BEIRUT, LEBANON Creative Collectives

Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s polarized politics cultivated a deliberate vacuum of the public realm and collective practices, evident in the lack of public spaces in Beirut, and their neutralization through excessive control, filtered access and neglect. Yet with the rise of the information age and personal access to technology since the early 2000s, previously inaccessible ways of collective expressions became possible, that broke away from established political and confessional definitions.
In such context, Creative Collectives looks at the spatial history of the collective in Beirut, re-charting all initiatives and manifestations that can be dubbed as communal — from political to social and economic — and their expressions in the city’s urban space from the year 2000 until the present.
Secondly, the project investigates emerging forms of collectives in the city, looking through mappings and footages at Beirut’s creative and entrepreneurial clusters. Operating at the intersection of private and communal initiatives, such practices in Beirut have slowly but steadily inhabited existing buildings and provided alternatives for collective experiences, mostly invaluable in a city where the public realm is fragmented into filtered archipelagos.
The project imagines a speculative future where Beirut can be overlaid by a network of nodes — Creative Collectives — that hold specific criteria for collectivity: the creative re-appropriation of vulnerable urban fabric and open spaces to host a positive negotiation between conservation, individual modes of practice, and collective experience.