Khartoum / Beirut
“Aren’t maps just a silly joke that we agreed to believe?”
Safia Elhilluo / Limits – Lighter 3
This project tries to carry the basic themes that formed the memory of each city in addition to the basic themes in its present, and then carry it to the extension of other cities and create an approach (creative / human) so that we understand the city from the perspective of other cities, and the purpose of this is to create the reflection that we referred to Through purification and so that the operators and the technical tools we use do not get distracted, we will identify themes with a depth through which we can understand the social, economic and political intersections.
Why Khartoum – Beirut?
Khartoum was not a city of well-established modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, so it seemed as if there was another model that was more powerful and capable of forming knowledge and intellectual systems that were paradoxical in its social nature. Some Sudanese began to be sent to other cities for university education, so the American University of Beirut was a very important station. The first thinkers of the era of modernity appeared, as they were named in the political and social literature, such as Muawiyah Muhammad Nour (1901-1941). Nour received his education (AUB) for three years and obtained a license in literature. Nour also wrote a group of literary articles in a number of newspapers, representing Muawiyah’s experience in Beirut was an important station for Sudanese modernity, which did not stop, as he studied the symbols of the national movement, such as Ismail Al-Azhari, the first prime minister of Sudan, at the American University also in Beirut. In the same period when Muawiyah Nour was studying.
Also, during the booming period of Khartoum in the mid-sixties and seventies, the books printed in Dar Al-Jil and Al-Farabi affected the political and social awareness of the political elite, which created a kind of intellectual connection. On the modern history of Sudan (Sudan’s historical impasse and future prospects) in Beirut.
All this political and social imagination of the elite is inseparable from the scene of the two cities, so we will go deep into the features of Khartoum and Beirut, and we will take demolition as a common feature in order to try to understand Khartoum and Beirut on the same ruins that we can find in the history of the two cities.
This project is supported by Culture Resource’s program “Wijhat”.