La resistenza culturale nel Libano contemporaneo. Le sfide di artiste locali e profughe

Abstract

Based on interviews conducted during 2018, this article examines the challenges that Lebanese citizen, Palestinian and Syrian refugee “culture-makers” – primarily artists – need to face in the Lebanese context, and how such challenges differ from or overlap with one another. After providing an overview of Lebanese political history and how, within it, "cultural resistance" emerges in a multifaceted way, the authors identify areas of encounter and of potential solidarity between groups. The article discusses the so-called "humanitarianization" of funding, through which especially the artistic projects that can serve as instruments of political neutrality and of "medicalization" of post-war traumas are supported. This phenomenon generates in part a de-politicization and aestheticization of art, thus demobilizing the political verve behind cultural work and, at the same time, linking the material survival of such cultural spaces to cyclical humanitarian crises.

Keywords

• Lebanon
• forced migration
• art
• resistance
• culture