PRETEND IT'S A POOL — Nathalie Harb

NATHALIE HARB

PRETEND IT’S A POOLSummer Commission, Beirut Art Center
June–September 2025

Year 2025
Beirut

Pretend It’s a Pool transforms the rooftop of Beirut Art Center into a constellation of small, improvised architectures, part found, part crafted, that invite visitors to inhabit the city differently. A tent becomes a sofa, a pool, an observatory; a seat frames a fragment of the skyline or gestures toward the sea. Each element alters how Beirut is seen and felt, creating a terrain where imagination and daily life overlap.

The project is rooted in Beirut’s history of makeshift living, when rooftops, abandoned gardens, and derelict flats became places for intimacy, secrecy, and dreaming. Here, those memories resurface as gestures of play and tenderness, claiming leisure and pleasure as quiet forms of resistance in a city shaped by scarcity and alertness.

Conceived by Nathalie Harb in collaboration with comic author and artist Joseph Kai and architect-researcher Lea Kayrouz, with contributions from local craftspeople and ateliers, Pretend It’s a Pool weaves together storytelling, domesticity, scenography, and commoning. Kai’s fragile and gently erotic drawings fold into the installation like a second skin, while Kayrouz’s research into domestic gestures and collective inhabitation infuses it with shared responsibility and imagination.

To pretend is to rehearse another reality. Suspended above Beirut, the rooftop becomes both a public and intimate space, a commons for gathering, resting, and reimagining futures.

Notturno Per La Terra

Land Iventory

Installation by Nathalie Harb in collaboration with Joseph Kai and Lea Kayrouz

Comissioned by Beirut Art Center

Curated by Ibrahim Nehme

Architectural Development: Alex Tzortsis de Paz

Wood Construction: Wood Factory

Tailoring: Loft Atelier, Dalal Salibi, Walid Srour, Bassam Khalil, Hassan Khalil, Mahmoud Hamami, Zahra Sadek

Steel Construction: Bashir Geagea

Fabrics: Rakha Textiles

Communication: Lama Zouein

Photography: Ieva Saudergaite

Special Thanks: Elie Chaker, Chantal Harb and Johnny Kayrouz

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