By Nadim Karam, Atelier Hapsitus, Beirut (www.hapsitus.com)
I always felt it important to go public.
Maybe as a need to reach the world around me and exteriorize myself. Also as a necessity to address the city culturally, especially the emerging post war cities like (Beirut & others) were the financial issues are first addressed while the city’s memory and historical layers fall into oblivion.
What is public art and how to project it in the city has been an issue of continuous research at Atelier Hapsitus. Cities need to dream and through the insertion of stories that act as links between the past and the future, we can help them do so. I have selected our office to be on the demarcation line. In a city recovering from a long civil war, I felt that the areas that used to be the barricade lines during a war, fought from street to street, becomes a rich combination of cultural, religious and social behavior in the post war period.
The two days seminar in Venice was a total change for me. It brought together different ideas developing along the Mediterranean Sea; I spent two days in one space seeing such diverse and interesting ideas that brings new and fresh input to the mind. An escape from the daily life of survival in which we are entangled and a way to rediscover my city with a fresh outlook.
In fact the Mediterranean Sea is a relief for Beirut. It links it to different thoughts and a variety of cultural aspects. It opens its boundaries on almost all sides and gives it a unique identity that balances it with the mountains and anti mountains of Lebanon and the extent of the Arab desert.
I live in Beirut, and I have decided to work from here. Being on the Mediterranean Sea it is natural to be in touch with the other Mediterranean countries.
These meetings between different cultures around one “bassin” shows that the common sea that we share is fully populated with stories told each one his \ her way. Between Sadness and happiness, war and beauty, the boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea are always fluctuating. It is for us to find out the issues that differentiate us and the others that bring us together.
1 response so far
Yasmine MATAR // Oct 26, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Dear Mr Nadim KARAM,
I hope this e-mail finds you well. The purpose of this e-mail is to
ask you for a potential collaboration for a project together with our
research center in Gent-Belgium .
I was told to contact you by Ine Pisters my friend and colleague, she told me you were a good friend of her sister Hettie.
I am a Lebanese Doctorate student in the Comparative Sciences of
Culture in Belgium.
My doctorate thesis is about the “Peacefull and prosperous coexistence
and cooperation in a pluri-religious and multicultural City”.
My research center, the “Center for Intercultural Communication and
Interaction” (CICI) is an interdisciplinary research center at Gent
University in Belgium and it focuses mainly on research and projects
in the fields of Culture and Arts.
We are now presenting for a project funded be the Arab Fund for Arts
and Culture; The project evolves around a “Performative dialogue
between artists and citizens in an Urban context, creating sensory
bridges between artists and the public helping to spread cultural
values in different cities from the East (Orient, Middle East and Arab
Countries) and from the West (Occident, mainly European cities).
I am amazed by your artistic
creativity and the cultural message you try to convey in your work,
I thought you might be interested in working together with us on a
project that would involve both arts, culture and would have an
education purpose.
If yes, please let me know asap, to send you more details about the project.
Kind Regards,
Yasmine MATAR
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