An installation by Nathalie Harb in collaboration with Joseph Kai and Lea Kayrouz    

June–September 2025

A kit of found and crafted objects unfolds across Beirut Art Center’s rooftop, forming a constellation of improvised micro-architectures that blur the line between function and fantasy. These structures recall the resourcefulness of makeshift appropriations, gestures of adaptation and desire that have long animated Beirut’s urban landscape. Shaped by what is available, and by what might be needed in the future, the kit proposes a space of pleasure-resistance: a scenography of possible worlds, elusive uses, and ephemeral joy.

Here, we stage intimacy and improvisation. A tent becomes a sofa, a pool, an observatory. The rooftop transforms into a terrain for lounging, reflecting, screening, gathering. It gestures toward the sea, always near, always unreachable, while fig trees and wild herbs stand as quiet witnesses to a beach imagined.

This project is a love letter to Beirut. It emerges from a deep, bodily relationship with the city, its rhythms, ruptures, scars and reinventions. Inspired by a time when rooftops, barren gardens, and derelict flats offered shelter for love and dreaming, this kit invites visitors to rediscover the city through acts of play and tenderness. Here, make-believe becomes a means to rehearse another reality. We invite you to pretend: pretend it’s a pool, pretend you can see the sea, pretend the air is soft, that time is slow.

In a city that demands constant alertness, claiming leisure becomes an act of defiance. The rooftop becomes a choreographed commons, where performance and repose are one and the same.

Commissioned by Beirut Art Center, this project brings together artist Nathalie Harb in collaboration with comic author and artist Joseph Kai and architect and researcher Lea Kayrouz, with contributions from Wood Factory craftsmen, Loft Atelier tailors, Rakha Textiles, and Tinol. Harb’s muItidisciplinary practice, centered on well-being, spatial justice, and rethinking public space, guides this project through a deep attentiveness to the context, collaboration, and subtle needs and nuances of the body in public space. Together with her collaborators, Harb proposes alternative ways of being together, spaces that offer rest without retreat, intimacy without enclosure, and the possibility of belonging within a fragmented cityscape.

Pretend It’s a Pool is scenography as an essential kit, an homage to the city, and an open-ended proposal. A public space suspended between past and possibility, memory and invention. A place to pause, to imagine, to fall in love again.