images | text

Marwa Arsanios
Born in 1978 in Washington DC, USA / Lives in Beirut, Lebanon

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What is the origin of your interest in the Acapulco Beach Resort in Beirut?

Marwa Arsanios (MA): It all started with a fascination with Chalet Raja Saab, as an object. It is the oldest and main house of the Acapulco Beach Resort (a semipublic beach club). Its peculiar design looks bastardized in terms of architectural influences and doesn’t have a specific design reference. It was my entry point into a larger investigation of the urban transformation that occurred in the southern coastal suburbs of Beirut after 1976, when refugees from south of Lebanon started squatting there and making over the once-glamorous beach resorts into their own homes. Chalet Raja Saab was designed in 1950 for a single family and now hosts four. I view the house as a space of conflict where different histories clash, and the violence plays out in the architecture.

AP: How did the archive project evolve?

MA: It started with a black-andwhite photo of the house taken in 1950 by the architect himself, Ferdinand Dagher. Following different threads, I gathered an archive of printed matter, moving images, and voice recordings of people who had lived in, visited, or seen the house— from Dagher to Raja Saab (the person who originally commissioned the house) to Pépé (a famous restaurant owner who transformed the place into the Acapulco Beach Resort in 1952). Also films that were shot there, and photos of the families that live there now.

AP: Modern ruins in the periphery often have European references, so it is interesting to see how Mexico appears as a tropical model of farawayidealized leisure.

MA: Yes, but at first I didn’t know about the Acapulco Beach Resort, I only discovered during my research that the houses were transformed by Pépé. He had lived in Mexico (where there is a big Lebanese diaspora) when he was young, and when he  returned in the early 1950s he liked  the “eccentric” quality of the building and transformed it into the Acapulco Beach Resort. Thus images of Mexico were somehow imported and rescued from Acapulco rather than imagined or fantasized. For me it was interesting to look at the details of this restaging, for example through the events that took place (“sombrero night” and cockfighting), the tropical plants used for decoration, the reappropriated imagery in the advertisements, and a certain graphic language that comes from sign painting. People were living a fantasy of another place, participating actively in the thematic parties here. South America was being discovered through many images, which traveled and were restaged here. Perhaps it was important to look for a “third world” brotherhood, for new models of life and architecture outside Europe. Dagher was fascinated by Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect, and is said to have played an important role in inviting him to Lebanon to construct the Tripoli International Fair site. Some details of the house were influenced by “tropical modernism.” The house was calling for Acapulco to come and inhabit it