Rubber, EVA Foam, 250 x 320 cm, 2023
Emerging from Beirut Caoutchouc by the artist Marwan Richmaoui, a conversation with it, or a rupture from it? In this new version, the building blocks and neighborhoods are not quite discernable, they are fragmented and disintegrating, as I see Beirut now.
I ran into Mounir Sabra on my way out of a yoga class right after the Beirut port explosion. The country endured yet another collective trauma after this catastrophe. No two people would meet without relaying the events of that hour: their exact location when half the city blew up.
We exchanged words briefly, then he immediately shifted to talking about his experience of that moment, and expressing relief that I was safe (alive). When he finished recounting the events, he pulled up photos from his phone of his destroyed home and the buildings surrounding it. He explained how he escaped and the horrors he witnessed.
One particular photo caught my attention. It was a picture of a piece of rubber with a map of Nejmeh Square and the Serail in downtown Beirut, a picture from a work I knew well. Mounir said this piece was still in his house. He didn’t know how it got there—it was probably blown away with the shards of wood and glass that ended up in the wreckage of his house. When I told him this was a piece from an artwork, Mounir remembered that in the giant building near his house lived a well-known collector called Henry Salloum. This likely belonged to some work in his collection. Mounir and I went to visit Mr. Salloum carrying the broken piece. He had bought the artwork titled Beirut Caoutchouc and dedicated an entire room for its display. Beirut Caoutchouc was also blown to pieces from the blast. Only a few of its parts remain, scattered here and there. The largest piece had landed in Mounir’s house.
Henry refused to take it back. He said he was leaving Lebanon for good, taking with him only a few artworks that had survived unscathed.
This story is fiction. Reality is, however, stranger than fiction. The only true fact in this story is that the blast happened.
Part of Serotonin, Benzine, and a Renegade Body, Solo Show, Marfa Gallery
