Between Home and the Highway

Marcelle El Achkar

Marcelle highlights three elements in her poster that illustrate how she experienced the 2019 protests: her home, the media, and the streets. Marcelle’s home is in the mountain village of Beit Chabab, nearly 30 kilometres north of Beirut. Marcelle described how being at home, away from the central areas of protests in the capital, meant at first she did not pay significant attention to them. It was through both traditional and social media she followed how these protests escalated. Marcelle did not go to Beirut but instead to Zouq, the highway on the coast that had emerged as an important protest space. Marcelle remarks on how different it was to experience the protest first hand in contrast to what she had witnessed on TV.

1
The 17 October marks the date of the first protests in 2019. Marcelle draws her house that she connects to the media that mediated her initial experience of the protests. The media screen has written on it Beirut, Tripoli and Saida in Arabic.
2
Al-Zouq, written in Arabic, is the highway in which protesters gathered. It was here that Marcelle experienced the October 2019 protests directly and where she participated in them. Sea Sweat references a pastry shop that protesters gathered in front of.
3
The nearest protest to Marcelle’s home was Mazraat Yachoua (مزرعة يشوع) where rumors circulated of attacks by certain political groups, injuring women and children. It was, Marcelle’s says, rumours like this that kept her away from the protests initially but as the excitement and momentum of the revolt built, she decided to join them.