The Secret Garden: “How Horsh Beirut Changed my Perception of the City and Native Flora” with Nour
The summer of 2014 was the first time I went to Horsh Beirut in my life. Everytime I go, there’s always a feeling of something being strange. I used to hear about Horsh Beirut from many different people. From one end, my mother told me they would have Eid celebrations at Horsh Beirut, so they went when they were young. There were violent altercations that happened there during the civil war. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Beirut, the occupation burned three quarters of the trees there. So since then, and even after the war, the municipality kept Horsh Beirut closed, supposedly for maintenance and reforestation. They kept it closed under the excuse that we–the people— wouldn’t know how to keep it kept. As I was growing up, there were many stories about how people needed to ask for approval from the municipality to enter the premises. Even then, you had to be of a certain age, have a foreign passport—things that made it just impossible for people to enter. After several major campaigns, there was major pressure on the municipality to reopen Horsh Beirut. In the summer of 2014, I learned they were going to open Horsh Beirut for a few days. Once I entered, I didn’t even understand where I was. It didn’t feel real. How is this even possible? I was looking at the city from inside this place—a place that felt like a blackhole on a map to me all these years. In my mind, there was a feeling that my body was doing the impossible in being here. They reopened Horsh Beirut on a more permanent basis in 2015, with many weird rules of course. But they did open it, and so more ideas of the public space began integrating into my imagination.
I was trying to conceptualize our relationship as human beings with the [strange] — how that feeling is present in our daily lives. My entering of Horsh Beirut changed how I perceive the city of Beirut. I had a perception of the city—and I still do— that it is a cement city. There’s something quite savage in how some buildings were built, there’s no proper urban planning. When I entered Horsh Beirut, the scene in front of me did not fit with my perception of Beirut. But my perception changed. I became obsessed with the plants in Horsh Beirut’s biosphere. When I exited Horsh Beirut, I began noticing Beirut’s plants. There are quite a lot, but they’re just not taken care of or regulated.I noticed them first in the park, then everywhere. In sidewalk cracks, in parking lots, growing wild on balconies.
I saw the plants everywhere. I began taking photos of them. The more I looked at them, I’d sense that they were strange. I became more inquisitive about the plants, and I’d collect botanical illustrations. Little by little, they kept on looking so strange to me, and I began imagining them as creatures coming from some odd place and invading the city slowly. That became the premise of my film, The Secret Garden. I finished its production in 2023 and I began imagining narratives in some version of Horsh Beirut that has been closed for so long, it began developing its own set of endemic flora and fauna that was never touched by any human being. I imagined all plants in Beirut originated from this “secret garden” that I was imagining. I collaborated with Carine Doumit, co-writer and editor of The Secret Garden, to piece together the film based on this tension between the documentation of plants in Beirut and the fictional narrative of a secret garden that one day explodes and scatters all its plants on the city. Once that happens in the film, all inhabitants become inquisitive of these new plants. The film follows the journey of two characters who try to investigate the origin of these weird plants.
Ségolène Ragu
Ségolène Ragu is a French-Lebanese photographer based in Beirut. Her long-term projects explore youth, the memory of places, and how crises and war shape everyday life in Lebanon.
- Ségolène Ragu
- Ségolène Ragu
- Ségolène Ragu
