The Beirut Manifesto

Celebrate an absurd juxtaposition,
Glorify this informal language that is so easy and fast to learn and understand and how the absence of its limitations greets you in a chaotic manner.

Celebrate this roaring sound of the machines and the babbling of the people as we walk down the streets.

Celebrate while listening to the overlapping sounds of the mosques and the churches, the machines and the people, the sea and the mountains.
(One could perhaps never encounter war damage if they avoided most of the city. But it exists, and it adds a certain intensity to it. Perhaps only an intensity, which the individual brings. But the other intensities that the dichotomy between the two religions in the city, and the legendary hot-blooded middle eastern methods of resolving differences make Beirut memorable. Beirut’s true intrigue lies in its ambience as a tired postwar ghost town desperately trying to regain footing.)

Celebrate the informality, enthusiasm and magnificence of everything we see around us as we are taking a walk, where new compliments old, and high values low.

Celebrate this charming mix between East and West. Walk and contemplate the traces of where cultures interact and discuss their opinion.

Admire how smoothly this multi-cultural and yet identical city opens the floor to many discussions.
Walk, think and talk organically through a non-linear path, a movement that reflects in the daily activity of this city.

Celebrate a place where you feel that you are imprisoned yet free, lost but happy, mistreated but enjoying it.

Celebrate a whole that contains parts of ruined buildings as well as new ones, modern and classic, machines and people, Muslims and Christians, black and white, foreign and native, aristocrats and proletarians.

Honor old operating systems integrated with new ones.
Celebrate a city where everything is quite large and at an extreme edge.

A superheated atmosphere, watch how its molecules behave when everything is turned up.
A city of hope even with the never-ending destruction.
A multicultural homogeneity.
A cultural maturity and adulthood that is a result of several years of civil war.
An incompatibility of absolute place and form.
A reality of transforming history into an explosion of neutral colors and an overlaying of opinions.
Appreciation in a state of distortion.
A love for danger, adventure, risk and the habit of fearlessness.

Celebrate DENSITY.

Celebrate an immense Pompeii still whitening with sepulchers.

Enjoy pure spontaneity and subjectivity, complexity and contradiction, overwhelming contrast, constant recognizable change, mixture of colors, sounds and smell.

CELEBRATE BEIRUT!