by Johanna Siegler, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Oct. 10, 2025
The low metallic thrum of machinery drifts over from the neighboring industrial yard as the waning, saturated hours of late summer seep in through the wide windows. Ali El-Darsa’s Neukölln studio is spare and luminous, pared to essentials, deliberate and generous with air. A long ribbon of shallow frames lines the wall, carrying images of a banknote, a watch, a torn devotional icon and a coil of blue thread, each isolated like a specimen on glass. At the center, a bouquet of flowers rises above the tables, stems and petals grasping upward like lines of paint flung into the air. “I don’t even have a sofa, on purpose” he says, half-apologetically grinning, his voice carrying a playful lift. He tells us that he had only moved in earlier this year. “I feel like I’m just starting to orient myself here,” he adds. “It takes me time to understand how light and sound work in a space.”
Born in Beirut and raised between Lebanon and Canada, El-Darsa arrived in Montreal at 17, where, as he says, he came of age–and came out. Since 2015, he has lived in Berlin, a city that resonates on a personal as much as an artistic level. His father, who had lived in West Berlin during the 1970s and 80s, recounted the city to his children as a haven of freedom, full of music and possibility. “I always saw Berlin as this Disneyland in my imaginary,” El-Darsa recalls. “It was where my father enjoyed the Disco-era of West Berlin and its nightlife. The photos from that time present a queer figure. It was the opposite of the place I grew up in.” Arriving in Berlin, however, revealed a more fractured reality. “I started to experience racism, systematic exclusions,” he reflects. How, then, did his father experience the 1970s as paradise? Was that Berlin a delusion, or was a second self briefly possible here? These persistent questions became the hinge of a feature-length film El-Darsa has been working on for the past four years. Moving between the city’s unresolved East/West seams and Beirut’s own partitions to see how each scripts a life, the project is an ambitious investigation into familial memory, intergenerational displacement and the overlapping psychic geographies of the two capitals. El-Darsa, here, occupies a double role between son and filmmaker, aware that, at times, the lens can feel like a trap. “I want to understand who he was. Not as my father only but also as a character, trying to understand that figure from the departure point.”
The gesture of using image and sound to excavate stratified absences extends across El-Darsa’s practice. At his desk, he opens a digital map of Beirut and, with the cursor, traces its neighborhoods. He zooms to the southwest, recalling the walk from his childhood home toward school. A thin canal, running along that route, has long disappeared beneath infill and pavement. “That river,” as people only remember when prompted, is now nowhere to be seen: “the armed Shia political party, Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed proxy, has worked on erasing its presence from the collective memory of the indigenous people, such as my parents.” He pans to the coast: a highway laid along the shoreline by the airport now functions like a berm, cutting public access. The red sand dunes his father once crossed to go swim in the Mediterranean, a few minutes from his home in Borj El Barajenh, are long gone and have been fenced off by a checkpoint, one of the few border crossings leading into Borj El Barajneh. The direct road that once linked the southern belt to downtown is now gone, too, and former agrarian plots that supplied the city read as a dense, subdivided mosaic. The term “Dahiyeh” (from Arabic al-ḍāḥiya, “the suburb/outskirts,” colloquially the southern suburbs of Beirut) was soon consolidated into a monolithic, political proxy. “Western media played into that a lot,” he says, and in the studio, next to stacked volumes by Samir Kassir, Guadalupe Nettel and Edward Said, newspaper clippings echo the shorthand.
Earlier, his research into his father’s migration to East Berlin, before seeking refuge in West Berlin, led El-Darsa to the first muslim cemetery in the city, Columbiadamm Friedhof, in Neukölln, which later took form in ‘Still Fields’ (2021 with writer Elias Kosanke-ongoing), a site-specific sound installation in three parts, available as an audio walk through the cemetery. In our conversation, he links it to a mosque on the grounds owned by Turkey, to World War II burials and to the site of the “Hererostein”–a memorial that honors German perpetrators of colonial violence against the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia–and notes that some perpetrators of the Armenian genocide found refuge in Berlin and are also buried in the mosque’s courtyard. In his telling, these layers tie Ottoman-German entanglements to German colonial and genocidal histories within a single site. ‘Still Fields’ invites participants to enter the cemetery with headphones, guided by GPS bubbles to specific sites and monuments. “It forces you to be there physically,” he explains. For the artist, the cemetery embodies Berlin’s selective memory culture, where certain histories are monumentalized, others erased or glossed over. “When you ask the caretakers about these monuments, they tell you: ‘This is just what it is,’ providing no answers.” The omission reads as political.
Between 2022 and 2023, he filmed ‘The Image Remains the Same’ between Los Angeles and the Lebanese port city of Tripoli. During a residency at Villa Aurora, the former home of exiled German-Jewish writers in the Pacific Palisades, El-Darsa found himself gazing at the Pacific Ocean–a sight that was almost “too beautiful, too perfect”–while receiving news of his people drowning in the Mediterranean. The only honest addendum was simple. Why be here at all? The dissonance, he adds, “felt like dissociation.” The resulting film collages sites and textures, superimposing rippling waves, palm trees and coastlines so that the distinctions between California and Lebanon dissolve almost entirely. At times, Tripoli becomes Los Angeles, the semblance broken only by the heavy voice of a taxi driver carried on the wash of the tide. “I wanted to create a sense of disorientation, because that was my experience in LA,” he explains. Palm trees, imported to California as a symbol of invented paradise, double as emblems of displacement and a register of home, Lebanon. They point to his broader preoccupation with fabricated idylls, with the simulacral veneer by which places sell themselves. The work also implicates questions of privilege: “It’s not just about money or class,” El-Darsa says. “It’s about opportunity, religion, sect, geography. Tripoli has always been segregated, denied equal opportunities.”
This recurring device of making one city legible through another is a method that plays dissonances and connectors in equal measure: “I always find myself understanding Beirut through Berlin, and Berlin through Beirut,” he reflects. What becomes unmistakable as El-Darsa speaks to us about his endeavors, is that he treats memory less as a miscellany of images than as a virtual reservoir that can be actualized in the present, understanding the virtual not as “unreal,” but a past that becomes sensible when a gesture or site calls it up. Amnesia, conversely, functions less as forgetting than as a set of routines and representations that keep certain pasts from being remembered. His works, across their manifold mediums, actualize these latent strata and make them operative again in our perception.
For all the gravity of his materials, El-Darsa speaks with precision and humor. He jokes about buying “every piece of outdoor gear” for his forthcoming residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, about banning naps in the studio as a matter of policy. Beneath this levity lies palpable rigor. “I sometimes don’t enjoy it,” he admits. “The research is heavy, emotional. But once I start, I need to get to the answer.” The answer, as he understands it, is never a concrete revelation so much as a workable form for complexity and a way to stage materials so they do not cancel each other out. He leaves Berlin soon, first for Beirut, then Stuttgart. Yet, if there is a geography the work advances, it is not the old opposition of origin versus arrival, but the back-and-forth that insists on keeping memory in play, even against the deep-rooted habits of forgetting.
