Narratives of city-branding and surges of global capital have caused waves of real estate development in Berlin and Beirut, two cities that were spatially divided by conflict and have been under reconstruction for decades. Caitlin Berrigan's artist's book strays from official narratives into a shadow landscape of unfinished and vacant structures that remain suspended in a state of incompletion—fixed on the brink of a possible future. Since 2010, Berrigan has documented the shell constructions of commercial and residential developments in Lebanon. She combined her photographs with Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren (1975) transcribed onto hundreds of saturated postcards and mailed them, addressing each to the building depicted on it. It is an epistolary exchange between Berlin and an emergent landscape of raw, concrete buildings across Lebanon. The book gathers the postcards, which, in the end, never reached their destinations and came back scribbled with notes by workers in Lebanon’s unpredictable postal system. The ruptured, recompiled novel is accompanied by conversations with artists and architects on practice, social space, and real estate. How do we carve out spaces for future imagination, that nonetheless acknowledge geopolitical history and violence? Continual Fragments of the Now explores how unfulfilled optimism, flows of capital, war, and shifting social terrains manifest across time through architecture and prismatic landscapes.

Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer to explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through moving images, sculptural instruments, and expanded new media. Berrigan’s solo exhibitions at JOAN (Los Angeles) and Art in General (New York) were critically acclaimed in Artforum, and her work has shown internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Haus der Kunst Munich, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Ashkal Alwan Beirut among others. She has published three artist books with Distanz (2026), Broken Dimanche Press (2018), and Autograph (2019), and has written for e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, Duke University Press, and Springer. Her work has been awarded by Creative Capital, Skowhegan, Humboldt Foundation, Graham Foundation, and Schloss Solitude. Berrigan leads Cryptocrystalline, a senior postdoctoral fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has held full-time and visiting teaching positions at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Caltech, Bard College Berlin, and Harvard University. She earned a PhD-in-practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a master’s from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program for Art, Culture and Technology and a BA from Hampshire College.