For our fourth micro-commission installment, titled The Bridge Cuts Ever So Close to My Balcony, we have invited 4 artists to create a short (up to 10 min) site-responsive sound piece that channels two architectural archetypes via a third.
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At the Beirut Art Center, we have come to see the metal passageway that connects the East and West sections of our mezzanine as a strange hybrid. At once bridge and balcony, the suspended structure feels like it has been swallowed up from the noisy outdoors and cocooned into private property. While these two typologies have often come into near collision in the ill-planned urban sprawl of Beirut, they have also formed a strange sonic and spatial spectrum of participation in the major events that gripped the city throughout the past couple of years. At times propelled onto the streets, at others retracted into domestic space, the inhabitants of Beirut concocted collective sonic practices: they made deafening noise by hitting rocks and projectiles on the metal handlebars of the bridges downtown. Then when retreating, they banged on pots or clapped for healthcare workers from their verandas.
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We have asked 4 artists to use our metal passageway as an instrument to channel, reflect, embody, conjure, pulsate, vibrate, record, reanimate and repatriate our little musified artifact, to resuscitate it with the echoes and vantage points of these last seemingly endless couple of years.

This micro-commission was made with the support of 21dB Acoustic Solutions.