Tripoli international fair between out-of-place/in-place : a Utopian nonbeing : emerging voices : a dialogue with Niemeyer

Abstract

Place is a word that speaks for itself - a concept both simple and complicated that allows the cultural elite to savour city's life. We can see many manifestations of a certain place; it is what we call "place of memory", where participating in certain activities expresses the spirit of such places. Place and memory intersect together so that every place has a memory, and each memory is related within a place. Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, nationalism, power and authority. This is what Tim Cresswell (2004) discussed fully in his introduction to place, emphasizing that being out of memory means being out of place, and that sometimes we invent memory of a certain past to create a new sense of identity, a new sense of nostalgia, so that what we remember becomes folklore. Place as a form of memory, is a way of being where all our senses become confused and evolved. Tripoli International Fair, commonly known as Rasheed Karame International Fair, is the place that I am addressing in this thesis. It is a place of postponed utopia because its prosperous future was ended by the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and it was never re-launched until today. As the corners of the fair are attempting to stand still between preserving, intervening, misusing and distracting, they leave us with a mysterious feeling of a leftover modernist heritage, evoking sadness, loneliness, romanticism, curiosity and freedom in a space completely disconnected from its spatial and urban environment. There are fragments of stories accumulated in multiple layers of time, haunted by its mysterious past and linked to the different militias and generations who came across the fair, with enduring traces of paint and ink revealing a counter-history to what was thought of as a dream. Those traces, the scope of this study, create an act in which the fair and its community were forged through destruction, mirroring its actual condition. This thesis proceeds in five sections. The first section is an introduction that defines my aim and objectives. The second reflects on three main points relating to the being of Oscar Niemeyer's Permanent International Fair in Tripoli: it's history, function and placelessness. The third section considers recent theoretical work associated with it's placelessness - the outof- place acts that are mainly those traces of the past (graffiti, throw-ups, and tags). The fourth section of this thesis offers a visual methodology and reflections. The fifth and final section seeks to connect theory and method, to discover how a place like Tripoli International Fair can be read as a process rather than as a final product.