Art brings ‘peace’ to tense Lebanon districts
Alawite-majority Jabal Mohsen and Sunni district of Bab Al Tebbaneh sport new message on roofs
From the street below, it’s easy to miss the workers daubing rooftops as part of an ambitious art project in two battle-scarred neighbourhoods of Lebanon’s Tripoli.
But the Ashekman street art duo behind the project say that once they’re done, the pistachio-green rooftops they are painting will spell out the word salam — Arabic for “peace” — on a scale visible from space.
The project, three years in the making, is the brainchild of 34-year-old twins Mohammad and Omar Kabbani.
They researched and rejected multiple locations in their native Lebanon before settling on Tripoli. They chose a site spanning the Bab Al Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighbourhoods, which have fought successive rounds of armed clashes in recent years.
“We jumped from one location to another and finally we decided to do it here in Tripoli, specifically in Bab Al Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen, an area that has been in conflict,” said Omar Kabbani. “We’re painting the word salam across 85 building rooftops over 1.3 kilometres... to convey that people here are peaceful,” he said.
Peace has been elusive in Sunni-majority Bab Al Tebbaneh and the adjacent Alawite-majority Jabal Mohsen.
Fighters from the two areas have battled each other periodically for decades, and the war in neighbouring Syria, pitting a Sunni-dominated uprising against Alawite President Bashar Al Assad, further stirred existing enmities.
Fighting between the neighbourhoods has eased in the last two years.
Ashekman’s project runs on either side of the infamous Syria Street separating the two neighbourhoods. The duo hired workers from across the divide to help them complete the project.
“All of the workers live here in the neighbourhood, they lived the conflict, some of them got shot,” Omar Kabbani said.
“Two years ago they were hiding from bullets... now they’re painting their rooftops proudly.”
The brothers say they chose paint that will seal rooftops against rain and reflect ultra-violet rays, cooling the homes below.
Painstaking job
And in order to paint the rooftops, they had to negotiate with residents and often had to clear large amounts of trash and debris. “It took us around 10 days just to remove all the garbage on the rooftops,” said Kabbani.
Walid Abu Heit, 29, joined the project as a painter after hearing about it from March, a Lebanese NGO that has worked on reconciliation and rehabilitation in the rival neighbourhoods. He was born in Bab Al Tebbaneh and worked at a dairy, but lost his job after violence erupted. “It was very difficult when fighting broke out,” he said. “Darkness engulfed the neighbourhood. People stopped coming here.”
He and other workers lugged heavy tubs of paint up seven floors and began plastering a roof with the fluorescent green. “The word peace, it’s a great word... we haven’t seen it for a long time, now we’re seeing it again.”