eople of similar professions, age groups and families often compare their ability to recall past events, minor details or distant faces. It is a common exercise in measuring the capacity of the hard drives of their brains. But more than a test of the power of an organ or muscle, memory is about an individual’s endurance – a form of resistance against erasure caused by passing years, chemical changes, internal factors or societal pressures. These pressures may lead them to avoid recalling incidents that are unacceptable or unappreciated by their peers, friends or relatives. One could include another important entity in that last category.

Milan Kundera, in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, describes how a state can operate to obliterate traces of unjust acts; erase the identities of disgraced members of a community; or suppress news of prohibited activities – to sculpt a perfect past for the sake of an idealised present. In such situations, a creative individual faces two choices: either to comply with authority and follow the official line, or to resist the oppression of amnesia through stories, pictures, buildings, songs, plays, films or dance.

Beyond the human domain, other elements of nature also store memory in visible, chemical, biological or genetic forms. The computer one uses, for example, becomes an archive of how the fingers interact with specific keys, leaving some fully intact while others are partially smudged. We transfer traces of our presence into the objects we touch, cross, consume, use and manipulate.

If, apart from individuals, entities such as nation-states, political institutions, power structures, and corporate bodies alter their surroundings, nature still maintains a record of their misdeeds. It keeps a chronicle of cruelties that might otherwise dissolve in the fog of forgetfulness.

The Lebanese Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (Intelligens: Natural, Artificial, Collective) offers an alternative version of the world. A substitute, based on fact, makes reality solid, unavoidable and – borrowing the words of JM Coetzee – “urgent, intriguing, worth being faced in depth.” The Pavilion, titled The Land Remembers, is curated by the Collective for Architecture Lebanon, a non-profit organisation co-founded in 2019 by Shereen Doummar, Edouard Souhaid, Elias Tamer and Lynn Chamoun.

Intriguingly, the CAL, registered with Lebanon’s Ministry of Interior, has built its project around a fictional government body: The Ministry of Land Intelligens. In doing so, it blends two realities – one bureaucratic, the other sensory – into a physical synthesis that guides our imagination across various homelands: Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other afflicted territories around the globe.

Lebanon is a country of 38 million people, once a leader of the Arab world in education, literature, art, music and other cultural domains. Yet for several decades, it has faced violence, civil war and foreign invasion. The recent sequence of devastating events – especially in the aftermath of October 2023 – has been covered by international media, but only at the margins. These reports are often reduced to data: number of deaths, lengths of attacks and dimensions of sites struck by missiles or bombs.

To a viewer lounging in a living room, such a human catastrophe is thus flattened into digits, soon forgotten by the public, as it has already faded from many news channels.

Except in regions routinely targeted by Israeli atrocities, such as Lebanon, the world often forgets. The Lebanese Pavilion at the Biennale fabricates an imaginary structure to confront harsh realities. Its fictional Ministry of Land Intelligens records and represents the details of Israeli hostilities, displayed across diverse formats. Despite the variations in medium and scale, each piece evokes the memory of land – its suffering, resilience and erasure.

The land that has sustained life for millennia is now poisoned – its soil and water contaminated by heavy metals, incendiary weapons and debris.

The curators note that Lebanon is “on the brink of losing its very essence due to decades of war, unchecked urbanisation and political instability.” Their collaborative project at the Biennale offers examples, facsimiles and statistics that allow visitors to recognise a land where “environmental degradation has reached catastrophic levels, accelerated by warfare and the deliberate destruction of nature. Land that has sustained life for millennia is now poisoned – its soil and water contaminated by heavy metals, incendiary weapons, debris and the deliberate, targeted destruction of agricultural fields and groves.”

These shifts in the natural order render land barren, uninhabitable and unwelcoming, resulting in mass migration, social disruption and cultural devastation. In the recent Middle East conflict, Israeli Defence Forces have not only targeted civilians and residential infrastructure but have also poisoned ecosystems. “For example, in 2024, the increased use of white phosphorus devastated vast stretches of land, leaving behind a toxic legacy that may never be reversed.”

The systematic erasure of Lebanon’s ecology, the Pavilion argues, is not merely an environmental crisis – it is an existential threat.

The pavilion, rather than focusing on futuristic technologies or speculative meta-verses, is grounded in immediate and brutal realities. It poses an urgent question: how can a devastated stretch of land be healed for future generations – generations that might one day live in peace and harmony?

To explore this, the curators have drawn on two elemental symbols from their cultural and ecological heritage: earth and wheat. Both represent the ancient history of food domestication, and both signify cycles of birth and renewal. Each year, the crop is cut and collected, the field is ploughed and new seeds are sown for the next season. Soil and seed thus serve as both physical specimens and symbolic substitutes for this process of metamorphosis.

At the heart of the Lebanese Pavilion, visitors encounter rows of soil bricks embedded with wheat seeds. Some are already sprouting; others yield pale, delicate green stems. The curators anticipate that the wheat will continue to grow throughout the six-month duration of the Biennale.

“These bricks are laid out in the shape of a cross, dividing the space into four areas – one for each department of the fictional ministry.”

The first, The Department of Ecocide Reports, archives the wounds of the land and traces environmental destruction. The second, The Department of Counter-Mapping, redefines the narrative of the land’s condition by uncovering erased landscapes. The third, The Department of Endemic Species, ensures that “the DNA of the land endures, adapts and regenerates beyond cycles of exploitation.” The final section, The Department of Strategic Healing, develops strategies for ecological restoration and repairing damaged ecosystems.

The most impressive aspect of the Lebanese Pavilion is the delicate thread it weaves between fact and fiction – a line that is difficult to define or cross. With an awareness of the country’s current condition, visitors can recognise the data on display mapping Israel’s violence through air and ground strikes on this biblical land. The installation highlights targeted areas, including homes, trees and water sources. Suspended above the cross-shaped installation are layers of translucent sheets bearing impressions of endangered trees. It is worth noting that no country may feel the importance of its ecosystem and natural balance more keenly than Lebanon, whose national flag features the cedar tree.

The curatorial team has included endangered seeds, on loan from a Lebanese government department, housed in small boxes alongside drawings and prints. At a time when Israel is targeting water streams, green fields and olive groves, seeking to disrupt the future of this small nation, the question arises: what is the role of creative individuals? If Theodor W Adorno once declared, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” can there be art, architecture or installation after the present genocide in the Middle East? It is an unanswerable question – unless the response lies not in creating an object, but in taking a stand. In this case, it is the act of transforming an exhibition space at a prestigious international venue into what the curators of the Lebanese Pavilion describe as “a place that confronts visitors with the stark reality of the intentional devastation of the natural environment.”

19th Architecture Biennale in Venice is being held from May 10 to September 14, 2025.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com