We were part of a group of artists invited by T.A.P (Temporary Art Platform) and the local municipality of Meziara to find alternatives and solutions for an industrial site—that would soon be relocated—near the village, an enclave within the enclave, surrounded by an oak and pine forest. The brief required new development ideas with social and environmental goals.

The Visit is a video piece that extends beyond the identified industrial site and is comprised of research about the unique urban typology of Meziara itself. The village  is one of the wealthiest communities in Lebanon, largely dependent on offshore investments.  It is empty for most of the year, except for the summer months, when its diaspora population returns for the holidays. In The Visit we propose a speculative future scenario for the regeneration site proposed by the local governors.

We conceptualized the Lebanese mountain village of Meziara as the suburb of an invisible city, which owes its present shape to the remittances of villagers that migrated to Brazil, Benin, and Nigeria over the past century. Its form is shaped in this cross-national movement – configured precisely through the transnational set of networks rather than the built fabric of the village itself.   The cord – the invisible infrastructure of global financial and telecommunication flows, and migratory routes - that connects it with Lebanon and other global destinations, is what keeps Meziara alive; Meziara exists as the externality but also the objective of social and capital flows.

Understanding this dependency both in terms of humans (who repopulate the village every summer) but also in terms of capital (for they directly finance not only their luxurious holiday homes, but also the infrastructure of roads, water, religious and leisure facilities that keeps the village alive), we proposed a future vision for the industrial site was to propose a place where ‘Meziarians of the World’ could re-connect, based on the notion that as long as the connectivity between Meziara and its ‘diaspora’ in different urban destinations worldwide is maintained, Meziara will exist.