Medawwar 2.0 is an effort to re-bridge the city coast to the sea.
Light aligns on our sides and
glows the huge highway of Charles l Helou. People look like the minimal
elements of the space around the high way, in a way not to exist. However, they
do. More over there, just down there, exists a land or maybe a country, no one
knows what is it exactly. They call it the Lebanese Port. Though I think it is
just a port and surely not Lebanese. An intervention which clashes the
separation between Marmakhael, the entrance to the middle of Beirut, capital of
Lebanon, and the cost line, starts to encounter and wrap around the high way
reaching all the way to the last square meter of the port. Along with other
programs the project mainly consists of a port tax-free market and a private
bus station, which sits next to the gate of a circulating tube, which
transports people up and down to the inaccessible sea. Speaking of separation,
the people in marmakhael are different in literal words, and some of them do
not recognize the existence of the others. Therefore, a stage, a platform hosts
several cultural events that introduce Beirut to itself. In addition, the
performance is on water, a natural element that has been deprived from reaching
the land. This water is a tunnel which absorbs itself from the Mediterranean
sea. All in all, the project is trying to bring the activities that where on
the primitive Lebanese port, the same activities that where demolished for the
port to grow. The activities were the Medawwar. The activities will never be
but a traditional, yet modernized Lebanese Medawwar.
