In the early 1960s in Beirut, a group of students at Haigazian, the Armenian University, led by their mathematics professor, Manoug Manougian, designed and launched “rockets for exploration and space study.” The project had no military intentions, and rather, aimed at promoting science and research. The Lebanese Rocket Society was born. Its activities soon expanded, and more than ten solid-propellant rockets were successfully launched. The Cedar Rockets had a range of 400 and then 600 km, reaching as far as the stratosphere. But the experiment was terminated abruptly in 1967 and fell into oblivion. The documentary and art works around this project brought back some of it protagonists and the strange tale of this Lebanese space race. The Golden Record is one of the installations created by the artists as part of the space project.

In 1962, the Lebanese Rocket Society had installed a transmitter at the tip of their rockets which broadcasted messages on Lebanese national radio waves during the rocket’s launch and flight. For the artists, this echoed how the US space probes such as Phoenix and Voyager 1 and 2, in 1977, launched messages engraved on golden records, intended for extraterrestrials. The messages were a selection of sounds meant to “establish a portrait of the diversity of life, of history and of culture on Earth,” a kind of interstellar message of peace and friendship. Currently, both Voyager probes are sailing adrift in the black sea of interplanetary space, having left our solar system years ago. The first probes will arrive close to a star in 40 000 years.

The soundtrack of The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth and of Lebanon was created using sound archives dating back to the 1960s, and inspired by the memories of various scientists from the Arab world who shared in the adventure. The sounds chosen reflect a subjective portrait and sound representation of our region, in general, and more specifically, of Lebanon during the 1960s. Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture and cinema, being documentary or fiction film. They have received awards in the most important international film festivals throughout the years and have been awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2017 for their art project Unconformities. Their long-term research is based on personal or political documents, traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret and the archeological undergrounds of cities. Hadjithomas and Joreige were both born in Beirut, Lebanon and currently live and work between Beirut and Paris.