status: Architectural competition - Finalist
location: Venice, Italy
team: Arch. Toufic Rifai (Director), Prof. Richard Ingersoll, Arch. Eugenia Bolla , Artist Mazen Rifai, Arch. Frederik Mads Svedsen.

In these unprecedented moments in Lebanon’s history, where the country is facing major challenges, our proposal has been shortlisted in the competition for curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2020 - How will we live together?

Refugee Roulette is a concept for the Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale that proposes to engage visitors to think creatively about the refugee situation. The plight of asylum-seekers can be found throughout the world; the displacement of people through wars, politics, environmental disasters, and discrimination has become a global phenomenon that doubled in the past decade to roughly 70 million. And, especially due to the effects of the climate crisis, is expected by UN agencies to increase incrementally.

Lebanon, due to its history of refugee settlements, can offer useful insights into the legal, social, urban, and architectural nature of this supposedly transitory manner of "living together".

The goal of the pavilion is to demonstrate how, despite the hopeless situation, in which people tend not to have rights, education, work, or even identity creativity can still emerge and can be seen as a life strategy. The desired effect is to create a relationship between individuals.

The installation we propose for the Refugees’ Pavilion will be primarily made of the same canvas used for for refugee tents, shaped into panels, stretched on metal frames. Instead of forming a classic four-sided space with a pitched roof, the panels, each set on a swivel, will rotate mechanically into three different configurations.

Refugee Roulette will be an interactive installation. At each end of the pavilion there will be a roulette wheel, where a croupier will set a ball spinning in the wheel for each player. When the ball lands on a number it triggers the projection of an image of a face of a refugee and a name. The player is then issued a card with the name, age, location, occupation of the chosen refugee, plus a QR code that when opened will reveal that person’s biography and clips to learn how they relate to creative responses in the refugee situation. The player thus will discover by chance about a creative individual, just as most refugees are destined by chance to the camps. The desired effect is to create a relationship between individuals, to instill in the player a certain responsibility to learn more about life in the settlements, the creative factors, and perhaps construct a stronger opinion about the future.

"We intend to raise consciousness about a challenge that Lebanon is facing today, and that most of the world either is currently encountering or will soon have a similar situation. To instill in the visitor a certain responsibility to learn that tomorrow the whole world could be Lebanon." - Rifai at the conference of the shortlisted participants.