Southern Lebanon contains a fresh and palpable memory of last summer's war: scorched hills, maimed towns, and battered roadways. The beach is no exception, its waters and rocks still heavily polluted with oil from a tanker bombed by the Israeli military.
La Voile Bleue lies in the string of beach clubs that line the southern coast. They are major summer destinations, attracting the upper classes, tourists, and hoards of Lebanese from the diaspora. Beach club culture consists mainly of sunbathing around a swanky pool with an Al Mezza beer—mixed with lemon juice and rimmed with salt. These clubs are not vibrant markets of public discourse.
On the one hand, Sahra Khat Ahmar reclaimed this place. Under the guise of night, it channeled the public sphere of Beirut southwards into an intellectually vapid party zone. Where, hours earlier, bodies had been stewing in the sun, there was now theatre. In that theatrical moment, the pool, the palm trees, and the dim lights spotting the coastal mountains in the distance coalesced to form a mise-en-scène. Similar to Bernard Khoury's club B018 (an underground after hours night club full of coffins), Sahra Khat Ahmar defamiliarized the beach club as place, rendering La Voile Bleue an arena for a communal consciousness.
On the other hand, staging the event in a beach club ridiculed the very substance and meaning of elections, reducing the political process to little more than a pretext to perform and to party.
After all, it was a carnival: a comic book hero sported a white body suit; poetry recitations peppered a non-theatrical social matrix; trance rhythms gave way to capoeira cadences and dance; pink and blue balloons floated about; and the fool had the chance to play king for the day.
So, elections became a moment to suspend socio-political norms, an opportunity to unbound performance from reality, a chance to transgress presupposed frames. No longer a formalized process perpetuating the systems of power in the body politic, the election begot an almost anarchic state of being, a carnival.
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