This section displays posters issued during wartime to commemorate the events or dates that are significant to a given political community. Marked annually, these dates got institutionalized and their narratives eventually materialized in people's imaginaries. These range from events that are specific to the party or political community, such as the founding date, to regional events to which the community ascribes its struggle. The commemorative poster provides a moment during wartime to recall and affirm the continuity in struggle and ideological position of the party concerned. It allows to symbolically write and re-write, through the historical narratives represented, meanings that are significant to a present moment in the unfolding of the war.
Posters also commemorate wartime events: 'victorious battles' and 'violent massacres'. The narratives of such events were a contested terrain, subject to political struggle and symbolic appropriation by the various political communities. Conflicting constructions of wartime history were thus written into the different communities' respective political discourse and regimes of truth. The politics of commemoration here joins the battle over meaning and history.
Organized into separate thematic keywords, this part represents the core of the exhibition. It displays posters according to recurrent subjects of communication across the different political factions and war phases: Belonging, Commemoration, Leadership and Martyrdom.
The exhibit reveals the weight each of these themes, and corresponding sub-themes, has held in the discursive frameworks of Lebanon's civil war. The thematic arrangement provides a comparative viewing of the signs and iconography across parties. It thus allows us to observe the antagonistic discourses and disparate visual representations around the same theme.
