Rooftop Garden

From the Rooftops is a mutual aid initiative in the form of a community-run garden on the art center’s roof. The project aims to function as a replicable prototype for urban farming that can be scaled up or down depending on varying needs. Based on horizontal and decentralized forms of organizing, the garden will be a collective labour around which to imagine an economic logic alternative to the monocultural and monopolistic ideals that have brought us to the brink. Relying more on sharing than supply and demand, the project aims to galvanize local and cooperative initiatives.

Located on the rooftop of the Beirut Art Center, the garden is imagined as a motor to weave a network of sustenance that connects the current momentum of revolutionary groups tending to the urgency of the right to food and food sovereignty with the farming history of the Jisr-el-Wati neighborhood. Mixing artistic, scientific, and academic modalities, the project aims to build a deeper understanding of structural problems in the country and the conditions they create in hopes to proliferate alternative micro-economies.