In Ain al-Mreisseh, a house that opens onto the sea. (Credit: Courtesy of the artist)
It's hard to believe that one is still in Beirut when entering this residence that opens onto the sea and silence. Yet, this was Beirut once: a maritime city before it was paved and an open city before it was fractured. The relationship to the sea was not, as it has become today, a mere "visual consumption," to use the words of architect Ala Tannir, who denounces the growing privatization of the coastline in favor of a financial oligarchy, whose relationship to the environment and community rests on appropriation.
Living with the sea is something entirely different. This is precisely what this unprecedented and minimalist project seeks to convey, based on the restoration of one of the few French mandate houses that escaped the real estate frenzy: an ode to the preservation of heritage — architectural, environmental and cultural — and the possibility of making it dialogue with contemporary interpretations of our heritage and collective memory.
Artists from different regions of Arab world
Visiting Beirut, Ala Tannir, a young Lebanese architect based in New York, discovers this house for the first time in 2021, which she initially envisions as a future studio. But very quickly, she understands that such a place "cannot be taken for granted in a city like Beirut." "As an architect, the urban development of the city concerned me. I wanted to return this space to the city," she confides. Like so many others, the house was damaged by the double explosion at the port on Aug. 4, 2020. Thanks to funding from the Graham Foundation, which supports projects at the intersection of art and architecture, Tannir launched a restoration project punctuated by permanent creative interventions.
She enlisted several artists from different regions of the Arab world, each bringing their own voice to the walls of the house she deliberately chooses not to clutter. She bets on space and silence, traversed only by the soundscape of Khyam Allami and the films of Panos Aprahamian and Vincent Vicken Avakian, in subtle resonance with the spirit of the place. Since the destruction of Aug. 4, 2020, is the very origin of the project, the curator invited Jana Traboulsi and the design collective 7w20 to restore the musharabieh shredded by the blast. But instead of reproducing it identically, they chose to deconstruct the original motif and recompose a new design from its fragments, in a poetic dialogue with the sea. This scar, visible from the outside, has become part of the landscape. It cannot be erased, but perhaps it can be opened toward the horizon.
To protect the house from harm, Syrian architect Khaled Malas transformed a vent into a pearl mosaic inspired by the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. He inserted Quranic inscriptions from a talisman that Ala's grandmother received from a Damascus sheikh after losing several infants. Following his advice, she threw the talisman into the sea upon her return to Beirut. Ala's father, born after this gesture, lived to be 55 years old. This project is dedicated to him. To the man who loved the sea, his daughter offers a work today.
The installation also documents the history of the house through the memories of Ala's great-uncle, Khalo Aziz, 96 years old, born in the building and still residing there. His stories restore the family memory, but also that of the Ain al-Mreisseh neighborhood and its transformations. The jury of the Milan Triennale was sensitive to this personal and creative approach: The microhistory of a place often says a lot about that of a city.
Continuing her research on the neighborhood, Tannir discovers that "the history of this area is quite different from what we have inherited." In her view, the recent upheavals in Beirut are part of a historical continuity initiated in the 19th century by the Ottomans, continued under the French mandate, and culminating with the post-war reconstruction led by Solidere. She recalls that the corniche was built in stages, from the 1920s, swallowing beaches, the shoreline and life on the sea. The erosion of Beirut's built heritage is primarily, according to her, the result of a deliberate lack of planning, both at the national and metropolitan levels. She develops this analysis in the exhibition catalog.
Political and poetic proposition
While Tannir's message is resolutely political, it is also deeply poetic. Anglo-Iraqi musician Khyam Allami imagined a sound system designed from the house's architecture: A magnetic tape runs along the panels, emitting a discreet and immersive sound. In the same spirit, physician and photographer Lara Tabet created friezes from samples taken from the nearby sea: Marine bacteria, cultivated by a chemical process, generated a painting, a true microbiological imprint of the Mediterranean.
Tannir herself went to the sea to symbolically transport this house to Milan. Using cyanotype techniques, she produced blueprints, full-scale plans of the facade at a 1:1 scale. She envisions a larger project: a platform for research and creation focused on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, questioning the transformation of space and its vital link to the sea.
Trained at AUB, then at the Rhode Island School of Design, passed through MoMA, the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, Tannir dares to dream of other futures, where beaches would be public again, fish recognizable, waters clean and fishermen restored to their rights. She recalls that the elders of the neighborhood have formed committees to defend their heritage against real estate developers. "I must imagine all this to continue living," she states with a passion.
"And from my heart I blow kisses to the sea and houses" ("Et de mon cœur j’envoie des baisers à la mer et aux maisons") is "a maximalist installation made of minimalist pieces," summarizes visual artist Vladimir Antaki, also passionate about memory and history. Supported by AFAC and the House of Today Foundation, the exhibition is visible at the Milan Triennale until Nov. 9, and in Beirut, in the house overlooking the sea, until June 13.
This article was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour.
