Retelling the story of Orthosia, the ancient Roman city lying beneath a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's performance piece, in Sharjah and Dubai, highlights the tension between history and the present reality

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige will perform The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai on Sunday. Actors will play the artists in Saturday's performance at the Sharjah Art Show more

In their performance piece, The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige delve into the vestiges of an ancient Roman city that disappeared for centuries before resurfacing in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon during the 2007 conflict.

The show highlights this tension between history and the present reality, and will be performed twice – first in Bait Gholoum Ibrahim at the Sharjah Art Foundation on Saturday, and at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai on Sunday.

Orthosia had puzzled historians for centuries. The city vanished after being struck by a tsunami in the sixth century. Since then, its whereabouts had been unknown. The only clues to its existence lay in coins that were found around the banks of the Nahr Al Bared river.

Its location was finally pinpointed in 2007, as the Lebanese army clashed with Islamist groups at the Nahr Al Bared refugee camp, which housed Palestinian families that had escaped the 1948 Nakba.

“There were 30,000 refugees living in Nahr Al Bared when a group of Islamists infiltrated the camp and began fighting with the Lebanese army,” Hadjithomas says.

The fighting was the most intense internal armed conflict that Lebanon had experienced since the civil war. It destroyed the camp and its refugees had to be relocated to a temporary site nearby. When the conflict ended in September 2007, bulldozers were brought in to clear the rubble, and from underneath the debris emerged the ruins of Orthosia.

For many, the discovery was not a happy one. An archeological excavation would mean that Palestinian families who had escaped the Nakba would be subject to another displacement, a prospect that was politically and humanely unacceptable.

“From that point, what do you do?” Joreige asks. “What are your choices as politicians, as different organisations? Nahr Al Bared was a prosperous camp because it was on the seaside, in the suburb of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-biggest city.”

Moving the camp to a different location was suggested, but the Palestinian refugees did not want to go through that harrowing experience again. Many have returned to the camp since 2007 and a reconstruction process has been under way, albeit stalled due to Lebanon’s economic and political struggles. Orthosia, meanwhile, was reburied.

“The idea was that they will rebury Orthosia and wait for the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, where at that moment, maybe refugees will go back to their homes and Orthosia will resurface again,” Hadjithomas says. In the meantime, she says, the city was covered up with a tarpaulin and concrete, and the camp was rebuilt.

This is, in part, where the adjective in the performance’s title comes from. Joreige suffers from vertigo, and the dizzying sensation was seen as an apt metaphor for the endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction.

“This idea of cycles and palimpsests, infinite palimpsests, where you always reuse stones and materials from another civilisation to construct the new ones, made us think a lot about this destruction and reconstruction that we go through all the time, giving a kind of vertigo,” Hadjithomas says.

This cycle was particularly thought-provoking in the context of Nahr Al Bared. “The war happened and the camp has to be rebuilt,” Hadjithomas says. “You also have the city of Orthosia, it is a kind of treasure. But you have human beings who live there and they have to go back. Do you want them to be refugees another time?”

The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia is a natural extension of the artistic oeuvre of Hadjithomas and Joreige. The Lebanese duo have been working together for decades and across a range of mediums. They are perhaps best known for their cinematic output, which includes A Perfect Day (2005) and Memory Box (2021).

“All our work is about a continuation in time of ruptures and catastrophe,” Joreige says. “It’s about how you can continue in a world of rupture, and this is why it's echoing easier the situation today.”

The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia has grown out of an installation that Hadjithomas and Joreige created for the 2020 Taipei Biennial. Under the Cold River Bed brought together photographs and documents, as well as a sculpture of resin, concrete, soil and fabric to tell the story of Orthosia. The project was developed in collaboration with artist Maissa Maatouk and archeologist Hadi Choueri. It also featured in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial.

“We wanted to give a physicality and materiality to this idea of having a city that is under another city,” Hadjithomas says. “We made this installation because we wanted to understand. Situations like this are not easy to apprehend, because there’s so many possibilities.”

Hadjithomas and Joreige were working on the project in their Beirut studio at the time of the port explosion on August 4, 2020. The artists had initially intended to present the sculpture horizontally, but the blast, which destroyed most of their works, left the sculpture upright. “We thought, OK, this is how we have to present it,” Hadjithomas says. “The rest of the studio was destroyed, but the sculpture was not. It was strange.”

With The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia, Hadjithomas and Joreige aimed to further examine the implications of the situation in Nahr Al Bared. The performance is set on a stage that represents the duo’s studio, and includes video, photography and installation work. It also features recorded interviews, such as with Choueri, who recounts his experiences in Nahr Al Bared, while other people talk about the camp’s reconstruction.

“We started with the installation, and then we felt that we needed also to say more about it, to see how the story can be told,” Hadjithomas says. “We did this performance, not because we consider ourselves performers, but because we consider ourselves storytellers, and all those means that we use are ways to convey stories.”

“What we are doing is to pinpoint and dramatise certain elements,” Joreige says. “Of course, you can’t tell the whole story. We are not historians. We are focusing on certain things that are our concern. We are using different tricks, like a DJ, if you want, where we are mixing different elements to communicate something.”

Hadjithomas and Joreige will perform in the production at Jameel Arts Centre on Sunday, whereas actors Ahmed Abu Arada and Miryana Milad Almaalouly will portray the artists in Sharjah.

Both Hadjithomas and Joreige say the story of Orthosia and Nahr Al Bared echoes the continuing tragedies unfolding in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon, as well as other conflict zones. “When you see the performance, you will see images that will remind you of things that are happening now, and how a city can be completely destroyed,” Joreige says.

“Now we are feeling that our world is collapsing,” Hadjithomas says. “We’ve been feeling this for a while. Everything is collapsing and we feel that there's no solid ground anymore. So this was our first reaction, to look at what is underneath our feet, and Orthosia is also this.”