![]() ![]() Even if the club is a memorial to the dead and a chilling parody of amnesiac Lebanese frivolity, its most cruel joke is ultimately on the claims of public memorials to speak to collective memory in general, especially in a place where the civil war never reached any formal conclusion. The site of the club is also the site of a refugee camp that saw a massacre of its Palestinian, Kurdish, and Southern Lebanese inhabitants at the hands of local Christian militias in the late 1970s. In addition to being a great club, it is also well known for its macabre design: built a decade after the end of more than fifteen years of constant fighting in Lebanon, the building is set completely underground and is reminiscent of a crypt. In Beirut there is a nightclub called B 018 that architect Bernard Khouri designed in the late 1990s. Or do these communities actually contain some real claim to a historical line that was violently interrupted by economic and geopolitical shifts that became most pronounced in the 1990s? Have we simply gotten so high on a period of information fever and lateral planetary spread that we simply forgot about entire swaths of the globe that have basically been on another wavelength the entire time? And we start to wonder whether these original communities are new synthetic fabrications concocted by the limits of communication and exchange, by the failed promises of a liberal democracy or a thriving economy that does not reach people who thought they were entitled to it, and who thus start to look elsewhere. They tell us that some things don’t change and they ask us to think about how original communities are constituted. We are increasingly faced with premodern foundation myths coming from right-wing propaganda and grassroots movements alike. E-flux journal iPad edition is now available.
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