Following the release of her critically-acclaimed debut LP Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels in March 2023, Lebanese artist Mayssa Jallad returns with a set of EU/UK tour dates (including shows in London, Berlin and Brussels), as well as a stunning new video directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ely Dagher.
You can watch the video below and read Mayssa’s notes on the historical/geopolitical context.
Apr 21 – Donau Festival, Krems, AT – tickets
Apr 24 – Hotel Olympik, Prague, CZ
Apr 26 – Sharpe Festival, Bratislava, SK – tickets
Apr 27 – Silent Green, Berlin, DE – tickets
May 1 – UCL, London, UK (workshop)
May 2 – Folklore Hoxton, London, UK – tickets
May 3 – Les Aralunaires, Arlon, BE – tickets
May 4 – Les Nuits Botanique, Brussels, BE – tickets
WATCH the video for “Holiday Inn (January to March)”
Written and directed by Ely Dagher, the video for Mayssa’s album track “Holiday Inn (January to March)” is a visually stunning work exploring the album’s theme of memory and decay. Archival images of a war-torn Beirut early in Lebanon’s Civil War are digitally processed into a series of fractured 3D models, through which we are slowly navigated. The results are eerily haunting, and resonate powerfully with current events.
According to Dagher, “I was looking for a visual language that could express the fragility and complexity of an elusive and broken memory – something fragmented and incomplete. Archive footage from the battles were given a new life and perspective to craft a collage that blends details from the vivid realism of the battles with the fluid capacity of memory. Bodies, buildings, feelings and violence fragmented.”
Mayssa writes that “Holiday Inn is an immense modernist high rise hotel with a revolving rooftop restaurant, overlooking the Mediterranean… It was inaugurated in 1974, a few months before the beginning of the battle of the hotels, in which it was a main protagonist, first invaded by the blues (right wing nationalists) and then the reds (left wing pro Palestinians). For 5 months, with 5 star hotel amenities, blue gunmen terrorized and controlled the city. During this period, two massacres occurred: on January 18, in Karantina, the blues killed 1,500 Muslims and Palestinians. On January 20th, in Damour, the reds killed 1,500 Christians. Spiraling into endless violence and retaliation.
The phenomenon of high rises in Beirut, these weapons of war that created the perfect conditions for urban warfare, is an often overlooked effect of the 1948 Nakba, when Israeli Occupying Forces expelled Palestinians and destabilized the Arab region. Wealthy Palestinians, Syrians and Iraqis invested their money in Lebanon to avoid the brunt of political and economic crises in their home countries. In parallel, Gulf countries that had struck oil around that period, also started investing in Beirut . A “Golden Era” of grandiose projects for the 1% was born, luxury hotels, nightclubs, towers, ignoring the ‘belt of misery’ being formed around the capital. A luxury so vulnerable, so easily destabilized that it was invaded 6 months after the civil war broke out, again, as an effect of the Nakba and the political division since the Palestinian Liberation Organization took post in Lebanon.
Today, these buildings exist as relics of the past, among new skyscrapers that threaten to repeat the same history over and over again. Are we remembering, or are we just reliving the past? We long to forget, and end up falling into the same traps of violence and false prosperity, over and over again.”
MARJAA: Listen/Order (Ruptured)
MARJAA: Listen/Order (Six of Swords)
Ruptured Music 