Five years have now passed since the tragic Beirut port explosion. While many Lebanese have moved on, those who lost friends and family are still fighting for justice for their loved ones.
One such person in Annie Vartivarian, who lost her daughter Gaia Fodoulian in the explosion. To honour Gaia’s unfulfilled dream of opening a creative platform, Vartivarian, a gallerist herself, launched Art Design Lebanon in 2020 and has since organised many exhibitions.
Next month, she’ll be publishing a book which documents and shares the name with the 2023 exhibition, Beirut Blast and Other Stories, by artist and journalist Cherine Yazbeck, serving as a reference and a reminder. The exhibition gathered documentary storytelling, forensic photography, architectural modelling, collage, audio installations, satellite imagery and other media, traversing the trauma and grief of the victim’s families and survivors, through artistic expression.
For Vartivarian, it keeps the issue present in people’s minds, lest they forget that the investigation has stalled and still no one has been held to account. Gaia’s sister, Mariana Fodoulian, is president of the Beirut Port Explosion Victims' Families Association, which is still pursuing accountability.
“As Lebanese, we’re very proud saying that we turn the page, we go forward, we forget everything and call it resilience,” Vartivarian tells The National. “Unfortunately, this year, I noticed too many people telling me to ‘forget it, this is in past’ or they say that they don't want to remember or think about the blast. They don't want to see photos of it.
“Instead, I think now is the right time to publish this book, because this was a catastrophe we should never forget. I purposely waited a few years to publish it, because I knew this would happen.
“For so long this has been the reason why things are always repeated in the country, because I think it's a collective attitude to just ‘move on’ without solving anything, and it's been like that for almost for 50 years, since the Civil War.”
The book will take readers through the nine chapters covered in the exhibition, including interviews, artworks and a breakdown of the events leading up to the explosion, the immediate aftermath and the road to recovery.
It also includes parts of the 30-minute documentary Beirut Port Blast Stories, which focuses on the stories of the families of five people who lost their lives. Through links in the book, people can access the videos and sound installations from the exhibition.
There are close-ups of an installation of 21 forensic colour photographs Yazbeck took at the foot of the silos, displaying the traces left by the explosion; as well as satellite imagery from before and after the destruction.
“The exhibition was three years of research on the ground in the port… and a deep dive into the hearts and the minds of these families of victims,” Yazbeck tells The National.
“It also really looks at the silos themselves, and what they represented. They were remarkable pieces of architecture that were feeding not only Lebanon but also Syria – millions of people. In a few seconds, it was all destroyed due to mismanagement and negligence.
“One of the important artworks was the model of the silos before and after, reproduced on a 1:200 scale. This was a year of work by a talented student at Alba university who I took to the silos to analyse and reproduce them, with a little artistic flair.
“I wanted people to be able to move around the silos, as they were and as they are now, so that they could see them close up and touch them.
“This way they’re preserved, because we don’t know what will happen to the remains of the silos. There are always fires in the silos, because there’s still some wheat inside. With the rain they ferment and then the heat, it’s almost like little explosions and they catch fire. One day they might just fall apart.”
Yazbeck was fascinated by the silos' architecture long before the blast, and so a host of pre-explosion shots she had taken over the years were part of the show, now to be printed in the book.
While the book will act as a permanent chronicle of the exhibition, it’s intended more as a statement, and a refusal to let the horrific event fade into the background.
“You continue to live without them, especially me,” Vartivarian says. “I lost my daughter, but I'm continuing to live and work. But we have to not forget what happened. We have to fight to find the truth, so it is never repeated.
“It’s not just about those who died. I know of a family who lost their son, and his sister now has heart problems from the shock. And there is Lara Hayek, who is still in a coma. No one thinks about Lara.”
