Life Stories from Bar Elias - video produced as part of research co-conducted by DPU's Camillo Boano

The video documentary is part of a research collaboration between the RELIEF centre and CatalyticAction. It is a visual representation of the work done in Bar Elias by lead researchers including DPU’s Prof. Camillo Boano with Joana Dabaj (CatalyticAction) and Prof. Howayda Al-Harithy (American University of Beirut).

As the lockdown started because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘Life Stories from Bar Elias’ video documentary was ready to be shared. The team is thinking of the people in Bar Elias during these hard times, this video of them sharing their life stories brought them closer. With this global uncertainty, it is important to reflect on the meaning of home across the different contexts and as researchers and designers to respond accordingly.

This film is part of a film series that aims to tell the life stories of people from the field, giving insights to the research conducted by the RELIEF centre and engaging the audience to want to learn more and get in touch with the researchers. 

The research looks at the practice of inhabiting and the making of an urban territory of Bar Elias. It focuses on Bar Elias’s ‘renewed urban grammar’ to use Bhan’s words (2017), where diverse community groups are living in one of the most vulnerable localities, where the ratio of refugees to deprived Lebanese is at least three to one or more (UNHCR, 2015) and highlighting a sort of becoming urban embracing the sensorium of the unfinished, the exceptional, the informal and the role of financial transactions. Based on a recent investigation, as part of a four years research project, the video aims to reflect on the becoming-urban of Bar Elias in its plurality where difference co-inhabit, where living together is not a choice but a destiny in which bodies move, dance, discard, coexist, in narrow spaces bound by the material limits of the city.
 

The video documentary is directed by Fabio Petronilli, produced by Catalytic Action and funded by The Relief Centre.