Plastic Memory Containers

In the summer of 2004, Nada Sehnaoui was invited to create a site-specific work near the 6000-year old ruins in the Lebanese town of Byblos. After some research the artist discovered how proud the local people were of their cultural heritage, yet how alienated they felt from their recent history, more specifically, the memory of the civil war. The installation entitled Plastic Memory Containers featured 100 white plastic buckets filled with 3000 crumpled balls of paper with the following text repeated indefinitely on them: “How meaningful is it to have a 6000-year old history when we have no memory of our recent past?”