“The Beirut River, at least in its current state, is a testament to infrastructural failure in Beirut”, writes artist and filmmaker Panos Aprahamian in his itinerary for the latest edition of Incidents (of Travel), from the Lebanese capital. “The river where my grandfather used to swim is now a stream of urban and industrial waste walled by raw concrete, taking the city’s toxicity out into the sea. A blast wave caused by the Beirut port explosion in August 2020 returned a lot of pollution back upstream.”

A year on from the devastation of the port explosion, which left half the city ravaged, more than 200 people dead, and thousands wounded, Panos and Marie-Nour Hechaime, curator at the Sursock Museum, took a day to explore the past and present of a place in the midst of a slow-burn crisis—and dare to consider its future.

Panos and Marie-Nour’s sobering contribution is the 16th episode of Incidents (of Travel), the Kadist online project edited since 2016 by Latitudes.