For decades, Lebanon’s captivating natural environment – from its verdant forests, lush mountain valleys and sandy beaches – has been collateral damage due to war, political instability and unregulated urbanisation.
The recent invasion and heavy shelling by Israel has resulted in more urban and environmental destruction.
At this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, which runs from May 10 to November 23, the National Pavilion of Lebanon hopes to rethink the approach to architecture and rebuilding, by making the healing of the land – deeply rooted in Lebanon’s identity, livelihood, history and well-being – an essential part of the recovery.
To be created by Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL), co-curated by Edouard Souhaid, Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer and Lynn Chamoun, The Land Remembers at Arsenale responds to the biennale’s overarching theme Intelligens: Natural, Collective, Artificial by Carlo Ratti. In this instance, it's about tapping into the intelligence of the land, which is able to regenerate overtime, and the ancient methods used by the land’s custodians.
“Architects need to take a more active role in environmental preservation and post-conflict regeneration, so the pavilion addresses ecocide as an urgent crisis, and it's not merely an exhibition,” Doummar tells The National.
“It's going to be a call for action, confronting the visitors with the reality of ecocide and inviting them to participate in reshaping the future of that environment, through petitions for policy changes.
“As architects, the instinct would be to rebuild right straight away after a conflict, but before we can seek to rebuild, we need to go beyond that, and we need to prioritise the healing of the natural environment first.
“There’s the poisoning of the land via the contamination of soil and water, from heavy metals in the missiles and white phosphorus debris.
“There’s all the debris from the destruction of the urban environment, which affects the natural environment, and the deliberate destruction of agricultural fields and olive groves.
“We're not negating that the urban environment was destroyed either, but we're looking at the intersection between that and the natural environment, which led to the displacement of entire communities.
“When you destroy somebody's agricultural land, you destroy their livelihood. You're purposely destroying their reason to return. It's easy to rebuild a house. It's harder to heal a land that has been poisoned.”
The pavilion assembles documentation of the destruction, exploration of centuries-old agricultural techniques, extensive mapping and potential strategies for land recovery, from a host of researchers, architects and cultural practitioners.
Assembled as a fictional ministry of activism, striving to enact change and encourage architects to take a more political and social role, the pavilion will be split into four ‘departments.’
The first will showcase reports and evidence of intentional destruction, from images and video to sound mapping, and the second is dedicated to charting the changes to the environment through mapping.
The third department will focus on endemic species, preservation work and biodiversity conservation, looking at initiatives that are safeguarding the DNA of the land.
The final department will look at strategies to address the problems and alternative solutions for land rehabilitation, such as biomimicry, reforestation and bioremediation – low-tech methods, some of which have been practised locally for generations, passed down through families.
At the centre of the pavilion, the team will build a structure from compacted soil bricks with wheat seeds embedded. Over the course of the six months the bricks will sprout, symbolising nature's ability to regenerate and hope for the future.
“We chose wheat to anchor the historical significance of Lebanon's natural environment,” Doummar says. “One of the reasons why the natural environment has been targeted so deliberately is to erase that historical significance and relationship with the land.
“Many don’t know, but Lebanon is actually the birthplace of the DNA of wheat. Any type of wheat you see today is a variant of the first grains to have been domesticated for reproduction in the Bekaa Valley 10,000 years ago.
“The most consumed food in the world today, contains DNA that comes from Lebanon. It felt right to have this be the symbol of Lebanon’s special relationship with its environment, which has thrived for so many millennia, and that is in recent times being so deliberately targeted.
“It's a very tactile space. We also have sound elements that are like a mix of the sound of the drones that were flying over Lebanon and the buzzing of the bees, which uncannily sound quite similar, but one represents the destruction, and the other represents the healing of nature.”
A publication is also being produced alongside the exhibition, collecting the research and strategies explored during the forming of the pavilion, to act as an archive that will be built on through a website, long after the end of the biennale.
“The natural environment holds not only the memory of the land to regenerate, but vital resources that we as architects need to safeguard,” Doummar adds. “And in order to do that, we need to redefine our relationship with the land. We just need to help it to preserve itself and remember how to heal.”
Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025 runs from May 10 to November 23
