Beirut, A Myriad of Cityscapes
– At the very start of my artist-in-residence at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut from March until May in 2016, I kept a log, jotting down my very first encounters and impressions of people and places.
Beirut. A city built on cultural- and religious crossroads, layers of brick, cement and limestone, framing spaces – hidden spaces, public spaces, sacred spaces, personal spaces. All of them pondered by rituals, rumours, laughter, quarrel and music, as well by vague and recent memory of violence and the immediacy and presence of war.
It is exactly the invisibility of the visibility of things: A myriad of possibilities to be untangled. Wrapped in a variety of ways, in a variety of realisms, dreams and visions.
A Quintessential Journey
Ilse Frech
The earth is a place where we humans thrive, love, care, admire, share either ignore and even destruct one another. It is said bluntly, but there is a thin line between comprehension, compassion and misconception of ‘the other’.
March, 2016
Nr. 1.
A first day of walking in the city center last week already proved to be fruitful, as I came across some people of whom I instantly felt I would cross them again. For those who know Beirut, the following observation – to my experience, might sound obvious knowing how all things and people one encounters is possibly entangled in so many ways. Even in a city ruled by chaos, there is an order to things, seemingly invisible, yet present for those familiar with steering in between the invisibility of the visibility of things.
A visual artist is used to observing, certainly when it comes to a new environment. But this day was different. It was an afternoon where I literally experienced chance, as if chance was walking along the narrow busy streets of Gemmayze and Mar Mikhael. Heading for an area that I hadn’t come across during daytime yet, as it was my second day in Beirut, I was looking at my map when an elderly man approached me cheerfully, asking if he could be of any help.
Thinking he would give me directions to then move on, instead we talked for at least 40 minutes, while I was on my way to the Arab Image Foundation, which was in fact a walk of about 10 minutes from the moment we met. Saying, that foremost we stood still, to then walk for a few steps, while he talked and even sang some Armenian aria’s all the same proving the volume of his baritone voice with which he used to perform at events. Meanwhile I just didn’t get what his profession had been or still is, but all that didn’t really matter. His family, he said, had been living in Beirut for ages; he presented himself being the offspring of a well known Greek-Orthodox family.
Gesturing with his arms in the air, as if he was grasping for his words from above his head, while continuously talking about history, mythology, war and legends about epic love, centuries ago, dazzled me as he spoke French and I had to keep up following his chaotic speech of ideas and stories disentangling too many timelines within his historical frame of centuries going forth and back between Bolshevism, the Ottoman Empire to Lebanon at present and the war in neighbouring Syria.
Our quintessential dance ended when my eyes caught the number of the Arab Image Foundation’s office and I told him that I had arrived, asking for his name and number. I could entirely see myself sit down with him again, to talk some more – if possible, coherently, either let him sing.
For, honestly, where does one find the perfect performer and narrator embodied by a stranger that I happened to walk into in Beirut’s streets by chance at certain day and time? Nor would I know that this stranger would become a dear befriended passenger, one of many dear friends that I was about to encounter, during this three month journey whilst artist in residence.
Nr. 2.
Passing by a gallery space, which lead me to meet with the owner and the photographer exhibiting her work, as this evening her work was about to be presented to the public. The gallery owner invited me to return in a few hours to join in for the opening due in a couple of hours. I decided to continue my path along Gouraud street. Sitting in a café overlooking the street and enjoying my first coffee, just after having posted a message to my dear beloved, my dreams were disturbed by a big black rat just passing by my feet. As I was the only one in the cafeteria at that point, it made me grin as the personnel (all men) were trying hastily to catch it in a suppressed panic mode and debating on strategy. I decided to leave the rat-and-man-game and went to visit the gallery again. I met with the artist, a German photographer who had been photographing in Iran for six years consecutively and had created a beautiful body of work.
We talked shortly and after a glass of wine I continued along the road when I passed a bookshop. The owner of the bookshop – and editor besides being entrepreneur, looked at me with curiosity while I was appreciating his assemblage of art books and handprinted cards and posters. Suggesting me to visit the opening, but as I had already been at the gallery, he then uttered to have a nice meal in the proximity of his shop. As by chance, we arrived at the same moment, for I had lost my way in the dark of the early night since our last encounter, at least an hour had passed.
I can’t remember how we had stumbled upon the topic of love, the second time that day – love and chance swirling around me I suppose, we entangled into yet another dance of words, when I dropped a line saying the words ‘true love’, the publisher questioned whether love could be true as such, either untrue, when he said: “True love is a concept by women”.
A daring thing to say, especially when one sits across one! Still, no no, this man wasn’t afraid of what my response would be, instead a playful dance of words and adjectives arose, while we sat at a tiny dinnertable having wine with mezze. Normally one has this type of conversation with people one knows a bit longer than just for an hour or so. Unusual as it may seem, the unusual in this world is very usual to me. I’m not persuading you to have missed out of this – or any other experience for that matter, as I’ve learned, all of us are instinctive beings. Meaning, that from the moment two or more people meet one another, one senses instantly whether a connection of understanding is to be established. If yes, this will happen instantly, yet naturally. It takes a few words, foremost it takes a subtle reading and understanding of the other person’s being, through what I call the inner eye.
One glance of eyes meeting for a first time, can be more meaningful than a flood of hundreds of words. Therefor I believe true exchange or dialogue comes from another place, another dimension of understanding. An experience that goes well beyond words. These are encounters that somehow behold some sort of a promise. For this promise to unveil itself, no assumption can be made. Nor does it come in a dozen delivered and packed at your doorstep either.
It is exactly the invisibility of the visibility of things: A myriad of possibilities to be untangled. Wrapped in a variety of ways, in a variety of realisms, dreams and visions.
Nr.3.
They were looking at me with patience, curiosity and some amusement — yet there was a tone of respect in their amusement. I was standing somewhere along a road that night, lost again in Beirut. A taxi stopped with three men who looked at me while I was trying to explain where I needed to go. One, the youngest, spoke English, and the other, the oldest man, who just got in the taxi before me, spoke French while the driver spoke Arabic. Here I found myself conversing both in English and French, while the men conversed in Arabic amongst themselves.
All of us were trying to solve a linguistic riddle, so it seemed. One of the men nodded in a friendly manner to me, as he invited me inside. It was the oldest one I chose to sit next to. For the next five or six minutes we had a little chat. To my curiosity as to where he was heading, he replied that he was in Beirut to assist at a classical concert in one of the better-known hotels of the city. He had arrived from Damascus, Syria, that day.
While the taxi was heading uphill, I spontaneously brought up the war and asked whether he thought the war would come to an end soon. With an ambivalent tone in his voice, somewhere between irony and sadness, yet with a slightly ‘numb’ sense, he answered that the war wouldn’t see an end in the forthcoming twenty years or so.
I sensed they tagged me as a typical white female tourist, one who seemed to be naïve. I then asked the older man whether he feared for his life in Syria, while tasting the feeling of freedom and peace in Beirut, only to return to Syria in a day or two. “ No, I’m not afraid ”, he responded. “I work for the Embassy (saying Assad), …I shall be fine”.
Of course, he preferred to live in a nation not being torn apart by war, but he would “deal with reality the way it comes”, as if he was murmuring a vow with the mannered façade of political correctness. The two other men in the taxi, the driver and the young man sitting up front, remained strikingly silent. The youngest asked me, “You, new here?”, in reply to my question if he was from Beirut. I sensed I was being scrutinized. Although there was a touch of lightness to his question, his tone of voice was somehow betrayed by the mirrored gaze of the drivers’ eyes, that secretely met mine.
At that very moment, while somehow ‘reading’ all these silent floating gazes from one to the other, within the narrow space of the taxi and the cooling evening breeze passing freely in between our physical bodies, I was struck still by the immediacy of the paradox in the words uttered by the older man.
When he left the taxi, I noticed his pale face as he walked on the sidewalk. Unveiled as his face seemed to be, lit by the nonchalance of impersonal street lanterns. With his gaze focused on the sidewalk, from my perspective he somehow shrunk in size, as if the amber toned light had stripped meaning from the tone of voice and of his words previously uttered under the contraints of social expectations, or even that of code – a linguistic conspiracy, in the presence of strangers sharing a taxi ride in Beirut, at this late hour.
Nr. 4.
Beirut. A city built on cultural- and religious crossroads, layers of brick, cement and limestone, framing spaces – hidden spaces, public spaces, sacred spaces, personal spaces. All of them pondered by rituals, rumours, laughter, quarrel and music, as well by vague and recent memory of violence and the immediacy and presence of war. It is hard to imagine, that just on an hour-ride away, in Syria, war was – and still is, raging.
– Ilse Frech, A Quintessential Journey, 2016.
