In the Eye of the Sun
- In the early 1960s, Oscar Niemeyer came to Lebanon to design a complex of buildings for the planned world exhibition. However, the exhibition did not take place because a fifteen-year civil war broke out in the country. Today, the space of the Rachid Karameh International Fair in Tripoli is considered a major icon of modernist architecture, but it remains unused and almost inaccessible to the city’s residents.
- Marta Bogdańska’s film Next Sunday tells the story of a group of teenagers who, despite restrictions, decide to take over this extraordinary space and inhabit it. They spend their free time there together, riding BMX bikes. This place becomes an important part of their individual stories, hopes, and dreams. At the same time, owing to their subversive activities, the decaying structure comes back to life.
- In 2023, the Tripoli fair space was urgently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List of Endangered Sites. Meanwhile, the destruction of cultural heritage is one of the main goals of the imperial policy of states currently waging war in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, and recently also in Lebanon.
- The screening will be followed by a discussion where we will consider the subversive potential of architecture and the issue of grassroots activism for the protection of heritage. We will look at specific examples of local community activism in war-torn Middle Eastern countries. We will see how, through everyday practices of resistance, these communities face occupation, fight for survival, preserve their place of residence, and protect cultural continuity.
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Panel participants:
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Marta Bogdańska
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visual artist, photographer, cultural manager, filmmaker (including Unicorn, In-Between, and Next Sunday), and FotoPlus educator. A resident of Lebanon for 7 years; member of the international platforms Futures Photography and Women Photograph. She is currently preparing the premiere exhibition of her new project Vive la Résistance! at the Fort Institute of Photography as a laureate of the “Hestia Artistic Journey” National Grant Programme for 2024. This year she also won the artistic residency Artist Meets Archive #4 at the International Photoszene in Cologne and Archivo Platform LAB2025;
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Rima Marrouch
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journalist and reporter for Al-Hayat, National Public Radio, Reuters, BBC, and Los Angeles Times. She has reported on events from Syria, Lebanon, the UN headquarters in New York, and the UK. Member of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she investigated the Middle East and North Africa programme. Currently Communications Officer for the World Health Organization in Geneva;
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Ala Qandil
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Polish-Palestinian reporter and social activist. Former Polish Press Agency correspondent in Palestine/Israel. She has freelanced for Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Le Monde diplomatique Polska, and Wirtualna Polska, among other media. Author of the web-doc Obliterated Families documenting the Israeli offensive in Gaza in 2014. Founder of the Słuszna Strawa Social Cooperative. Activist on the Polish-Belarusian border. She currently runs the Nomada Association’s Polish-Palestinian Initiative for Solidarity “Kaktus”;
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Małgorzata Kuciewicz
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author, with Simone De Iacobis as CENTRALA, of projects informed by the concept of Amplifying Nature, exploring the relationship between architecture and natural processes. CENTRALA researches and popularizes post-war modernism, e.g. Warsaw Powiśle (2009), the house of Zofia and Oskar Hansen in Szumin (since 2013), the work of Jacek Damięcki (since 2014), and of Alina Scholtz (since 2019). CENTRALA presented their projects at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018, 2023), London Design Biennale (2021), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022), Gwangju Biennale (2023). Since 2017, they have collaborated on a permanent basis with the Kharkiv School of Architecture.
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The host:
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Małgorzata Szczurek
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is a Romance scholar, translator, and publisher; editor-in-chief of the publishing house Wydawnictwo Karakter, which she co-founded. She has collaborated with the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. Szczurek has published in Znak, Książki. Magazyn do Czytania, Tygodnik Powszechny, and Czas Literatury. Among her literary translations are the novels This Blinding Absent Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun and The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud. She has edited dozens of books on architecture, design, and decolonial perspectives. At the Karakter Bookstore, she curates a series of debates titled Learning from the South, which aims to popularize literature, art, and philosophy from the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.
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