Bechara Maalouf: What Still Holds

What Still Holds

Komune presents What Still Holds, three lamps by Bechara Maalouf. The lamps are built from fragments that span two distinct environments: his family home in Kfertay, Lebanon, and his present life in New York. The house in Kfertay sits alone on a quiet mountain—suspended in time while simultaneously enduring it. In contrast, the city offers an opposite, ever-changing pace. Maalouf constructs the lamps with repetitious precision, recalling the wrought-iron window motifs that surround the house in Lebanon. These patterns are transfigured and fractured, dissolving into forms that no longer hold shape.

Maalouf’s senior thesis, But First, Coffee, attempted to answer the question “how might we still make coffee if it were the end of the world?” In his apocalyptic musing, Maalouf constructed coffee roasters out of a Fresnel lens from an old TV set and a popcorn maker, and a Kyoto cold brew drip tower out of a lampshade and the spigot from a lemonade jug. The constraints of an imagined future gave way to a world in which familiar objects were reassembled into new systems of use. In What Still Holds, Maalouf must contend with the real—the memory of a simple pattern on a window—now in danger of destruction in real time.

Both projects shepherd the same question: what elements of ordinary life persist under the threat of discontinuity? But First, Coffee engenders improvised tools through speculative collapse, allowing ritual to persist through adaptation. The logic of What Still Holds is far more immediate and intimate. What remains is no longer projected toward an imagined end, but thrust into the present, just as the window is no longer a structure, but a threshold. In place of a distant apocalypse, Maalouf turns to an existing architecture of memory–one tied to home–and considers how such forms might endure as the structures themselves become increasingly precarious. This extends to the material construction of the lamps, which incorporate scrap wooden beams—remnants of buildings on the Lower East Side that once carried domestic lives of their own.

These wooden beams upon which the lamps sit offer another register of temporality: one not marked by repetition or industrial production, but by history, erosion and decay. Against the precision of the laser-cut aluminum, the materials produce a tension between permanence and adaptation. Maalouf transforms the memory of place into objects that function as both relics and domestic furnishings. What emerges is no longer an act of reconstruction or preservation, but an attempt to hold disparate worlds in suspension. The lamps cannot restore what has been or might be lost, nor can they relinquish it. Instead, they linger in the space between object and memory, carrying traces of home, shifting across time.

- Chanterelle Menashe Ribes