Representing infrastructural violence: artistic engagements with Lebanon’s waste crisis

This chapter approaches the question of how infrastructural violence operates through the lens of visual artistic engagements with waste in Lebanon. Through the work of three Lebanese artists, it makes three main points. First, the trajectories of harm emanating from infrastructural violence are complex and thus difficult to trace. Second, while often examined from a top-down or planning view, the violence of infrastructure works through the body, through feelings and affect. This is not incidental but a core quality of infrastructures’ violent potential. Third, the violence of infrastructure operates on a range of timescales. Artistic engagements are able to overcome some of the representational challenges of infrastructural violence by addressing these head on. Their poetic licence allows them to engage with different forms of knowledge production, highlighting toxic uncertainty, make linkages between a range of spatial and temporal scales, and envision alternative futures. This reflection on how the circulations of waste in the city are represented and understood outside traditional scientific or social science contexts thus allows us to unpack key aspects of the way in which infrastructural violence operates.