.. various events to update the recent situation about ongoing events in this starting autumn season:
On thursday the german version of the ‘Atlas der Globalisierung’ (english: ‘Planet in Peril’) had been presented with the event of a quite lifely discussion including interesting participants like Dominique Vidal, Johan Galtung, … taz has a short article on the event with the very appropriate commmentary:

Walid Raad’s Atlas Group is shown in a major show since a week at Hamburger Bahnhof:

The Atlas Group was founded by Walid Raad (b. 1967 in Chbanieh/Lebanon) in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon, in particular the years of the civil war (1975-1990). The Archive set up by

The Atlas Group focuses on found and produced photographic, audiovisual, and written documents of everyday life in Lebanon. These include snapshots from the private albums of the (fictive) Lebanese historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri or the videotapes of Souheil Bachar, who together with five Americans (allegedly) was a hostage in Beirut in 1985 (Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31), 2000). Everyday experience of the civil war is ever present without being explicitly represented, such as in the series of engines which are found scattered throughout Beirut after the detonation of car bombs, or in Walid Raad’s own photographs of the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982 (We Decided To Let Them Say, “We Are Convinced,” Twice, 2002). Walid Raad’s works are characterized by an aura of the documentary while fracturing it at the same time. Because the authenticity of the written, pictorial, and audiovisual document is always queried, with The Atlas Group project Walid Raad is also continually posing the question how history – in particular one marked by the trauma of a civil war as in Lebanon – can be told and represented.

.. more to follow …