Street art brightens rundown Beirut suburb
BeiRuT: Seen from the highway out of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, the Ouzai neighbourhood is a jumble of haphazard construction, but venture inside and its low-slung buildings transform into street art canvases.
Artists taking part in the “Ouzville” project have painted walls in brilliant blues, reds, yellows and greens, adorning others with enormous murals, doodles, and cartoon characters.
The project is a breath of fresh air for Ouzai, a rundown and largely informal neighbourhood on the Mediterranean coast south of Beirut.
It was once a sleepy seaside village, with long stretches of beach that attracted sunbathers from miles away.
But during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, civilians displaced from elsewhere built slapdash housing in the area, often without permits, to accommodate their needs.
For decades, the neighbourhood’s chaos of jumbled buildings and the web of electrical wires hanging overhead have been among the first things visible from planes landing at Beirut airport.
Ayad Nasser, the property developer behind the Ouzville project, was born in Ouzai in 1970 but moved overseas during the civil war.
He said each landing at the nearby airport was a painful reminder of the neighbourhood’s decline.
“Every time, I was sad landing here. I said,‘I’m going to take care of Ouzai,’” he said.
Nasser launched his project 18 months ago, inviting Lebanese and international street artists to beautify parts of Beirut -- Ouzai in particular.
He worked with Ouzai residents to identify streets and buildings to be brightened up with bursts of colour.
Around 140 buildings have now been painted, with a handful done by the residents themselves.
From the street below her first-storey home, Jumana Yunis can be seen preparing green beans for lunch, framed by a large window in the bright yellow outer wall of her building.
Below the window is a large mural of a girl’s face, rendered in serene shades of turquoise and royal blue.
At 38, Yunis has spent her whole life in Ouzai and is raising her four children in the home where she was born.
For her, the Ouzville project has “brought joy” to a neighbourhood she loves.
”You’re happy when you go outside and see the colours, even if sometimes it’s strange. You feel that this is a new neighbourhood,” she said.
Rania al-Halabi, an amateur artist participating in the project, admits that Ouzai is “an area that we usually only enter with a car, in the best of circumstances”.
But she said the project inspired her from the minute she heard about it.
“Colour can make everything in life beautiful, and this is something that will certainly change everyone’s lives,” she said, as she daubed green paint around a stark face several metres high.