Concept
The work takes a single building block from the ruins of Deir El Kalaa, Lebanon, and treats it as a unit of history rather than a fragment of ruin. The block marks a beginning and an end at once, the beginning of a wall, the end of an empire, a small physical unit standing in for a much larger story: that of a place, a land, and its accumulated history. Quarried from a mountain that once lay under an ocean, the stone was carried to this site to support the structures around it and, in doing so, became a witness across the site's past, its present, and its future. Its materiality locks it in place: its weight, proportions, and surfaces belong to this particular site, and it is meant to remain there, deep-seated and protected within the ruins.
Execution
Working with artisan Nohad El Daher, we produced a clone of the original block in resin, replicating its surfaces, textures, and lithophytes, and borrowing the erosion and chisel marks that shaped the source stone over time. The resin block is a ghost of the original stone rendered in a material of the present; not a copy in the sense of a forgery, but an original of its own moment, positioned to become an archaeological artefact of the future in the way the source block already is one of the past. This work was created in collaboration with architect and design Roula Salamoun.
