Beirut - (AFP) - In a heritage building that has become a museum in the heart of Beirut, a rich archive mixes with events that summarize the capital's golden past and the hidden corruption it stored, with works of art that simulate a present exhausted by successive crises, to draw the features of a country living in a state of permanent turmoil.

Newspaper clippings, film negatives, and entry statements gleaned from the archives of Caf des Roi, one of the pre-civil war (1975-1990) one of the most famous nightclubs in Ain Mreisseh in West Beirut, tell of faulty official politics, entrenched corruption, general strikes, and student protests that marked an era. important in the history of Lebanon.

In addition to this archive, ten artists participating in the exhibition, which opened Thursday, entitled "Hello, Beirut?" Contemporary artworks that vary between photos, videos, and interactive installations, simulate their vision of Beirut's present, which is also depleted by corruption and the failure of successive political authorities to manage the country's crises.

"Sometimes it is strange to explain what we are witnessing without knowing what happened in the past," exhibition director Delphine Abi Rached Darmansi told AFP.

"Beirut is suffering and we are suffering," she added, pointing out that much of the misery that the Lebanese live in today is rooted in the crises of the past.

According to the curators, the idea of the exhibition stemmed from a ten-year search in the archives of the nightclub for its owner, Prosper Guy Barra (1914-2003), a Lebanese billionaire whose name stuck to the golden age of Beirut before the civil war.

It was supplemented by research in the archives of newspapers and magazines to shed light on that period in Lebanon's history.

Among the artworks, a text by Guy Bara is displayed in which he wrote, speaking of the political class at the time, “those sick minds obsessed with collecting money,” in an impression that still prevails among the Lebanese who have been exhausted by an unprecedented economic collapse that has been going on for nearly three years amid political paralysis.

"He was talking in the sixties about what we live in today," says Darmansi.

Today, more than three decades after the end of the civil war, the Lebanese are living in very difficult circumstances due to the economic crisis, which the World Bank ranked among the worst in the world, and the repercussions of the horrific Beirut port explosion in August 2020.

More than eighty percent of the population now lives below the poverty line, with the local currency losing more than ninety percent of its value against the dollar. Many, especially young people, chose to emigrate with the inability of the political authority to provide salvage solutions and implement reforms to stop the bleeding.

Ten young artists, at the invitation of the curator Roy Dib, are presenting works that embody their own view of Beirut today, dealing with several issues, including the October 17 protests, the economic crisis, immigration, and the relationship with a city in decline.

Rawan Nassif (38 years old) is participating in the exhibition through a short documentary that presents the history of the Beiruti neighborhood of Msaitbeh, in which she grew up and then returned to it after two decades to care for her sick parents before they died this year.
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She tells Agence France-Presse that the film "shows the repercussions of the losses" to which Beirut was subjected, adding, "Beirut today mourns its dead and mourns all the opportunities it previously provided" to its residents and visitors, before it gradually lost them.

Raoul Mallat (28 years old) combines, in a short film, video clips drawn from the family archive during his childhood, and other recently captured clips of Beirut.

"This project helped me a lot to express my sadness over some aspects of my city that I will never find again," he told AFP during the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition will open its doors in the "Beit Beirut" building in Sodeco for a whole year, and will be accompanied by various cultural programs.

The three-storey building has a special memory in Lebanon. At the request of the Barakat family, the prominent architect Youssef Aftimos built, according to a distinctive design based on the open corner, the first floor of it in the twenties of the last century.

In later years, another architect added the upper two layers of it according to the same architectural style.

With the outbreak of the civil war, the Barakat family abandoned the elegant house on the street, which had turned into a main line of contact between the warring parties.

Snipers made their headquarters in the building and witnessed rounds of gunfire, dogfights and looting.

In 2017, the building was reopened and converted into a museum and cultural space, before it re-closed its doors in recent years.

Through the holes left by the gunmen in the walls of the building, footage of the protest demonstrations that took place in Lebanon for months, starting on October 17, 2019, can be viewed today through small screens installed in the openings of the walls.
In one of the rooms, worn furniture and destroyed belongings collected from the abandoned "Café de Roi" nightclub are displayed.

Rola Abu Darwish and Rana Qabout, through an artistic installation they participate in in the exhibition, simulate the idea of the ruins and the troubled existence of Lebanon.
"Beirut was built on rubble," Abu Darwish, 38, told AFP. "For me, the rubble is one of the most important elements of Beirut."
"It's part of where we live, how we live and who we are. And I feel like the direction we're taking today is going to cause more debris."