This archival installation explores the fragility and depth of meaning embedded in preserved remnants from film archives, with particular attention to pioneering works and lost films that were never completed. Rather than attempting to fully reconstruct these films, the work engages in an archaeological process of excavation, uncovering traces, gestures, and names that have been erased or buried, whether by chance or by design, within the folds of history.

Through close examination of these fragments, a tension emerges between the traces and their makers. What emerges is not only lost works, but individuals and practices that played a pivotal role in the development of cinema in the Middle East that have often been excluded from dominant historical narratives.

In this context, the archive becomes not merely a site of preservation but a space for reactivation and rearticulation. The work approaches archival materials as a means of restoring a fragmented biography, bringing together the life, practices, and imagination of a filmmaker whose existence now survives only through incomplete images, damaged reels, marginal notes, or scattered references.

These materially neglected elements are brought to light both physically, through the hands-on engagement with and treatment of the archival artifacts, and conceptually, by tracing the artistic, social, and political forces that shaped their production and obscured them.

In doing so, this archival installation seeks to bridge the narrative gaps surrounding these limited remnants, proposing the archive as a living space where biography, history, and loss intersect, and where the legacy of an erased filmmaker can be tentatively reassembled.

This archival installation is currently in development under the auspices of UMAM Documentation & Research, curated and researched by Ayman Nahle. It sheds light on filmmaker Youssef Fahdeh, inventor of the “LebanoScope” lens and an individual whose life and works allow for in-depth tracing of the film industry as well as political and social dynamics in Lebanon and the wider Middle East region.

Poster: Alfred Tarazi

This project was funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP).