Restoration of cultural heritage in Beirut
Key takeaways
The project offered a great opportunity to start a deep exchange of knowledge, skills and experiences - offering fieldwork, workshops, teaching activities and conferences - among different Swiss and Lebanese partners. From Switzerland, lecturers, researchers and students from SUPSI had the opportunity to exchange with partners of different educational institutions, exploring the relationship between the professionals of cultural heritage and civil society.
The project offered a great opportunity to start a deep exchange of knowledge, skills and experiences - offering fieldwork, workshops, teaching activities and conferences - among different Swiss and Lebanese partners. From Switzerland, lecturers, researchers and students from SUPSI had the opportunity to exchange with partners of different educational institutions, exploring the relationship between the professionals of cultural heritage and civil society.
The explosion that hit Beirut on 4 August 2020 had a devastating effect on the city and its inhabitants. The material and immaterial damages of an event of this scale require an unimaginable effort to recover acceptable living conditions. In the recovery process, actions aimed at the restoration and care of the cultural heritage can play a fundamental role in giving life and dignity back to a displaced population. Those who can have moved away from the city to join their families in other parts of the country or abroad. Beirut is losing its inhabitants and their know-how. Most of the historic buildings are destroyed and abandoned. Many owners do not have the means for restoration. The alternative is to abandon the houses and sell them to estate developers. On the other hand, several universities offer degree programs in cultural heritage, and several NGOs are active in the country to promote recovery.
The project enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration, creating an international network for the care of cultural heritage, developing new methods, techniques & approaches, know-how and skills to support disaster recovery (from emergency intervention to preservation and restoration) and promoting awareness of the values of cultural heritage among local people, contributing to rebuilding a sense of place. The project was developed by Prof. Giacinta Jean (conservation architect), Giovanni Nicoli (expert in the conservation of plaster decorations) and Giulia Russo (fully qualified conservator-restorer of decorated architectural surfaces) from the Conservation-Restoration unit of SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland) in collaboration with many Lebanese partners.
The Leading House MENA supported the exchanges between the different partners and helped to promote the public initiatives by bringing them to the attention of a wider audience. Two events open to the public were organised during the project: on 5.07.2022, the hybrid seminar “Building a Road Map through disaster recovery” (Beirut and online) to channel the initiatives that emerged in the process of disaster recovery into a common, useful exchange of knowledge via education and practice; on 3.04.2023, the online conference “The role of memory in heritage conservation” tackling the dilemma of reconstructing places “as they were – where they were”; or trying to integrate the memory of the disruptive event into a new project, considering it as part of the history that over the centuries has made the building or surface what it is now.
The project offered a great opportunity to start a deep exchange of knowledge, skills and experiences – offering fieldwork, workshops, teaching activities and conferences – among different Swiss and Lebanese partners. From Switzerland, lecturers, researchers and students from SUPSI had the opportunity to exchange with partners of different educational institutions, exploring the relationship between the professionals of cultural heritage and civil society. Our activities have been developed in strong collaboration with Dr. Yasmine Makaroun from the Center of Restoration and Conservation, Faculty of Fines Arts and Architecture, Lebanese University; Prof. Joseph Zaarour, Head of Conservation-Restoration of Cultural Property Program, Holy Spirit University Kaslik; Prof. Nayla Tamraz, Director of the Master and PhD program in curatorial studies, University of Saint-Joseph; Prof. Joseph Rustom from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts; Prof. Nadine Panayot from the American University of Beirut, the Swiss Embassy and the RestArt Beirut Foundation.
We organised a five-week summer school inside the wonderful Sursock Palace in order to plan and execute – with Swiss and Lebanese students and lecturers – emergency interventions to secure the plaster decorations, developing new methods and techniques; two conferences open to the public; lectures and discussions on preventive conservation and collection management. All these activities aim to develop knowledge and applied research on the role of cultural heritage in education, research and everyday life.
The work on such a rich and complex issue requires the joint efforts of a relevant number of people. All the different initiatives must be well coordinated, and every contribution must be part of a whole conservation-restoration program. We hope our mission in Beirut could provide concrete help in transforming an emergency situation into a cultural project, activating training activities for local professionals, and collaborating with those already involved in recovering this precious cultural heritage at different levels (architectural, technical, interpretative and curatorial). For us, coming from a much quieter cultural and political background than the Lebanese one, working in Beirut represents a major cultural challenge to test our methodological and operational approaches and to adapt them in a completely different context.
