Munira Khayyat

This project explores life ongoing in the longstanding warzone of South Lebanon, where the violence wrought and brought by ever-returning cycles of war has shaped the landscape and its dwellers. My project proposes the possibility of proliferating life under the cruelties of war, capitalist extraction, impending climactic collapse and the ruined worlds these have created and within which we must continue to somehow live. In this seasonally violent world, I peer past dramatic topography to explore more prosaic, continuous, long-term meshworks and alliances that vitally bind heterogeneous beings and elements thrown together within these violent formations – political-ecological alliances that enable, optimize and sustain resilient, resistant life-worlds that give shape to the living landscape as it is ethnographically encountered. My research is a fresh take on studies of violence and war, for instead of looking solely at destruction and devastation, I examine worlds that are created and thrive within the often-inescapable harsh realities imposed by such violent conditions on life. What I hope to show through my work on ecologies of survival in a landscape of war is that (resistant) life itself is often premised on violent structures or processes that seek to extinguish it.