زي تكون

This project aims to conjure an ancestral futurity in the present. As Lebanon undergoes perpetual crises, it leaves one’s life within it fixated on quotidian struggles, unable to imagine a brighter tomorrow, and occasionally escaping in the nostalgia of its recent romanticized past. Working with a seven-thousand-year-old olive tree, the work muses on the notion of deep time within the framework of this living tree, imagining the deep past as well as the deep future.

The work also uses the site of the billboard to consume light during its exhibition – just as a tree photosynthesizes – rather than promote consumption. The exposure to sunlight in the present alchemizes the ancestral tree’s leaves to postulate a renewed future.