Celebrating Beyroutes
The People united will never be defeated: The People properly guided will never stray.
Last Saturday, the Studio Beirut collective launched Beyroutes in the city that it honours: Beirut. With many of the contributors packed into the tiny Papercup Bookstore, it became a happy, emotional, and shamelessly self-boosting affair.
From an upper shelve of a book cabinet, Chris Fruneaux speeched about the deep friendships that underlie the making of the book. In a talk with the Royal Netherlands Embassy’s Cultural Attache, Joost Janmaat revealed some of the inner workings of the beast we refer to as Studio Beirut. In a far corner, Rani al Rajji could be found recruiting stunningly beautiful girls into the ranks of the Bounyaks. Joe Mounzer got into a signing frenzy of his own; brazenly scribbling away at every blank spot of paper that got near. And all along, Steve Eid and Pascale Hares were standing on the pavement outside Papercup, between them the intimidatingly pretty latest addition to the squad: baby Noa.
Hard core locals, engaged tourists and nostalgic diaspora: this guide was made by a broad array of committed amateurs that project themselves onto the city. For years, they have looked to this particular city to accommodate their dreams, ambitions, curiosities and insecurities.
The result was a book about Beirut disguised as a guide. For a guide, it is a pretty lousy one. it does not have much listings of great bars and fancy restaurants. it does not give you splattering colourful accounts of the luxurious places to sleep, nor the latest haunts to dance the night away. It does, however, give you personal, subjective, intimate, and contested accounts ways to look at, experience, understand or even judge the city. Thus, you can navigate the city with Joe’s assassination tour, dig into Ashrafieh with Tony Chakar’s statements on Catastrophic Space, step into the head of artist Jan Rothuizen, who drew the annotated maps or written drawings that illustrate the cover.
Beyroutes is a guide about Beirut that could be of use in any city. They say all people are unique; the cities they live in are surprisingly similar. In every city, for example, the cheap and trashy hostels can be found just around the corner from the train or bus terminal. In every city, next to the official monuments of the state you will find the accidental monuments of the people. Thus, rather than propose a re-enactment or simulation of a particular city, in Beyroutes we propose four lenses, or looking glasses to look at the city (or any city). We give you the first impression city, the official city, the accidental city, and the emotional city. In Beyroutes, these ways of looking have lead to Zinab Chahine's survival guide to Dahiyeh, and the ultimate pieces on the infrastructure of intimacy by Maureen abu Ghanem (on the etiquette of commercial sex) and Joane Chaker (on teenage love).
With so many people present, the launched resulted in a (almost) sell out of the first print, a total depletion of the Lebanese National Reserve of Stroopwafels and a smiling stack of empty 961 bottles.
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