CALAMITY.
An installation by Uncanny, Midge, and Charbel.
A year ago, Charbel approached Uncanny with a vision: to create an installation that merges physical sculpture and 3D animation — a dialogue between the tangible and the digital, the silent and the screaming.
The central theme is war trauma , a wound that never fully heals. With the resurgence of wars around us, especially the most recent one in Lebanon, something stirred in Charbel: a dormant pain reawakened, a memory that shakes you to the bones.
From this emotional ground, CALAMITY emerged.
An abstract reflection on the transformation of peace into chaos, of silence into destruction.
The visitor enters a room draped with long, flowing flags, evoking the fragile and complex idea of nationhood , their textures layered, conflicted, alive. At the center stands a broken sculpture spelling “Peace” in Arabic, fractured yet persistent. Nearby, a large screen hosts the unfolding of the 3D animation.
The film begins in monochrome, vast and meditative , a slow, breathing landscape of serenity. Gradually, this calm collapses into color, noise, and disorder: a violent metamorphosis where harmony disintegrates into chaos, echoing the inner collapse of those marked by war.
CALAMITY is not a narrative but a state , a tension between stillness and explosion, memory and erasure.
It is a confrontation with what remains after peace breaks.
Special thanks to
Total Concepts
Dries Geuns
Creativ' Up
Wonder Festival
Matthijs Vanstaen