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Forced to leave West Beirut while civil war is tearing the country apart, a teenager moves with his mother and sister into a cramped bungalow at a seaside resort. In the suspended time of war, everything becomes unreal. The bungalow blocks, the beach, the swimming pools, the concrete … all of it an obsessive setting for a bitter paradise, deserted in winter and bursting with life in summer. In this ungraspable reality, friendship, escape, and the first stirrings of desire remain possible. Against a backdrop of violence – latent at first, then omnipresent – young bodies test their limits and take shape. Encompassing war and everyday life, adolescent lucidity and naïveté, Chant balnéaire (Seaside song; Allia, 2023) is a collage of sensations that immerses us in the awakening of a body and a language, fashioned both by exile and the tragedy of fratricidal conflict.

CURE director Markus Messling will read excerpts from his latest book, Kulturtod und Reparation: Der Fall Champollion (Cultural death and reparation: the case of Champollion), at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University of Berlin. The reading will be followed by a discussion bringing together perspectives from literary and cultural studies, art history, and European ethnology. The discussion will focus on the entanglements between the history of knowledge and colonial violence, forms of cultural death, and reparation as a contemporary cultural and social practice.