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With Covid-19 ravaging populations and the World trying to come to terms with lockdown reality, it seems an appropriate moment to reactivate this Platform-7 project from 2013 exploring the trauma that follows on from a sudden shocking change in circumstance.
 Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ...this would be the first year that I was not present in at the events in London; I would be undertaking a research to the Middle East, and which on 11th of November would see me in Beirut, Lebanon, researching contemporary music... |  Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ... Everyone I met had some experience of the war. Regardless of whether they had been present or not, the repeated wars of the region have impacted upon everyone here in some way... |  Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ...in a country that has only recently encountered a war whose focused attentions were once again on the densely populated cities, these experiences are not only within living memory, but also within the memory of the youth... |
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 Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ... the hotchpotch chaotic city infrastructure is just one aspect of how these recurring issues impact the city. As one local pointed out – between issues with official city authorities, and the chance of another war, city planning is not a massive priority. Everything is somehow makeshift, because certainty is in short supply... |  Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ...Around his apartment were examples of various munitions that he and his team (brothers and sisters as he referred to them) had disposed. The variety was astonishing: most were no larger than a pencil case (which he actually used several of them as) ... |  Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ... cluster bombs, these were a little smaller than a tennis ball, and with their patterned surfaces (made to make the fragmentation on explosion easier) looked like elegant children’s toys, a reason why when they don’t explode on impact that children are one of their main victims... |
 Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ...The shocking awareness for me came in the realisation of how warfare has developed since the V-rockets were hitting the UK. Cluster bombs, though banned from use in civilian populated areas continue to be used extensively, ... |  Dispatch from BeirutDaniel Merrill ...For me this was the fourth consecutive year of participating in Platform-7’s events that take place on November 11th... this annually shifting and morphing event has become something of a tradition. One that for me takes all the confusion, mixed feeling and reflection that Remembrance Day brings and intensifies it somehow, a ritual that forces me to examine both my own feelings about the implications of war, and my own continually shifting place in this world. |
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Images & Copyright: Daniel Merrill
11th November 2013
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