Much to their surprise, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige recently came across a half-century-old Lebanese postage stamp depicting a rocket emblazoned with a cedar tree. Though enshrined in official history, this inscrutable, fantastic image—seemingly the stuff of science fiction—commemorated an event no one could remember. An enigma, it intrigued the artists enough to do some research. They discovered that between 1960 and 1967, as the global superpowers vied for superiority in the space race, Armenian students at Beirut’s Haigazian University had successfully produced the Middle East’s first rockets intended for space exploration. The Lebanese Rocket Society launched more than ten of what were called “Cedar” rockets (after the country’s national emblem), reaching an altitude of two hundred kilometers with the “Cedar IV” rocket and briefly becoming the pride of a small nation riding the hopeful, modernizing wave of pan-Arabism. The amateur space program fell apart in 1967, and later, with Lebanon besieged by sectarian strife, it was forgotten. Like many Lebanese artists who came of age during the country’s civil war (1975–1990), a period excluded from national textbooks to this day, Hadjithomas and Joreige have investigated—and invented—unofficial histories both to redress public amnesia and to question the select images and narratives …