This is “Bride of Beirut,” a sculpture that sits “just 675 meters away from the epicenter of the August 4, 2020 Beirut port blast” and commemorates that tragic event with rubble and debris salvaged from the site. It was inspired by the designer’s harrowing experience of fearing for a loved one’s safety that day: “For 10 minutes we didn’t know what was happening because there was no cellular connection.”
I hadn’t heard of this artwork when I stumbled on it on my last day in Beirut and found it arresting, though oddly arranged. Like something was missing. The installation had apparently originally featured hundreds of shards of glass around the central figure, but another individual took it upon himself to clean it up, because he found that re-traumatizing and potentially dangerous. Many seemed to echo his views on social media and the original designer seemed fine with it, even thanking him in a comment on his post. L’Orient Today has a write-up about the whole affair.
I can’t speak for residents of the area because I was far, far away, but from what I’ve seen from images, the site doesn’t really work without the glass, and I didn’t see much evidence of the greening that was to replace it. But the visceral reactions against it and the individual and collective efforts to engage and affect it seem to me like a triumph of public art in a country where these things are never participatory.
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