The Search for Power

On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighborhood, Tania El Khoury and her husband, the historian Ziad Abu-Rish, discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, El Khoury grew up with the understanding that the problem with the country’s electricity was rooted in this conflict. However, Abu-Rish recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled electricity outages across Beirut. The pair decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersections between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations that have shaped both. Their investigation reached as far back as the introduction of electricity to Beirut, before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. The documents they collected come from across Lebanon and beyond its borders, extracted from the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they pieced together is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage. The Search for Power presents a record of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s conversations, research, and findings in a performance and installation.