Des récits arabes teintés de possibles

Drawing on three works by Maha Maamoun’s 2026 (2010), Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate (2012), and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s The Lebanese Rocket Society (2013), the essay examines how they mobilise the codes of science fiction, dystopia and counterfactual thinking to reimagine suppressed or foreclosed historical trajectories.

Joan Grandjean’s essay has been published in Possibles inachevés. This collected volume edited by Vanessa Brito (Beaux-Arts de Marseille) and Vincent Jacques (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Versailles) brings together artists, filmmakers, and scholars around a shared and generative question: what happens when history takes seriously what never came to be — the censored, the unfinished, the unrealised?

The volume proceeds from the conviction that historical writing need not confine itself to what actually happened. By restoring the field of possibilities that past events always conceal — what could have been, what was prevented or repressed — it opens onto what the editors call possibles inachevés: the unfulfilled futures of the past and their unaccomplished promises. The book weaves together counterfactual history, archival speculation, and artistic practice, asking how attention to the non-existent might reshape not only how we write history, but also what form a film can take, how an archive can be read, or how a festival can be programmed.

The contributors approach these questions through a rich diversity of formats — scenarios, synopses, collages, montages, interviews, and essays — reflecting a genuinely transdisciplinary dialogue between historical research and contemporary artistic practice.