Following the wires: sensing socio-material practices of everyday electricity supply in post-conflict Greater Beirut.

这项研究探讨了冲突对贝鲁特电力基础设施的影响。自1975年内战开始以来影响该市的暴力和动乱对电力服务的影响迫使家庭和个人发明新的战略，为他们的家庭和商店提供能源。非正式的电力供应系统和网络已经深刻地改变了城市环境：电缆、发电机和保险箱现在是城市景观中无处不在的元素。获得电力和确保稳定供应的需要已成为日常生活的一部分，并导致了新的做法和生活方式。通过视频的唤起力量，这个研究项目追踪了横跨贝鲁特社区天际线和建筑的电线。在视觉上，该项目将沿着其连接的个人和家庭的生活方式将电缆接地。通过讲述电力基础设施的故事和对其故障的日常反应，该项目旨在了解冲突带来的生活和物质遗产。该项目强调了基础设施的重要性，利用视频的综合力量，结合人种学和社会学的描述，通过贝鲁特的声音和建筑展示冲突如何塑造城市，改变人们的生活和决策方式。因此，研究包括对贝鲁特居民和其他利益攸关方的正式和非正式采访、传记描述和参与者观察，以记录该市停电生活的日常经验，以及为维持家庭电力服务而采取的不同战略。20世纪60年代初，黎巴嫩开始了一项普及服务和基础设施--包括电力--的计划，由当时的总统福阿德·谢哈布带头，最终于1964年成立了利班学院。自那时以来，黎巴嫩的暴力和政治动乱打乱了这一努力，扭转了这一趋势，导致服务削弱，停电和长时间停电盛行。自内战(1975)以来，基础设施供应一直被用作政治武器，造成重大中断，改变了电力供应的性质。随后几年的重建和恢复政策(新的基础设施工作)和网络政策的管理(收费、打击盗窃)增加了空间和社会分化的新层次。2006年以色列-真主党冲突期间对发电厂的军事袭击及其对电网的破坏进一步削弱了电力生产能力，导致全国和城市范围内的电力短缺加剧。本已紧张的供应条件加剧，使得家庭必须依赖替代的供应手段。通过关注电力供应，该研究项目旨在展示服务中断不仅是技术漏洞的结果，还揭示了多年来冲突造成的社会、政治和宗派分裂。

The research explores the consequences of conflicts on electricity infrastructures in Beirut. The impacts on electricity services of the violence and unrest that have affected the city since the beginning of the civil war in 1975 have forced families and individuals to invent new strategies to bring energy to their homes and shops. Informal systems and networks of electricity provision have profoundly altered the urban environment: electricity cables, generators and fuse boxes are now an ubiquitous element of the cityscape. The need to gain access to electricity and to secure stable supply have become part of everyday life and led to new practices and ways of living. Through the evocative power of video this research project follows the wires that crosscut the skyline and buildings of Beirut's neighbourhoods. In visually doing so, the project will ground the electricity cables along the lives of the persons and families it connects. By telling the story of the electricity infrastructure and the everyday responses to its failures the project aims to make sense of the lived and material legacy of the conflict. Emphasising the importance of basic infrastructures, the project uses the synthetic power of video, together with ethnographic and sociological accounts, to show through the voices and buildings of Beirut how conflicts shape cities and change how people live and make decisions. As such, research involves formal and informal interviews with residents and other stakeholders in Beirut, biographic accounts and participant observation to capture the everyday experiences of living with power outages in the city and the different strategies adopted to maintain electricity services in homes.In the early 1960s, a programme for the universalisation of services and infrastructure - including electricity - began in Lebanon, spearheaded by the then president Fouad Chehab, culminating in the creation of Électricité du Liban in 1964. Since then, violence and political unrest in Lebanon have upset that effort and reversed the trend, resulting in the debilitation of services and the prevalence of power outages and elongated blackouts. Since the civil war (1975) infrastructure provision has been used as a political weapon, resulting in significant disruptions and changing the nature of provision of electricity. The following years of reconstruction and rehabilitation policies (new infrastructural work) and the management of networks policies (fees collections, theft repression) have added new layers of spatial and social differentiation. Military attacks on power plants and the resulting damage of the electricity grid during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict have further diminished the capacity of power production, leading to an increase of the shortage at the national and urban scale. The aggravation of the already tensed conditions of supply makes it compulsory for households to rely on alternative means of provision. By focusing on electricity supplies the research project aims to show how the disruption of services is not only the result of technical vulnerability but reveals social, political and sectarian fragmentation caused by conflicts over the years.