“Cedar Exodus”: EcoRove Reclaims the Narrative of the Cedar Tree

Al Rawiya Team

Note from Al Rawiya Team:

Many in Lebanon and outside of it have a tumultuous relationship with the Cedrus libani — the infamous Lebanese Cedar tree — relating it to the narratives that many right-wing politicians inside the country or many foreign colonial and imperialist entities have promoted. Linking a variety of disciplines together in one project, EcoRove — made up of Em Joseph, Jumanah Abbas, and Iyad Abou Gaida — challenges this perception, restoring a meaning to the tree that once was, and giving Lebanese and non-Lebanese folk a chance to create a new connection to the tree and the land, independent of any influence — whether local or foreign.

EcoRove exhibited their project, Cedar Exodus, at the New Museum in New York City, curated by Ian Wallace, between October 12, 2023 and January 7, 2024. The project includes a film, Where Can We Be Found ? , and two animations, Trapped and Exploited.

Animated drawing from Trapped (2023), part of EcoRove’s project, Cedar Exodus. Trapped contrasts the Lebanese Cedar’s use as a symbol within present-day Lebanon’s political and social spheres with changes to the country’s climate and ecology.

Al Rawiya: Can you introduce yourselves?

Em: My name is Em Joseph. I am an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. I make work about the intersection of landscapes and community and, more specifically, how communities are deeply influenced by landscapes and their histories. I am also Part-Time Faculty of Sustainable Systems at The New School.

Jumanah: My name is Jumanah Abbas. I’m currently based in Doha. I am trained as an architect but currently work as a Project Manager of Exhibitions and Programs at Qatar Museums. My personal practice, on the other hand, looks at the politics of the electromagnetic spectrum and its agency in the making of sonic spaces. So, I mainly look at ways of mapping the sonic landscape and the invincible infrastructure of the West Bank. I thus explore ways through which we can look at the landscape of the West Bank through sound waves, frequencies, and cloud data systems that have failed to sustain the urban necessities of a smart city.

Iyad: My name is Iyad Abou Gaida. I’m an architect, researcher, and ecological designer based in New York. I have previously worked in offices in Beirut and Tokyo. My research engages the ecologies of human and non-human beings to address aesthetic and socio-political urgencies for architecture and urbanism across dimensions and geographies.

Al Rawiya: What is EcoRove, and how did Cedar Exodus come to be?

Jumanah: The project began when Iyad and I met at Columbia University, and we were exploring the migration of the cedar tree. Then we came across Em’s work through her sister Joanna, who mentioned that Em was also exploring the displacement of the cedar tree. That’s when our interests converged. We came out with EcoRove as a multidisciplinary project that opened up these questions about the politics of the climate zones.

Em: From there and moving forward, we want to situate EcoRove as a collaborative coalition between artists, architects, critics, curators — anyone in any field who is interested in looking at the situation of human and non-human beings in areas called critical zones, which are areas of landscape where geopolitics are greatly influencing the people, plants, animals, and geologic conditions. The overarching vision of the work is to approach climate change as an intersectional issue to investigate all colliding factors contributing to human-driven global warming , and to follow how these same forces also have an impact socially, culturally, and politically. We’re interested in how climate change has become relentlessly ingrained and solidified in the ways the world functions. There is a certainty and passivity in this phenomenon that we find both horrifying and fascinating.

Iyad: In early 2018, there were a lot of articles on different platforms discussing the cedars of Lebanon and climate change. Many of these articles were flat and abstract. At the same time, Jumanah and I were unhappy with how climate change was being discussed in our alma mater. We thought the cedar tree was a good example of climate change as a product of years of human domination and activities in landscapes. We were linking human-induced climate change to consumerism, capitalism, colonialism, and the struggle for self-determination.

Em: We likened the cedar tree to a climate refugee within its own landscape, and we also wanted to emphasize that all ecological zones in Lebanon accommodate a variety of forest ecosystems existing at different altitudes and containing different plant and animal species, and geological constitutions. When one is disrupted — whether that be by warfare, occupation, non-renewable agricultural practices, or natural disaster — the others are also impacted. We also wanted to consider the relationality between various components of biodiversity, the relationship between the peoples of the Levant, and the way they, and their ecosystems, have been perceived through a distorted vision and have been physically altered by different scales of violence.

Still from Where Can We Be Found? (2023), part of EcoRove’s project, Cedar Exodus.

The film re-tells transhistorical narratives of the Cedar, which has been used since ancient times as a symbol of eternity and immortality. Where Can We Be Found? distinguishes the Lebanese Cedar as an autonomous being from the various ways in which it has been used as a national, cultural, and ecological symbol, or otherwise misconstrued.

Al Rawiya: The cedar tree has great significance in Lebanon, on a variety of political, social, and historical levels. How did you try to convey this through your project? And how did your personal relations to the tree affect the project?

Em: The significations of the cedar tree are so layered and complex. It took us several years and the gift of COVID quarantine to truly organize how to share these diverse formulations in a way that was clear, critical, visually seductive, and avoided being didactic. Personally, I was first drawn to focus on the Lebanese Cedar as a part of my practice about five years ago when I became very interested in my maternal Lebanese ancestry. I began thinking about the ecological attributes of the landscape where my family came from, my entry point being a photograph of my great-great grandfather underneath an enormous Cedrus libani in Dimane, a village in North Lebanon. In a similar way to how my family eventually emigrated from Lebanon through Europe to North America, I was drawn to consider the tree and its agency as a decorative prize of colonialism, extracted from its indigenous environment and planted in various locations abroad. I became very interested in possible dialogues between the cedar’s geopolitical trajectory and that of the diaspora of Lebanese people, between biologies and cultures being from one place and taking root, quite literally, in another. Before making its way to North America, the Cedrus libani was assimilated into the culture and landscape of the UK, most notably into the symbolic ideology of British royalty and aristocracy, with no mention of the tree’s origin or aboriginal culture. This instance of ecological extrication mirrored Jumanah and Iyad’s description of the cedar as a refugee. In a spontaneous and interconnected way, we were all thinking about currents of migration and control that have come to define this one species of tree.

Animated Drawing from Trapped (2023).

Iyad: Many Lebanese people have certain social, political, and historical relationships with this tree, whether they’re positive or negative. Essentially, the idea behind Cedar Exodus was to deconstruct these abstracted and distorted narratives.

My relationship with the tree has been full of ups and downs. On Independence Day, as children at school, they would hand us flags and make us wear cardboard crowns, which we had to make in art class, in the shape of a cedar tree. That being said, I was also living under the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. As I grew up, I started harboring some resentment towards the tree. I associated it with the government that gave up on us.

It became more personal during the 2006 July war with Israel. My cousins, who held dual citizenship, were being extracted by United Nations personnel and Lebanese army forces with their cedar tree badges on their shoulders, while my mother had to explain to me why we were not being taken as well, and why these countrymen with the cedar tree badge on their shoulder wouldn’t take us to a safe place. But then I grew up, and I understood that this tree is a victim of so many narratives: it is the victim of the narratives of the far-right, of the nation-state, of mainstream media, and of religious authorities. There is so much political, cultural, historical, and religious stuff that makes the tree and its significance so charged, and we wanted to allow the tree to reclaim its agency.

Al Rawiya: This project aims to retell transhistorical narratives of the cedar tree. How did you approach researching and presenting these narratives, and what were some of the most surprising or impactful findings?

Iyad: We’ve seen a few exhibitions about the cedar tree that either romanticized it or shied away from its politics. We didn’t shy away from telling the truth as it is; didn’t shy away from rethinking the Phoenician narrative, from questioning colonial powers and their connection to the tree and its politics, or from calling out local politicians whose actions have impacted the tree on a theoretical and physical basis.

I was surprised by many things, for example, how the French used the tree and its symbolism in furthering their own interests. I also found out that the cedar tree is mentioned in the Quran, and I hadn’t even known it was mentioned in Islam in any capacity before. But that’s not all. I discovered that Walid Jumblatt, the former head of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) planted mines around the Shouf biosphere during the civil war. Initially, one of those who manage the land there was proud of this fact, saying that these mines were planted to protect the trees from poachers. Once we had left, my stepfather informed me that this was not the reason, but the PSP did this at the time just to militarize the zone and stop opposing militias from gaining territories at higher altitudes. I also did not know that, in order for the Cedar Festival to take place in Bcharre, North Lebanon, they had to flatten a hill planted with cedar trees, turning it into a parking lot. The tree has been the victim of many economic, political, and social plans.

Animated drawing from Exploited (2023), part of EcoRove’s Project, Cedar Exodus. Exploited addresses the extraction and consumption of the Lebanese Cedar by various civilizations throughout history.Today, the protection of the most visited cedar forests—Shouf Biosphere and Cedars of God—effectively functions as a form of “greenwashing” for the factional leaders who proclaimed themselves the stewards of the land in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War.

Al Rawiya: Within the context of the past few months, we’ve been witnessing Israeli ecocidal bombing on South Lebanon, and we’re witnessing genocide taking place in Palestine. Can you elaborate on how these real-time events influence your work and your way of thinking about ecology as a whole?

Jumanah: In November, in the middle of Israel’s white phosphorus endeavors in the south of Lebanon, an international news platform posted an article on how Lebanese Christians are feeling the heat and effect of climate change on cedars. It was shocking to see this divisive article, considering everything Lebanon is going through at the moment. This made me think that through our work, we do not only want to talk about the ongoing destruction going on in the south, for example, but we also want to acknowledge how having our ecologies under threat means having our identities, our selfhood and our relationship with the land and the Cedar tree under threat. As our work looks at the political aspect of such issues, we are also questioning whether it is only certain sects experiencing something, and how these wide-frame ecological disasters affect both the individual, and the country as a whole.

Iyad: I personally feel like the timing of that article was not spontaneously published, as its message has clear political reasons. The ecological disasters don’t only impact one community. All ecological events taking place in Lebanon and Palestine are interconnected. If you impact an ecology in one place, it’s not going to be isolated: on the contrary, it’s going to have a regional impact. What was

disgusting to me was that while the colonial-settler state was targeting forests and agricultural fields in South Lebanon, the US embassy in Beirut was running an ad on certain TV channels and newspapers on how they were planting 218 cedar trees, while a few kilometers south, weapons manufactured by the US were used by Israeli Occupation Forces to burn the landscape and poison the soil. They were treating the ecology as a fragmented thing and pushing a neo-colonialist narrative of the global-north country coming to the aid of the Lebanese environment as if part of the Lebanese environment wasn’t being destroyed by their phosphorus bombs, with effects to come for decades.

Em: Colonialism deliberately created spaces for sectarianism to thrive. We are still seeing the effects of this today. In real-time, olive and pine trees in South Lebanon can be relentlessly bombed and exposed to white phosphorus provided by the United States with little to no media coverage while simultaneously, United States Marines are “heroically” re-planting cedars in the north, the loss of which news outlets describe specifically as a “Christian” episode of mourning. The orchestration of narratives, the disconnect between cause and effect, and the controlled publicity of grief by humans for their landscape are both blatant and blatantly astounding. In our work, we seek to draw these same connections.

Still from Where Can We Be Found?

Al Rawiya: What kind of responses or reflections have you received from viewers of the exhibition, and how do you hope your work resonates with diverse audiences?

Iyad: Before talking about the exhibition, we had mixed reactions from people we approached in the early phase of research. Some were happy we were dismantling the narratives around the tree. Others were uncomfortable with that, and some even went as far as questioning the intentions, believing that the tree is a fascist symbol in the Lebanese political and cultural landscape. For the exhibition, it was great seeing viewers interact with the work. Many Arabs and Lebanese were surprised at how little they knew about the entanglement of trees with political, colonial, cultural, and economic systems. Also, many foreigners were shocked by the scenery and landscape and how a tree can be this charged.

Em: It’s a charged time to show work from and about the Arab world for reasons all of us here having this conversation understand. The film and animated drawings recount parallel events of violence and occupation to those we are witnessing today in Palestine, but instead of telling a story about people, they tell a story of trees. This abstraction, in our observation, was enough to engender the attention and sympathies of a wider audience than may have been possible otherwise during such a divided moment. In fact, we witnessed an outpouring of emotion around the state of our natural world, and what at the hands of man’s destruction has come to create such a fragile and precarious contemporary existence for the cedar. More than we could have anticipated, the piece facilitated renewed connections and attachments to trees and their landscapes. One visitor expressed that after watching the film the cedars were, in fact, already gone from this world. There was love, elation, nostalgia, despair, and fright. It was overwhelming if I am honest. However, this level of disturbance also filled us with the hope that if visitors could feel this strongly for a tree they don’t know, perhaps they could feel the same for a person beyond the bounds of their own life experience.

End Note: On January 7, EcoRove held a closing ceremony at the New Museum in New York City, to celebrate the ending of their exhibition. This was their closing note:

“This work began as a refusal, an act of resistance to mainstream narratives around climate change; a refusal that human induced global warming is a topic of privilege; a refusal that it only compensates for green politics. These foundations are reiterated in the work’s current form, which is driven to demonstrate parallels between the Lebanese Cedar tree and the peoples of the Levant, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Like the Cedrus libani itself, the peoples of this region have had their narratives stolen, distorted, and manipulated for the sake of political control and financial gain by the world’s dominating powers and their companion aggressors. The violence of settler colonialism today, namely that occurring in Palestine and Lebanon, is rooted in the enduring narrative that the landscape and resources of the so-called under-developed world are for the taking, and as a result, their inhabitants expendable. Above all, this work was intended to expose these intersectional issues, and to emphasize that one cannot speak about climate change without addressing the systemic dispossession of territories of indigenous human and nonhuman beings, too often cast away as forgotten byproducts of capital success. We hope the film, and Frances Chang’s accompanying live performance today, inspires future acts of resistance, or in the least, engenders the understanding that there is community and purpose within resistance, and the comfort that there are pathways in a future that prioritize people and their land.”