Birdless Sky
Laetitia Hakim & Tarek Haddad [duo]
2022-ongoing
Birdless Sky is based on John Conway’s zero-player 1970 “game of life”. It draws from the unpredictable and indeterminable evolution of the base image fed into the program to reflect on the post-collapse morphing of the social fabric in Lebanon.
The entropic evolution of the image and its dissolving into an unrecognizable map of dots echoes notions of dispersion and disintegration, characteristic of the recent past years. It draws on a future that’s out of control and a present marked by distance, separation, and loss, when masses of friends and family emigrated from Lebanon to flee from the instability caused by the economic collapse.
The coldness and rigidity of the approach are met by a poetic excerpt from a conversation between the artists discussing the fact that yet another friend was leaving for good. The piece became a preliminary work for an ongoing and upcoming seminal project on the quantification and perpetuity of loss.
Birdless sky was published in Ambit Magazine #248 [the war issue] co-edited with Dongola Limited Editions, in collaboration with the catapult program of British Council Lebanon.
https://dongola.com/projects/ambit-x-dongola/