Her Elegiac Landscape: Southern Lebanon (2001), is a suppressed form of death in life, akin to an archaeological discovery of a grave in an unsuspecting landscape. Printed onto a slim landscape format, the hills turn to blue in the distance reminiscent of the exquisite seventeenth-century cartography of George Braun and Franz Hogenberg. Using a lens she made herself and attached to a Lomography camera, Yacoub went to Southern Lebanon to experience the geography of a region that had been forbidden to civilians throughout the bitter protracted Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The sites Yacoub visited, where you could see ‘only clumps of grass, a few rocks...’ corresponded to places of massacre. Mediterranean cypresses, symbols of mourning since Classical Antiquity, dot the land, nearly invisibly. Walter Benjamin’s words on the stories that lie within buried layers of civilisation echo within Elegiac Lands- capes: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Yacoub’s work tells a story of perception and can be read as an investigation of the gaze. As in her lecture-performance ‘What do I do?’ the artist asks whether you see a ‘battlefield’ or an ‘elegiac landscape’, leaving the answer up to the viewer.