Chronicling the car bombs of Lebanon

Walid Raad and the Atlas Group is presenting a mixed-media installation at The Kitchen, a performance and exhibition space in Chelsea. Raad seeks to explore the contemporary history of Lebanon - specifically the wars from 1975 to 1991 - by collecting and archiving fragments related to the conflict. I had seen the exhibition, but the statistics, ephemera, and video on view seemed thinly stretched over a barely articulated concept. And the allusion to invented documentation didn't help: What was real? What was invented? And why fabricate any of it? However, the subject interested me.

Tonight Raad gave a lecture in conjunction with the exhibition. He seemed dispassionate as he described his group's ongoing investigation into the use of car bombs in Lebanon - and in particular a specific blast that occurred in Beirut on January 21, 1986. In a visual presentation and subsequent video, he showed maps of the area, the buildings that were damaged, the kinds of cars that were used, the political cast of characters, and so on. It was hard for me to gauge what anyone in the audience would take away from all this, except that terrorism is so much in the news. But when he answered questions from the audience, something like an agenda seemed to emerge. No one had been held accountable for some 3,600 car blasts in Lebanon; data were available, but they had never been archived, and archiving could lead to accountability.

More broadly, Raad is interested in what happens to cities in the aftermath of these attacks, and to their definitions of time and space. This certainly resonated for me: Each day I pass the former site of the World Trade Center on my way to work, where overheard conversations often distinguish between "before" and "after" and devolve into "where were you when..." Raad wants to know how we cope when the interiors of buildings - and of people - are literally thrown outside, and the demarcation between private and public is blurred. Papers from the Twin Towers floated around Brooklyn. We open our bags to let the NYPD look inside. And we start to suspect our neighbors.