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 confl ict.
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.