Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

The adventure of the Lebanese Rocket Society began, in the early sixties, at Haigazian University, a young Armenian University in Beirut, where a group of students, led by a professor of mathematics, Manoug Manougian, set up the Lebanese Rocket Society to create and launch rockets for space study and exploration. They produced the first rocket of the region. The project had no military character and was aimed at promoting science and research.
The adventure, which appears nowadays rather unbelievable and surrealistic, was nevertheless a serious one. Between 1960 and 1967, at the time of the Space Race and revolutionary ideas more than ten solid fuel Cedar rockets were launched. The launchings gave rise to celebrations. To commemorate the 21st anniversary of Lebanon’s independence, a set of stamps representing the Cedar IV rocket was even issued. The Arab defeat of 1967 put an end to the initiative.
The documents, photos and mainly films relating to the space project have almost disappeared.
This unusual and heroic adventure, which had made the front pages of the press, is nowadays forgotten. It appears like an anecdote in the course of history, a story kept secret.
The project investigates the apparent absence of the Lebanese space program from our personal and collective memory, shedding light on our perceptions of the past and present and our imagination of the future, exploring the notion of a collective dream. The project enables us also to consider the mythologies and historic events of those years: pan-Arabism and its decline after the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967, a moment which confused our societies, our parents generation, and which transformed deeply the Arab world and, first and foremost, images of ourselves.
Documents and archives as well as reconstitutions and art installations attempt to question this story and the ideas of reenactment, reconstitution and restaged in the present time.