Filmed during the total collapse of the Lebanese energy infrastructure and subsequent long-term blackout in 2021, Maatouk produced a single traveling sequence to capture the remaining flickering lights in Beirut. The work that transpired is a tableau that uses sections from the footage taken that night. Darkness becomes the paste that holds together all the fragmented parts of the city, mirroring the way people were forced to approach the effects of the collapse at the time, in a dispersed, individual manner.

This movie is part of the Floating Lights series which is an ongoing cartographic video exercise that, since the total electricity blackout in 2021, aims to capture the experience of the political, economic, and infrastructural collapse in Lebanon. As the informal, private economies and infrastructures rapidly established throughout Beirut rapidly change in response to the collapse, every year, the artist captures a sequence while driving around the city at night. With every new sequence, the artist re-examines the different political and aesthetic paradigms of collapse, each of which requires a specific editing approach.

Maissa Maatouk (b. 1992, Beirut) is an artist living and working in Beirut. She graduated with degrees in product and global design from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), Beirut (BA, 2014; MA, 2017). Her recent projects tackle perception during the recent Lebanese collapse. She was a 2019–2020 fellow in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut and has been a resident at the Junge Akademie (Akademie der Künste) (2022), Saradar Foundation (2023), and Akademie Schloss Solitude (2023). She has shown her work in Lebanon, USA, Germany, Austria, and France. Her most recent video work, Floating Lights, was part of the exhibition Foreshadows, curated by Reem Shadid at the Beirut Art Center (2024).