Originating from a RSVP event in 2006 PP developed with its partners local workshops, online projects and publications.
Current projects are the Catastrophic Space Tour, the Lost Room and the Beyroutes travel guide project.
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.
Last Wednesday, the third episode of the Syrian Film Festival Box Docs kicked off with a Dutch production as its opening film. Shout, directed by Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Ester Gould, is a documentary about two Golani teenagers that get the chance to study in their homeland Syria.
As a rogue desert storm swept the streets of Damascus, Kindi Cinema - a no-nonsense concrete theatre from the sixties - filled up to the rim. The walkways were totally clogged, television crews were crowding the aisles, and film enthusiasts were quite literally hanging from the balcony. As the last spectators tried to secure themselves a spot inside the projector room, a classic coming-of-age story unrolled.
We meet best friends Ezat and Bayan in their home village Majdal Shams on the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, as they prepare to cross one of the most contested and heavily guarded borders in the world. They are about to go to Syria, the motherland they only know from their parents’ stories. Two best friends, on an adventure of a lifetime.
[Screen shot]
Where the wildest thing in their village was getting drunk in the apple orchards, Damascus totally overwhelms them. The city takes them on like a pinball machine. But as Ezat passionately starts his drama classes, finds a warm welcome with his relatives in Syria, aggressively embraces his new freedoms and falls in love with the cutest girl of the school, Bayan struggles. With his study in medicine, with living by himself, but most of all with his longing for the village and the girl he left there. As the Golani students are not allowed to cross the border until the end of the term, we see him travel as close to the border as possible, as often as possible. In the cold, he and his loved one can just talk to each other by shouting through megaphones. At the end of the term, Ezat decides to stay in Syria, while Bayan goes back to his old life.
[Kindi Cinema]
Shout is a stunning documentary. It is a road trip throughfamily life, friendship and adolescence. It is a tale of two cities. And it is about choice and decision. About checkpoints: quite literal, as the story moves back and forth through the UN guarded borderland between Israel en Syria, and on a more emotional level, as the two teenagers constantly force themselves and each other to assess their dreams and ambitions.
[Sabine Lubbe Bakker interviewed]
As the audience started discussing amongst themselves how two European girls had succeeded in making such an authentic, a-stereotypical movie, director Sabine Lubbe Bakker charmingly weaved her way through a series of interviews, in Arabic.
Shout will be screened in the Netherlands at Movies that Matter, the Amnesty International Film Festival, Sunday 28 March at the Spui Theater in The Hague.
Available in Amsterdam in Atheneum and Architectura & Natura booksellers. Soon also in Beirut and elsewhere in the world the Studio Beirut initiated BEYROUTES. A Guide to Beirut published by ARCHIS and produced in collaboration with Partizan Publik and Pearl Foundation.
If you want to read more about the Eifel Tower, the Tate Modern or the Time Square of Beirut then don't buy this guide. BEYROUTES is not an ordinary guide, it won't bring you to the usual places.
Instead of providing facts and figures, landmarks and places to eat BEYROUTES presents a series of stories about the Lebanese capital. The stories are told by a varied group of individuals.
Experienced researchers, artists and writers as Tony Chakar, Mona Harb, Hassan Choubassi and Michael Stanton but also by local professionals and students in the fields of architecture, arts and design as well as foreigners as artist Jan Rothuizen and other frequent visitors of the city contributed and made BEYROUTES into a guide to experience Beirut at this moment of time.
The book which designed by Pascale Hares under art direction of Nicolas Bourquin and Jeanno Gaussi is losely organized around four chapters. The First Impression City, the Official City, the Emotional City and the Invented City.
By changing in each chapter the perspective on Beirut the editors attempt to give visitors tools to engage with the city and its inhabitans without providing an over-arching narrative.
Purposely BEYROUTES focuses both on known areas as Hamra and Ashrafieh or Solidere as well as lesser known quarters of the Lebanese capitals as Dahiya, Karantina and Bourj Hammoud.
Each chapter of BEYROUTES includes a background essay from a cultural or architectural perspective, a walking tour and a series of subjective tales about the different city quarters.
BEIRUT: Walk its streets, visit its hip quarters, check the destroyed but completely resurrected city centre, talk to the armed soldiers at the street corners, listen to the old and not-so-old war stories from the cab driver, explore its old, new and upcoming neighborhoods. Only a few cities in the world offer so many layers of hidden meaning as Beirut does. In the public realm of this town there seems to be merely suggestion, projection and differences of opinion that somehow interact with people’s daily movements and actions.
Participate in the BEYROUTES guide project organized by Studio Beirut, Partizan Publik, Pearland Archis. A project that enables you to go beyond an exotic visit to the people, buildings and places of Beirut, and to get engaged: in its past, present and future. To produce a guide that provokes to construct your own anecdotes, actions and architecture of the city.
If you want to contribute in writing, drawing, research, photography or design: sign up now for the 2nd RESEARCH workshop at ranije[at]yahoo[dot]com
During the Beirut Summer Workshop on Public Space, Partizan Publik conceptualized a side project. Together with the workshop participants we re-designed the Lost of Room of the Lebanese National Museum.
In the Lebanese National Museum the room dealing with modern history is not there. Apparently there is no agreement on what Lebanon’s ‘National History’ is. Yet Lebanese seem to be united in the love for their capital. Although it is a contested and violent city, Beirut encapsulates many places, which are full of sweet, loving, memories and nostalgia. Indeed it is a city saturated with favorite places.
Click here to view the online result of this project.
Partizan Publik is devoted to a braver society. The Partizans explore, produce and implement social, political and cultural instruments, which generate positive and sustainable change to people and their surroundings.
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