2014, the breaking point, and the day work stopped being possible. Told by Ahmed Al-Baroudi (EP 135).
Ahmed's personal periodisation of the post-2011 Libyan years runs in three points: 2010 as the peak — the last full year before the rupture; 2012 as paradise — the brief window in which the post-revolutionary project still seemed possible; and 2014 as the break — the year the civil war re-opened and the post-revolutionary project collapsed in on itself.
The 2014 break, in Ahmed's account, was not a single date. It was the accumulation of weeks in which Tripoli's infrastructure became unreliable and the work he was trying to do — visual identity, design, the slow building of a discipline — became impossible to conduct as anything other than an act of stubborn refusal.
He described, in the episode, a shell landing close enough to the building next door that the practical question of whether to keep working from the studio dissolved. The shell was the punctuation, not the cause. The cause was the slow accumulation of months in which the post-2012 paradise had inverted, ministry by ministry, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, into a country at war with itself again.
The story sits underneath the rest of Ahmed's biography in the episode. The fear-of-being-laughed-at diagnosis, the Dawaya exhibition platform, the state-commissioned Visual Identity Guide — all of it is built by a practitioner who survived 2014 and who continues to work in a country where 2014 has not yet ended for the design economy. The shell next door is the moment the periodisation became personal.
See: Ahmed Al-Baroudi