"Do you think my birds are art?"
"Yes I suppose they are, its culture, bird keeping"
"I'm going to paint a mural on the wall, a forest. well I cannot painted directly on the wall because the birds will die with the fumes of the paint, so instead I am getting a man to design the forest and then it will be printed onto wallpaper and pasted onto that wall"
RIGHT: Internal affairs building in beirut. Outside the building there was a huge queue snaking back all the way down the street. these are syrian refugees attempting to get papers of residence or possibly work permits. As I was driving past in a taxi, the taxi driver said 'Syrians, more and more of them everyday, not good'..
ABOVE AND BELOW: The old centre of Beirut has been completely renovated, this renovation is an absolutist reflection of the new way of doing things. This new way of doing things is a wholehearted reliance on unrestrained capitalism as a bringer of both internal stability and national wealth. it was all Rafic Hariri idea, before somebody blew him up. still nobody is sure who blew him up.
The whole centre district is now privately owned, mainly by Saudi's, and controlled by private security guards, if they don't like the way you look you're not coming in. This has led to a perception amongst locals that part of the city, a city that has only just been reconstructed has now been sold off. The people of the city do not own the centre.
In the reconstruction of the Central district they use lots of old stone to do the renovation, on the surface it's very complimentary, from a distance it looks like it makes sense. however a more detailed inspection exposes a corporate soullessness to the place, that feels a bit like a reanimated corpse or maybe a wax dummy.
