Daily Star – Lebanon
Nov 11 2006
Landmark’s battle scars take on new meaning
Multimedia artist Marwan Rechmaoui’s captures history of a former
icon
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Interview
BEIRUT: Marwan Rechmaoui’s most recent work, entitled “Spectre,” is
an exact, sculptural replica of a building that spreads across two
blocs in the neighborhood of Ras Beirut.
As an artist, Rechmaoui has nurtured an enduring interest in acts of
mapping and deconstructing city life. “A Monument for the Living,”
from 2002, dealt with the history of Bourj al-Murr, the concrete
tower in Kantari that continues to define the Beirut skyline despite
its uselessness (never finished, can’t be used, can’t be knocked
down, can’t be imploded, can’t shake a reputation as Civil War-era
sniper nest and torture center). “Beirut Caoutchouc,” from 2003,
re-created a map of the capital in tough, interlocking black rubber.
For “Spectre,” he tells The Daily Star, “I wanted to take a
cross-section of Lebanese society,” but only by dealing with the
traces that society leaves behind, the marks that are imprinted on
Beirut’s urban fabric.”
Plus, Rechmaoui used to live in this particular building, so whether
he’d be keen to acknowledge it or not, it must mean something to him.
The building, known as the Yacoubian, is named for the man who had it
built, says Rechmaoui, an Armenian originally from the Syrian city of
Aleppo who, according to rumor, once worked as a cake vendor but came
into great wealth when he moved to Beirut.
As Rechmaoui tells it, the Yacoubian was erected in the Nasserite
era, in the aftermath of Syria’s brief unification with Egypt, when
members of the Damascene elite were nervous about the potential
nationalization of their assets and shifted large amounts of capital
into banks in Beirut.
At the time, he continues, a group of five architects living in
Beirut pushed for new legislation to be passed in Lebanon, which
would allow the units of a particular building to be separated and
sold. Previously, such legislation had applied only to undeveloped
land.
As a result, he says,”people took advantage.”
Huge structures went up in Beirut’s residential and commercial
quarters. The typical four- to six-floor apartment building gave way
to towering blocs like the Yacoubian’s.
A Lebanese architect named Rafik al-Muhib drafted the plans for the
building. Yacoubian had commissioned him to design a deluxe housing
complex for wealthy residents who would be living in close proximity
to the sea and Beirut’s upscale, cosmopolitan nightlife district.
Indeed, in the initial years of its existence, the building was used
for that very purpose. The legendary Venus nightclub was located
beneath the parking lot, and every night that parking lot was filled
with Rolls Royces and Ferraris.
But with the outbreak of the 1975-1990 Civil War in Lebanon, the
building’s original residents, whether they were from Lebanon or
elsewhere, began to leave in large numbers. They were rich, says
Rechmaoui, which meant they could afford to escape the fighting, and
they had other places to live anyway.
As the violence in Lebanon continued, new residents began to move in
– refugees from other parts of Beirut and from South Lebanon, seeking
to escape the first Israeli invasion of March 1978.
Some of the older residents stayed on throughout the 15-year war.
Some refugees from the South who decided to settle down in Beirut
after the war eventually bought their apartments and stayed as well.
Some refugees who had been squatting in their units moved out and
made way for another wave of new residents in the postwar period.
In the process, the Yacoubian Building lost its original luster. It
is no longer viewed by anyone as a glamorous address.
But for Rechmaoui, it is a telling piece of history.
For a few years, he says, he lived in there in a first-floor
apartment with a studio next door, his two windows located right
above the entrance. For Rechmaoui, what is interesting about this
sprawling, two-bloc concrete structure is the challenge it presents
to the central tenets of modernity.
It was designed to be clean, rational, sleek, and sophisticated, he
says, and for a time it was all these things. It resembled an
architect’s maquette.
But then everything broke down. Residents wrecked the unity of the
facade by enclosing their balconies or throwing up tough and colorful
curtains. Businesses moved in hung exterior placards advertising
their offices. The boy scouts established a base in the complex, as
did an Eritrean social club and a dive bar much loved for its Che
Guevara memorabilia.
The new inhabitants of the Yacoubian established their own ad hoc
barriers and gerrymandered boundaries between units. The spaces
imagined by planners gave way to realities of how those spaces were
used. New rules took hold. The rhythms of urban life were disrupted
by the conventions of rural residents who lived in the Yacoubian
Building as they had in their villages.
“Spectre” is a recreation of this building in miniature. Rechmaoui
was commissioned to create it by the Sao Paulo Biennale, which opened
last month. He planned to cast it in concrete and have it shipped by
boat from Lebanon to Brazil this past summer. With the outbreak of
another war with Israel, things didn’t pan out. Instead, Rechmaoui
traveled to Sao Paulo in late September and built the work there
ahead of the opening in early October. He had only two weeks time to
complete it, which meant he had to make sacrifices.
As it stands now, “Spectre” is constructed of wood and painted a pale
shade of beige.
Originally, Rechmaoui wanted each unit to be not only rendered in
concrete but also exploded out for emphasis, “a gentle rather than
violent explosion,” he explains.
Pulling out each unit would call attention to the demarcation lines
between the apartments and highlight how they function, how they
allow a heterogeneous group of people to live together.
“Spectre” was meant to be a recreation of every detail along these
borderlines, examining the traces people leave behind and exploring
how urban life is impressed upon a city’s surface. At the same, the
artist wanted to make manifest his refusal to divulge what goes on in
those people’s lives inside.
“I don’t like to deal with people,” Rechmaoui says. “It’s a hassle
for me. I work how I work. Plus I didn’t want the work to be
gimmicky. You can never know what’s inside [a building like the
Yacoubian.] You can only see what people allow you to see, even if
you’re a voyeur.
“For me, it’s important to work on the city,” he continues.
“According to modernists, a place like this does not exist, because
to exist it has to follow a certain order. This place is chaos, but
it works and it works well. I don’t look at it as a case study on how
people are living and how they function,” he adds. It’s more a
mediation on urban life, “throwing away traditions to live now in
this life.”
Rechmaoui traveled to Sao Paulo with a suitcase packed full of
individually marked and ordered envelopes – the accessories
representing each of those borderlines.
The work currently on view in Sao Paulo is an approximation of the
work Rechmaoui originally wanted to do. Within a year’s time, he
intends to redo the work as planned.
The one lesson he learned in Brazil is this, he says: “I realize it
has to be bigger.”