige approaches Lebanon's capital city as a palimpsest. The media she employs include video, text, still images, and digital technology. The National Museum of Beirut is one of the sites she has chosen and entitled as Chapter One. Mathaf means 'museum' in Arabic and it also stands for the name of the neighbourhood where the National Museum of Beirut is located. Opened in 1942, the museum embodies a troubled history. During the civil war (1975-1990), the building was taken over by militiamen and was deployed as a sniper vantage point. It became a strategic military location as well as a bunker and a barrack where weapons were stored. Situated on the khutut at-tammas (lines of confrontation), which acted as a demarcation line between East and West Beirut during the armed conflict, Mathaf, along with the space surrounding it, formed a passage called the 'museum alley' - a site associated with kidnappings, death, and menace. By focusing on Joreige's multi-media installation, this paper discusses ways of archiving, remembering and forgetting that passage as 'the museum continues to be haunted by lingering traces, tormented by the layers of death it carries within its folds whose ghosts must be summoned and remains must be exhumed', to put it in the artist's words.
