Submarine Channel

Art After Crisis is a website by traveling writer Chris Keulemans. Part of Submarine Channel’s Roadtrips documentary series, it follows the author on his journeys in Beirut, Prishtina and Tirana, among others.

Ever since his first visit to wartime Sarajevo, he has been fascinated by the way artists reinvent their work, their city and their life after a period of war or dictatorship. Their art often occupies empty spaces in a city struggling to recover. It finds a place for traumatic and violent memories, it mirrors the shaky present and it looks forward while others are still paralyzed.

Keulemans travelled to Beirut, Prishtina and Tirana… Along the way, all the materials he collected is curated on the website – travel stories, audio interviews, video shots, the photographs of his girlfriend and co-traveler Riette Mellink. And of course, the new art of all these cities itself.

Each city tells its own story through the artists who live there. But it seems that art also follows universal patterns when reinventing the place it comes from: from the original euphoria through the emotional backlash to the emergence of truly new places and ideas. Check out the Beirut Metro Map, the Tirana pyramid, the erotic imagination of Jakarta, the Anne Frank of Sarajevo and all the others…

Roadtrips is a series of online documentaries made by filmmakers during their journeys around the globe, with interactive timelines, maps, images, text, and video segments.