Caitlin Berrigan

Continual Fragments of the Now

Return to Sender

Caitlin Berrigan (b. CA, USA; lives and works in New York, Berlin and Vienna) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who works across sculpture, video, and expanded new media to explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices.

In her project Continual Fragments of the Now, Berrigan zooms in on Berlin and Beirut—two cities shaped by speculative real estate development. She studies how war and real estate precariously influence each other and how they define the architecture and sceneries of a place. Since 2010, the artist has documented the shell constructions of commercial and residential developments in Lebanon that were never completed due to the civil war and subsequent financial volatility. She created postcards combining her photographs with excerpts from Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren (1975) and mailed them from Berlin to Beirut, addressing each to the building depicted on it. The experimental artist’s book gathers the postcards, which, in the end, never reached their destinations and came back scribbled with notes by workers in Lebanon’s unpredictable postal system.

With contributions and conversations with the artists, writers, and architects Marwa Arsanios, Marwan Abou Dib, Haseeb Ahmed, Mirene Arsanios, Franziska Pierwoss, Caleb Waldorf, and Suzy Halajian.