When the Zionist movement published the “Visit Palestine” poster in 1936 it was part of propaganda to recreate a myth of the promised land to encourage the Jewish of the world to immigrate to Palestine. It was promoting an image of Palestine as an empty land, “A land without a people for a people without a land”, they wanted to convince the world that Palestine was uninhabited, denying the existence of an urban Palestine and also denying a Palestinian culture, in a way effacing any traces of civil Palestinian society and selling the idea that Arabs are nomads.

The POM-conference addresses the politics of the machines and the inescapable technological structures, as well as infrastructures of artistic production in-between human and non-human agency with critical and constructive perspectives. Where and when do experimental and artistic practices work beyond the human: machine and human: non-human dualisms towards biological, hybrid, cybernetic, vibrant, uncanny, overly material, darkly ecological and critical machines? 

To unfamiliarize the familiar in a comprehensible approach of a city as illogical as Beirut, certainly is a step beyond mass production of false iconography and nostalgic history. Beirut is mon amour, a beating heart of multidisciplinary scholars determined to discuss a conceptual perception of Beirut. Surely the recovery of the past, the destruction and the near future interpretation are all influential when delineating the capital portrait. Between the outer necessity and the inner necessity, Beirut remains mon amour.