(Photo by Paul Gorbould via Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)
Note from the author: I finished writing this piece the week before the US/Israel attacks on Iran. The catastrophic violence and the displacement crisis currently unfolding in Lebanon did not occur in a vacuum. This violence is yet another event in a series of events that have been testing Beirut’s population – and Lebanon in general – to its core. Understanding what happened before can help us understand the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding now.
In 2021, visual artist and photographer Ara Oshagan described returning to his childhood home in Beirut. In the sensory-rich, nostalgic ode to his city, he described seeing “narrow chaotic neighborhoods falling apart, crippled by generations of violence, external and internal; the rush of life, stench of kebab and trash, noise, dirt, wafting music and laughter … men, women, children, ghosts at once familiar and utterly foreign; a community, breathing and vibrant, defiant; a place, an incessant undying past.”
Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, has experienced conflict and rebuilding throughout most of its modern history. Although Beirut is not new to conflict, the last seven years have witnessed multiple crises, one after the other, including the 2019 economic collapse, the 2020 Beirut Blast, and the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel in the aftermath of October 7. These cascading events have had a profound impact on Beiruti society.
Finding ‘Points of Reference’
The arts have long acted as a lens through which the Lebanese population has processed chaos and safeguarded its memories. They offer an intimate space to communicate identity and vulnerability, particularly when so-called objective descriptions come up short. In Jocelyn Saab’s 1982 documentary of the 15-year-long Lebanese Civil War, Roger Assaf’s script, translated from French by Zeina Hashem Beck, offered a poetic description of the effect of the war and destruction on the Lebanese people:
it is my identity it’s the same for everyone
it’s the identity of all the Lebanese who lose their houses their belongings
furthermore when we don’t know our points of reference
we no longer know who we are
Assaf’s script highlights the importance of infrastructure and living memory in identity formation and maintenance. Today, in a city where so many physical and institutional structures have faltered, even the most ordinary objects begin to act as alleged points of reference. Under pressure from state failure and urban destruction, the memories once held safe in buildings shift into smaller, more portable forms. Community is safeguarded through objects and routines, and what was once considered common can gain symbolic weight.
Among these modest points of reference, one stands out: the chair. As formal communal spaces disappear and frequent electricity blackouts push people outside, chairs spill out onto sidewalks, transforming the streets into impromptu spaces of connection and closeness. Chairs have become synonymous with community. And empty chairs have a way of confronting us with what is missing.
In Beirut, an artist is using their Instagram account, @chairsofbeirut, as an archive of the city’s communal spaces, providing an intimate perspective on how Beiruti society is coping with the tumultuous events of the past seven years.
Crisis in Beirut
Infrastructure plays a central role in the crisis in Lebanon. According to the World Bank, the country is likely immersed in one of the top three most severe economic and financial crises of the last 150 years. This crisis, which peaked in October 2019, led to a complete economic implosion. Between 2018 and 2020, Lebanon’s GDP fell from $55 billion to $33 billion, and its poverty rate skyrocketed to 85-90% by the end of 2021. And although the economy fully collapsed in 2019, the crisis has its origins in the structural mismanagement and corruption by the post-Civil War regime.
In October, fueled by anger at what has become known as a WhatsApp Tax, people took to the streets, demanding that their politicians step down. However, this tax was the trigger of the anger, not the sole cause. The protests occurred against a backdrop of frustration with the government’s clientelism, continuous political deadlocks, and inability to provide structural solutions to an economy that had been declining since the late 90s.
As public trust evaporated, people rushed to withdraw their dollar savings. The banks found they did not have enough liquid dollars to meet the demand for withdrawals. For years, the Lebanese pound had been artificially stabilized to USD, relying on constant inflows of US currency. However, these inflows have been slowing, and the central bank has been using depositors’ money to finance government debt.
In response to the mass withdrawals, banks closed for two weeks, restricting people’s access to their money. The Lebanese pound devalued immensely, businesses closed, and families were plunged into poverty. By June 2020, the Lebanese currency had lost 70% of its value. Society was swept into a crisis that deepened even more with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Beirut Blast
Beiruti society did not have the chance to catch its breath, because on August 4th, 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history shook the city to its foundations. The Beirut Port Explosion, or Beirut Blast, killed 218 people, injured roughly 7000, and displaced over 300,000. Half the city was damaged.
The cause was the detonation of approximately 2750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate that had been improperly stored in port warehouses. The disaster placed enormous strain on Beirut’s healthcare system, which had already been struggling to cope with the pandemic’s effects.
(Photo by Mahdi Shojaeian via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0 DEED)
Rebuilding and restoring the city while in the midst of a pandemic and an economic downturn was incredibly difficult. Political disagreement rendered the official response lacking. And while formal, government-run reconstruction efforts were in shambles, people and NGOs took initiative to help their neighbours and clear the rubble. However, without clear leadership, the quality and speed of reconstruction efforts varied by neighbourhood, and the results remain deeply unequal.
For the past five years, both the international and Lebanese communities have called for investigations into the causes of the Beirut Blast. However, the authorities have actively obstructed and derailed these investigations, seeking to evade accountability. This lack of justice is building psychological strain on victims and their families as they rebuild and economically fend for themselves.
An Unstable Region
The uncertainty and havoc are not limited to actors within Lebanon’s borders. Regional instability, fueled by the October 7 attacks and Israel’s genocidal response, has spilt over into Lebanon. Hezbollah, as an armed external branch of Iran’s military, exchanged fire with Israel nearly immediately after the October 7 attacks.
Israel’s response has been swift and unforgiving. Tensions rose and came to a head in September 2024, when Israel launched a coordinated attack on Hezbollah operatives by rigging their pagers with explosives. As Hezbollah reeled from the attack, Israel started a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and bombed Beirut’s Shi’a-dominated suburbs.
Despite a ceasefire that was instated on November 27th, 2024, Israel continues to launch nearly daily attacks on Lebanon’s southern border. Escalating violence between a US-backed Israel and Iran keeps the Lebanese population in a state of anxiety.
Coping with Chaos
In the last seven years, Beiruti society has felt the ground fall from beneath its feet. However, it takes more than statistics to understand the effect this has on a community. In an essay written for Guernica Magazine, called “A Man Made of Dust”, Tarek Abi Samra recalls his interactions with a man called Beshara, who sat on a bench close to his home.
Samra speaks of Beshara’s temporal paralysis, his inability to live anywhere but in his memories. It was “as though the roar of the port explosion hadn’t shaken his body. As though he didn’t now hear the silence of the streets.”
After the disillusionment of the fruitless October 2019 protests and the Beirut Blast, Beshara remained confined to a bench on Mar Elias Street. When Samra asked him what he thought about the parliamentary elections of 2022, Beshara simply said, “Let’s see what comes of them. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sitting right here, and I’m going nowhere.”
The regional instability also weighs heavily on Beirut’s society. In October 2024, Amal Ghandour wrote an essay for the Markaz Review in which she interrogated her country and region’s relationship with Israel and the continued tensions. “We live uncertain of who and what we are and shall become in a terribly frayed and threadbare universe … this world that we once understood implicitly, notwithstanding its absurdities, we tread gingerly now.”
In the suburbs of Beirut, communities mourn their martyrs and try to make sense of the suffering. Despite the horrors of recent years, they remain hopeful and try to focus on the future.
In spring 2025, anthropologist Sabah Haider documented her time in Dahiye, a neighborhood Israel considers a ‘Hezbollah stronghold’: “As I move through the devastated streets and neighborhoods of Dahiye — streets that were once bubbling with life, with people coming and going and young men zipping about on scooters — I see mostly women of all ages, trying to reconstitute the things of life, walking past buildings reduced to rubble.” Although they know that war is always looming, they continue to pick up the pieces of what was destroyed.
The Poetry of Empty Chairs
As a crisis destabilizes time, it leaves a mark on the smallest architectures of life. Across Beirut, chairs remain scattered on sidewalks, beachfronts, and balconies, waiting to be sat on. The Instagram account @chairsofbeirut captures these objects in isolation. The account finds chairs in various states: some appearing to have just been sat on, others covered in dust. Missing limbs and a background of rubble convey the city’s injuries. They register the stress placed on communal life.
The account acts as a type of photojournalism devoid of people. The absence is deliberate. Two empty chairs suggest a conversation paused, a conversation expecting to be held. A chair sitting alone evokes waiting. By not including people, these chairs show what crisis so often erases: the feeling of sitting together, of taking space without urgency.
(Photo by Terry Narcissan Tsui via Pexels/Public Domain)
Chairs, and particularly the unassuming white plastic monobloc, act as a form of social infrastructure. Across Beirut’s neighbourhoods, this accessible, affordable furniture blurs the boundaries between private and public life. They symbolize social gathering and hanging out, and are markers of human behaviour. Whereas humans can sit without chairs, chairs have no meaning without their human counterparts.
Monobloc’s of Resilence
It is precisely because of the affordability and approachability of these chairs that they serve as an improvised form of infrastructure. Infrastructure tends to imply something permanent, something immovable. The monobloc is special because it offers the opposite: mobility. They can be rearranged and replaced. Even when buildings, power grids, and institutions fail, two chairs can be placed across from one another. This makes them a powerful form of social infrastructure. As objects, they are disposable, but as social forms, they endure.
Subtly, @chairsofbeirut reveals both the exhaustion felt by Beiruti society and its resolve to continue. Not because rebuilding is beautiful, but because it is necessary. As Sabah Haider remarked, “I am reminded that resilience — a word that is too frequently used by Western media to describe that steadfastness of the Lebanese — is not a choice made by them. In the absence of choices, ‘resilience’ is a necessity. It’s called survival with conviction and commitment.”
In one post, @chairsofbeirut shows dusty monobloc chairs with legs sewn back on with twine. Despite the crises that envelop the Beiruti social landscape, the account uses art to resist the erasure of societal rituals.
A chair does not rebuild a city, but it does convey what Beshara said: “I’m sitting right here and I’m going nowhere.” The chair marks where conversations will return, where communities will sit together once more, and where life will resume.
Edited by Gabrielle Andrychuk
