Fabricating: Facts and fiction in the work of the Atlas Group

Abstract

The Atlas Group, both an elaborate archival project and an “imaginary foundation” established by Walid Raad, aimed to document the Lebanese civil wars. The Group produced and acquired a series of documents, photographic images, video footage, objects etc., which were meticulously organized under the Atlas Group Archive. In a comparable structure, that of a museum, the Group assembles these artefacts into a manifold archival project which refers to the Lebanese wars and the contemporary history of Lebanon. In examining the Atlas Group Archive, it becomes apparent that the documents constituting this archive transcend their face value as historical artefacts manifesting into signifiers of fictional stories, ambiguous historical and mnemonic devices. Through this scheme, the work questions the process, politics, authenticity and mechanisms of historical documentation, of historiography and historians themselves. Raad, through his fictional foundation, the Atlas Group, functions in a sophisticated, somewhat subversive way, as a historiographer and a curator of this archive, in a quest to examine the authority and authorship of historical events relating to the trauma of war.