2019-2020
Project Title: Introducing Beirut
Project Description:
No less than 1.5 million people fl ocked to the streets of Beirut in late 2019 to mark the beginning of what was later called the October 17 Revolution. Replacing resilience; pain, anguish, struggle, poverty, hopelessness had joined the pedestrian
vocabulary as the population sheds its “thick skin” for an urgent demand for change.
Reintroducing Beirut is an alternative guide to navigating the city. Since Lebanon has been in a state of turmoil for over a decade, it perceives the urban environment through a lens of materializing confl ict and violence, and addresses a facet of the city as it is today, beyond the romanticized idea of “resilience”. The scarcity of commodities, the use of violence, the quasi-routine oppression of protests, and governmental policies are the basis on which this guide is founded. Through the lenses of eco-social violence, a series of pamphlets are developed, each of which tackles a single tool of conflict. To fi ll the chasm of an absent government, tools of soft--and not so soft--warfare are the object of this guide.
These pamphlets serve three categories of engagement: (1) Personal, (2) Group and (3) Societal; each of which is expressed through different mediums respectively via (a) Object, (b) Strategy and (c) Policy.