{"id":16159,"date":"2014-09-22T09:31:42","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T07:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/beirut-multidentity-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-01T01:27:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T23:27:44","slug":"beirut-multidentity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/beirut-multidentity\/","title":{"rendered":"Beirut multidentity"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is Beirut? What is the soul of this city, apparently so indecipherable, aggressive and fragmented, and yet dangerously attractive like a magnetic zone?\u00a0Like a Tarkovskian Stalker, the urban explorer begins his reconnaissance of the city. A description of its physical appearance, its buildings and streets would render only a partial image of its truest nature.
\nThe overwhelming mass of towers, bridges and viaducts are merely a rigid infrastructure that affects whole neighbourhoods, connecting and at the same time separating its multifaith community. The eighteen religious ethnicities continue to live together in the capital, which is being rebuilt on itself. Once divided by invisible and impassable lines in the urban tissue, they now find themselves united in the difficulty of a consensual elaboration of history. In spite of everything, the magnet that is Beirut still wields its attracting and disorienting influence. Its oscillations make us want to investigate the city from another angle than the contemplative analytical one. Its self-image does not coincide with the external reality.
\nOn the assumption that the outer, public appearance of the city does not sufficiently reveal its essence, we have investigated its most intimate and private dimension.
\nThis project, constituted by photographs taken by Edoardo Delille, is the first step in an investigation on \u201cAn anthropology of living\u201d1 in the contemporary Beirut. Like an exploded drawing that reveals the internal functions of a living organism, the photographs of its multifaith community reveals much more of its city and its history than may be inferred from its outward appearance. An imaginary cross-section in the manner of Perec2, on an urban scale, exposes domestic scenarios of the Beirut society.
\nThese photographs retrace the different identities of faiths, ethnicities and lifestyles in the urban territory, along a path of discovery that shows how the individual citizens relate to their inhabited space. The latter are often surprising; while some are modern and carefully planned, others are chaotic and variegated, traditional, enigmatic. The cross-section reveals an extremely heterogeneous, multicultural and composite society that challenges the preconceived Western image of a generic Middle-Eastern culture or a city that never got over the war. The reconstruction of Beirut involves more than just buildings. The recovery of a shared memory is the complex common ground for the cultivation of a new society, made of ethnic, religious and cultural groups, but above all of countless individuals, all of them different but all of them Lebanese.<\/p>\n