Hkeeli Ya Jnoub: How women are Keeping South Lebanon's collective Memory Alive and shaping paths to peace
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Some exhibitions invite visitors to observe. Hkeeli Ya Jnoub at Beit Beirut invites them to remember, reflect and become part of a collective story.
"In these dreadful times where villages in South Lebanon are being wiped out, the least we can do is keep the memory alive," says Delphine Abirached Darmency, co-curator of Hkeeli Ya Jnoub and Executive Director of Hkeeli, an initiative which preserves Lebanon's collective memory through storytelling, community participation and archival work.
Destroyed buildings in Nabatieh reflect the widespread devastation across South Lebanon, where communities have lost homes, landmarks and places that hold generations of memories. Photo: UN Women/Rawad El Feghali
A total of 11,095 buildings across areas south of the Litani River, including Bent Jbeil, Marjaayoun, El Nabatieh, Tyre, and Saida, were destroyed between October 2025 and April 2026. As communities lose homes, livelihoods and landmarks, efforts like this exhibition aimed at preserving collective memory, help safeguard identities and strengthen connections across divides.
Through its Women, Peace and Security programme, UN Women, with generous funding from the Governments of Canada and Norway, supports women-led initiatives that preserve collective memory, create spaces for dialogue, and strengthen social cohesion. Hkeeli Ya Jnoub is one example of how cultural initiatives can contribute to peacebuilding by bringing communities together, amplifying women's voices, and safeguarding histories that might otherwise be lost.
A Living Archive Born from Urgency
Hkeeli Ya Jnoub2 emerged from an urgent question: what happens to a community's memories when the places that hold them disappear?
Rather than documenting conflict through headlines or statistics alone, Hkeeli Ya Jnoub creates a space that captures the moments that define a place and where the living archive of South of Lebanon can be documented, shared and passed on.
Visitors listen to personal testimonies from South Lebanon, where shared memories become a bridge for dialogue, understanding and peacebuilding. Photo: Delphine Abirached Darmency
Through Hkeeli Ya Jnoub, preserving and sharing memories take many forms. Unlike a traditional exhibition, Hkeeli Ya Jnoub continues to evolve with every visitor. People are invited not only to observe, but also to contribute by bringing along photographs, everyday objects, family archives, films, handwritten letters and personal objects and memories, while artists present works inspired by collective experiences.
The final stop is not an artwork on the wall, but a blank page waiting to be filled. Before leaving, visitors are invited to write letters to people they miss, childhood homes, neighbours, villages they remember, or communities transformed by conflict.
Delphine explains "People don't come here simply to visit an exhibition. They enter a living space where they can share their own stories."
She says the exhibition has also become a bridge between communities.
Visitors from the South recognize their own lives reflected in the installations, while others discover stories they may have never heard before. A woman reveals a family photograph that had remained hidden in a drawer for decades. Strangers find themselves in conversations while reading the same letter.
Across generations, visitors engage with documentary films that preserve the memories, voices and histories of South Lebanon, shedding light on decades of conflict, resilience and everyday life. Photo: Delphine Abirached Darmency
"Through these personal stories, they begin to experience a reality they may not have known. That connection creates empathy," Delphine adds. For her, reading the letters visitors leave behind has become the most emotional part of the exhibition.
That is the hardest part for me," she says. Some letters speak of villages people long to return to. Others remember grandparents, neighbours and childhood homes that no longer exist. Together, they form a growing record of loss and belonging. One letter reads: "Say hello to our neighbours and my grandparents, whose home was destroyed. We refuse to die."
At the end of the exhibition, a blank page becomes a space for remembrance. Visitors write letters to the villages, homes and loved ones they long to return to, adding their voices to South Lebanon's living archive. Photos: UN Women Lebanon/Zakia Krunfol
Women Turning Memory into Peacebuilding
For Nour Nasr, Hkeeli Initiative Coordinator and a peacebuilder engaged through UN Women's Women, Peace and Security programme, Hkeeli Ya Jnoub creates a space for dialogue and social cohesion.
"People are living an experience here," Nour says. "It creates common ground between people from the South and people from other parts of Lebanon. It builds understanding and solidarity which contribute to peacebuilding."
She adds "When people leave here understanding each other's stories a little better, that matters,"
Nour Nasr introduces visitors to the stories woven throughout Hkeeli Ya Jnoub, where personal memories become a catalyst for dialogue, social cohesion and peacebuilding. Photo: UN Women Lebanon/Zakia Krunfol
Nour highlights the central role of women in preserving collective memory. “The presence of women in documenting the stories of the South is not a coincidence. Most of the artists in Hkeeli Ya Jnoub are women," she says. “By documenting these stories, women help ensure that future generations inherit not only the history of conflict, but also the history of life."
Walking Through Memory
Exhibiting Lebanese artists document not only conflict, but also memory.
In What Remains, artist Sama Beydoun reflects on the memories, places, and moments that continue to live within her, her village, her family, and the life they knew before the war. Nearby, Adeeb Farhat's After Supper, Keys Without Homes and Stories from the South preserve oral histories and personal memories, and explore occupation, displacement and the enduring connections between people, objects, voices and the places they call home.
Objects from the years of occupation and recorded oral histories come together in Stories from the South, preserving the voices and memories of communities while inviting visitors to listen, reflect and remember. Photo: UN Women Lebanon/Zakia Krunfol
Elsewhere, Batoul Faour's The Bunker, the Barracks and the Base explores through photographs, archival material and documentary film, how decades of military occupation have reshaped both landscape and collective memory
In But We Are Nearing the Pomegranate Season, Rabab Chamseddine pairs photography with a spoken narration to reflect on memory, attachment to the land, and the continuity of everyday lifedespite repeated cycles of violence and uncertainty.
Drawing on family photographs and the olives rooted in her land, Rabab Chamseddine's But We Are Nearing the Pomegranate Season explores memory, belonging and the enduring connection between people and place. Photo: UN Women Lebanon/Zakia Krunfol
Meanwhile, Rawan Mazeh's Manufacturing Estrangements draws on a censored family correspondence, and photographs, to explore how occupation manufactures separation and leaves lasting traces across generations. Visitors leave the exhibition with a renewed recognition of the role of collective memory in fostering dialogue, preserving shared histories, and strengthening connections across generations and communities.
These letters, sent to family members detained in the Khiam Detention Centre, bear witness to the separation endured by families during the occupation. In Manufacturing Estrangements, they become part of a broader reflection on memory, loss and belonging. Photo: UN Women Lebanon/ Zakia Krunfol
For UN Women, initiatives like Hkeeli Ya Jnoub demonstrate that preserving memory is also an act of peacebuilding. It creates opportunities for dialogue, recognition, and shared understanding.
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- According to a rapid building-level damage assessment released in June 2026 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), conducted in coordination with the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS-L).
Hkeeli Ya Jnoub is hosted at Beit Beirut as part of the Hkeeli initiative. The exhibition is currently closed for technical work and will reopen on 2 September 2026, continuing to welcome visitors and collect stories, photographs, and personal memories.