Dear Hamra Street,
I have visited you a million times before, yet allow me to tell you how seductive you look tonight.
I am looking forward to turn you my home once more.
And never before, as you may have noticed, has home been such an elusive dream. A bit like those rare smiles that used to come from the heart.
Many things have happened since I last saw you a few months ago.
But things are always happening around here, aren’t they?
It is an exhibition, you see, which led me once more to you.
A fine evening made of sounds of passers by, as they roam life so silently, it is almost deafening.
We are all looking for a place called home.
And that couldn’t be more true for artist Sara Badr Schmidt.
In her solo exhibition In Agial Gallery:
WE LEFT HOME…
BUT WHAT IS HOME
She searches, as we all do, inside of her.
For it is a deeply personal experience, that feeling called home.
And that is how it should be, really.
Gallery owner and Patron of the Arts, Saleh Barakat, feels this lady “delves into her intimate world with the precision of a surgeon, the tenderness of a parent”.
Ah! The intimate world.
What a merciless enemy that could be. Homes, too, are usually merciless in the secrets engraved in their walls.
“Where is your place in this unfolding story?”, Barakat asks the visitor.
And in the background, Hamra Street dances to the rhythm of whatever is left of the street goers’ souls.
It is a very complex notion, of home.
Did anyone ever belong anywhere, dear Hamra Street?
The artist herself says:
“This project is about being torn from one’s place. This project is about the violence of war suffered in childhood and its repercussions on the construction of a being”.
War has visited us a few times.
And for some, Its shadows linger still in what remains of us. Perhaps the fading photograph of exile?
“This installation is being presented by galleries in Beirut, Paris, and Stockholm. These cities having been the stopping – off points for the various journeys I made as a child”, she continues.
May I ask you, dear Hamra Street, of your own Journeys as a child?
But perhaps that is too personal a question. And we must refrain from delving too deep on our first few encounters.
Months have passed, and we are almost strangers once again, you and I.
“This project took root in me when, a few years ago, my 2 childhood homes were destroyed. This loss made me realize that the physical materiality of these places was all the more important as the war has forced me into repeated departures throughout my youth. I realized the extent to which they represented 2 pillars, deep points of attachment, whose foundations came to life on very specific lands”.
Sara Badr Schmidt lost her homes, and that loss made her realize how “fortunate I had been to grow up in such beautiful spaces”.
Most of the houses we all rested our dreams in, have turned into mere memories.
And what are memories but the faint sound of a broken heart?
The houses Sara Badr Schmidt continue to inhabit her.
And for this evening, Dear Hamra Street, allow me to inhabit you. For I too have lost my home.
But then again, haven’t all at one point or another?
AR 
EN