INFRA-CATHARSIS: Libyan Space Revolutionised
by Sarri Elfaitouri
Post-revolution Benghazi has been craving form a new revolutionary civil space as the events of 2011 promised. However, soon after the presumed end of Gaddafi’s “central” totalitarian dictatorship, emerged many other marginal oppressive regimes that later radically dominated, practised by religious extremist and fundamentalist groups and military role. The city has gradually become only a silent witness to brutal conflicts and experiments of political and socio-religious power dynamics. Civil space has been narrowed down to everyday mundane and consumerist use. Revolutionary space in squares and streets was stripped away from its free potential to speak out truth, and got reduced to only being ceremonial for those who adhere to the oppressive authorities and their campaigns.
I remember vividly meanwhile I was working on this project with heating enthusiasm and hopes for social change and brutal disbelief in architecture, Benghazi had just got out of the civil war in 2018, with catastrophic destruction in the heart of the city, downtown, where I spent my childhood wandering joyfully with my mother and grandmother, who would walk me around its intimate narrow streets and spaces where now I only stop by to think and question still where all of this destruction really came from and what does it mean. INFRA-CATHARSIS was for me more than just a graduation project, it existentially wounded my confidence and hope in architecture as positive force that could transform society to the better as the modernist movement blindly claimed. I was driven by feelings of anger and sadness at times, and desperate nostalgia at other times, although, the dominant feeling that possessed me was an urgent desire to fight back to reclaim the city and revive it, as naive as it may sound, by any means necessary.
INFRA-CATHARSIS is a theoretical project that aims to revolutionize an autonomous living in present Libyan city through instrumentalizing architecture with socio-ideological programming to influence a new revolutionary movement, unlike that of 2011 which was led by failing political elites, this time through spatial mediation and spontaneous cultural mobilization starting from the streets of Benghazi and ambitiously spreading to other Libyan cities and countries around the world. An evolutionary curation of a second rebellion that would initiate from ground zero, the streets of the city, the boiling vessels of revolutionary blood. Architecture here was never about a dreamy utopia, but a dangerous experiment to synchronize urban space and infrastructure with social ambitions of liberation.
This project suggested an alternative model of thinking about architecture, urbanism, art, and social reform, where it starts as just infrastructure and rough space planned to be continued and built by Libyans, regionals, and internationals, on a span of 10–15 years. A revolutionary open call is triggered to host all the possible radicals, social justice warriors, alienated, marginalized, and minority groups to come to unite on this mission. A new heterotopic space is born. I called it “co-existentialism”, as an alternative to the flatness of mere co-existence. Since the problem as I saw it was not really to live together by passively respecting difference, but to live together AND think critically to oppose dominant power structures for a project of radical urban and cultural change.
The project remains to me an open archive, or rather, an open corpse for unceasing autopsies to investigate its inevitable death by impossibility, and to make sense of my current personal and Tajarrod’s work
Project date: 2017–2018
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