4K DIGITAL VIDEO, 43:35:00.

Where Can We Be Found? is a short experimental documentary film comprised of landscape footage, 3D and 2D animation, and interviews. The film examines the contemporary state of Lebanese Cedar trees (Cedrus libani) in Lebanon, delving into the complex ecologies they inhabit and co-inhabit. The film re-tells the transhistorical narratives of the Cedar, which has long symbolized eternity and immortality. By tracing human impacts—ranging from climate change and extractive tourism to the tree’s use as a civic emblem in constructing an illusory Lebanese identity—the project repositions the Cedar as an autonomous being, disentangled from its national, cultural, and ecological misrepresentations. The work critically reflects on the intertwined legacies of exploitation and resilience while considering the Cedar as more than a symbol, but as a living entity within a shared ecosystem.

Memoirs of a Cedar: Human Histories & Resilience

The natural environment has always been intertwined with human existence, shaping and shaped by us in a continuous and reciprocal dance. It is an ecology we inhabit and, simultaneously, a force that defines us, blurring the lines between human and non-human, individual, and community. Among the non-human beings that dissolve these boundaries, Lebanon’s Cedar trees (Cedrus libani) stand as poignant witnesses to their landscape’s history.

Renowned for their resilience, beauty, and endurance, the Cedars of Lebanon have long been celebrated as emblems of eternity, strength, and immortality. Yet, beneath their majestic stature lies a complex legacy of reverence, exploitation, exclusion, and misrepresentation—one that began in ancient epochs and persists into present-day.

Where Can We Be Found? seeks to reexamine this legacy, unraveling the layered histories and symbolic weight carried by the Cedars. The work delves into their ecological, cultural, and political dimensions, separating the tree's identity as a national token from its reality as an endangered non-human species. In doing so, it asks us to see the Cedars not as obsolete objects of human-created narratives, but as autonomous beings co-creators of the world we share.

A Diminished Forest

Once spanning vast territories from Northern Palestine to Southern Turkey, Cedrus libani now survives only in fragmented stands. Centuries of human-driven deforestation, neglect, and political upheaval have reduced these forests to isolated groves in Lebanon, Northern Syria, and Southern Turkey. Even within designated conservation areas, the Cedar faces environmental challenges. Heavy foot traffic of eco-tourists disrupts forest regeneration, while climate change disrupts the tree’s growing conditions and accelerates the tree's decline. Rising temperatures, drier winters, and increased vulnerability to invasive pests have forced Cedars to migrate to higher altitudes. These migrations, while reminiscent of the tree’s movement at the end of the last Ice Age, occur at an unprecedented pace due to human-induced climate change. As the tree adapts to harsher conditions, its stature diminishes, and its roots grow deeper, reflecting a struggle for survival that mirrors the broader ecological crisis.

Contradictions of Conservation

Efforts to conserve the Cedar are fraught with contradictions. Germination labs cultivate Cedar seedlings under controlled conditions, powered by private generators in a country plagued by electricity shortages. While these initiatives offer hope, they should be understood as a small solution to a wider issue of environmental decline, which underscores the unnatural and altered circumstances of the tree’s survival within the broader systemic failures that have engendered these conditions.

Cedar parks, established after the Lebanese Civil War, serve both as conservation sites and as tools of political image-building. These parks highlight the tree’s plight, but often mask deeper issues of environmental mismanagement and exploitation. The symbolic rehabilitation of the Cedar, while garnering public support, does little to address the ecological and cultural systems that perpetuate its endangerment.

The Cedar as Climate Refugee

As the Lebanese Cedar migrates upward in search of landscapes in which it may surve, it becomes an ecological refugee, displaced by the very systems that simultaneously glorify it as a symbol of national pride and resilience. Forced to higher altitudes by environmental changes due to climate change as well as by the settlement and destruction of its habitat, the Cedar is unable to seek refuge in soils that are already capitalized and contested, occupied and transformed  by various architectures of leisure and exclusivity. Ski resorts carve pathways through fragile ecosystems, private, gated communities and mansions occlude its natural habitat, restaurants and recreation centers increase the traversal of humans, vehicles, and other forms of human commercial infrastructure across its once-thriving terrains. These spaces, designed for human pleasure, comfort, and profit, leave little room for the Cedar to establish new roots, intensifying its struggle for territorial indemnity and survival.

This uphill migration mirrors the Cedar’s historic exploitation, as the tree continues to fight for its place in a landscape increasingly dominated by human ambition. Its plight parallels broader patterns of displacement faced by marginalized and indigenous communities, both human and non-human, highlighting the interconnectedness of ecological and social crises. As the Cedar’s presence diminishes, so too does the biodiversity and cultural heritage it anchors. This precarious existence compels us to reconsider the narratives that have long celebrated the Cedar as an ancient tree rendered as a static emblem of fortitude, urging its recognition as a dynamic, living entity with intrinsic value and a rightful place within the ecosystems from which it grows.

The Cedar as a Token of Identity Politics

The Lebanese Cedar has long been burdened by human narratives. From ancient mythology to contemporary nation-building, the tree has been co-opted into roles it never chose. It has symbolized sectarian affiliations—Cedars for the Maronites, Pine trees for the Druze, Citrus for the Shi’ite—paralleling the arbitrary colonial divisions imposed on Lebanon’s peoples and lands. More broadly, it has been exploited for material and political gain, its essence commodified and reduced to a tool of power and profit.

Historically, this commodification is evident in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which recounts the destructive felling of Mount Hermon’s Cedar forests as a mark of human triumph over nature. Later, the Phoenicians capitalized on the tree as a key resource for building their maritime empire, setting a precedent for centuries of commerce-driven deforestation of Cedrus libani. Modern-day Lebanon not only celebrates this story of so-called entrepreneurial success, one that chronicles deforestation at the hands of Canaanite Phoenicians, but also continues this pattern by weaponizing Cedar trees as ideological and physical barriers that demarcate military bases and private luxury properties. This has established a Lebanese exceptionalism that, in extreme cases, becomes Lebanese supremacy against neighboring communities. The Cedar tree once again finds itself deprived of its narrative and abstracted for symbolic forms of national and material gains.

TowardsNew Relationships

The story of the Lebanese Cedar is ultimately a reflection upon humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Its decline, rooted in centuries of exploitation, mirrors the broader ecological crisis of our time. The tree’s survival in the face of extinction offers itself as a vital, if not urgent, pathway to consider, and reconsider, this relationship. To truly honor the Cedar, and all landscapes, we must move beyond an approach to natural ecosystems as resources for monetary and political gain, or as symbols of human hierarchy and hegemonic social, cultural, and religious structures. The Cedar’s intersecting, and after thousands of years, resounding stories pronounce and demand its place within a shared ecosystem, both in Lebanon and globally, and its role in not only maintaining ecological balance, but the aspects of this world that we may very well lose forever on the edge of climate collapse.

By shifting perspective, we are empowered to repair relationships that sustain both the Cedar and humans. The tree’s resilience, though remarkable, should not absolve us of the responsibility to protect it. Instead, it should inspire us to reimagine our role in the natural world—not as conquerors or exploiters, but as co-inhabitants.

This project was made possible with generous support from The Arab Fund for Art & Culture Fine Arts Grant (2020).

“Screens Series: EcoRove” is curated by Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant.