Container Series
Tripoli, Lebanon: A Queer Portrait of a Hometown
Raed El Rafei
About the work
This video installation casts a queer lens on Raed Rafei’s hometown, Tripoli, Lebanon, challenging depictions of the city as inherently homophobic. Through encounters with locals and poetic shots of its urban landscape, the work uncovers Tripoli’s overlooked queer textures through palimpsestic layers of culture and history, reimagining the city as a place of intimacy, complexity, and possibility. The work unfolds in the container across four looping screens, offering thirty-minute audio-visual fragments that visitors can encounter at their own rhythm. This non-linear, wandering mode, echoing the circular alleyways of Tripoli’s medieval core, invites audiences to sense the city’s concealed queerness through gestures, testimonies, and fleeting moments. Printouts of poetic essays about the city invite visitors to linger and further experience Tripoli through a queer lens.
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This project has grown from Raed Rafei’s sustained impulse to film moments in his hometown. As a diasporic queer filmmaker, born and raised in the city yet estranged from it, he was drawn to its disarming charm, even as it remains framed in the national imaginary as homophobic and aligned with radical Islamism. Filming during periodic returns from the United States became an exercise in reorientation and reclaiming space. Through these images, he sought alternatives and deviating routes through which queer bodies like his might navigate the city.
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His wanderings through Tripoli’s homosocial spaces became a search for queerness in affects, gestures, and glances, as moments slipping between the cracks of rigid heteronormative narratives. He attuned himself to sensory encounters: men embracing in crowded cafés during World Cup matches, a young man dancing by the beach, the intimate proximity of striking municipality workers, and candid conversations about love, revolution, and change. These scenes revealed generative negotiations between individual and collective, private and public, belonging and alienation. What transpires through the video installation is a multi-layered portrait of a city, with all its complexities, contradictions and richness.
An intimate film portrait of the artist’s hometown through a queer lens.
An invitation for visitors to meander in the city and experience it through a fragmentary, non-linear approach.
A window into Tripoli through a queer poetic lens.
