When I first reached Beirut, the sea trumped the anxiety in face of the unknown, for it was the first time I had seen such a blue expanse of sky and water. The sea held me in awe perhaps for months, before I claimed the sadness and fatigue concurrent with the life of Beirutis. The city poses such a large number of questions to its inhabitants that they feel lost in search for answers that they never obtain.
«Do not look for what lies underneath things here, the reality of the city is on its surface,» someone once told me the moment I arrived to Sadat Street in Hamra. There I became the closet girl, living in a very small room that is usually reserved for the maid in a house. But I do not exaggerate when I say that I had always dreamt of this room. Small enough for me to control its space, turning its walls into other dimensions with pictures and sketches, and falling asleep in the smell of paints. I liked that small wooden cabinet, just like the ones where glassware is stored in homes, that was my clothes closet and above it a magnifying glass, an empty glass with brushes, an eyeliner pencil, a magazine about universes and planets, a pack of cigarettes, and many other things.
When I left the monotony of family and community to go into the world on my own, I lost the smoothness of circular time that goes back to the same point every day. Life here takes time by surprise and dismantles it. I often fail to recall moments in their chronological context. Thus I do not remember whether I moved to Furn el-Chebbak in my second or third year of university, but I still keep the meaning of memory abstracted from its context.
From Mathaf to Hamra, going through Corniche el-Mazraa and Verdun, I experienced bus number 24; like a mobile box packed with human beings. I do not really know whether this abstraction is in favor of art or against it. But what I know is that bus number 24 chips away at the importance of individual experience in the city, making it part of a public scene in which tired experiences are reproduced. The place is not individual, as rumored, it allows people to be individuals if they resist the collective group strongly enough.
I transformed from a little girl with long hair, shy and taciturn, into someone else. I set about chasing off habits imposed by my old community, one by one. I experienced independence from my family at a young age. My crossing of the border between Lebanon and Syria was enough to break the many components of power in Syria. Of course, I got myself a boyish haircut, and I liked the idea of working at the Metro al Madina theatre where a new part of Beirut was revealed to me, at night and underground.
I used to feel that Beirut was just a stop on my way, but I kept questioning this idea out of fear that its source might have been my inability to achieve anything here. I do not know whether this has to do with my desire to leave Beirut by any means, or that the place is of little importance to me compared with my strong desire to find a small inner boat to sail in wherever I wish and in all directions and places.
I was trying to reach a single point in my head, reducing the experience and condensing it into an idea. I ended up making small concrete creatures resembling one another in their anxieties, worries and obsessions, ruled by giant monsters that sweep away their desire to live, and make of them copies resembling one another and obeying the large cement block: call it tyranny, capitalism, neoliberalism, your grandfather the village headman... or whatever you wish.
Installation by sculptor Marwa Abu Khalil