Just hours before I sat down on a call with Creative Space Beirut’s (CSB) founder Sarah Hermez and strategic advisor and board member Waleed Jarjouhi, Lebanon had been bombed by Israel once more, killing at least five people in the southern town of Nabatieh, including the town’s mayor. Hermez and Jarjouhi are understandably shaken by the spiralling crisis which has already displaced an estimated 1.2 million people within Lebanon, but display a remarkable steadfastness in continuing their work to support young creatives in Beirut. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in an hour,” Jarjouhi tells Dazed. “Just yesterday, we got assurances from the US that Israel is not to touch Beirut, and then we woke up to three bombs in the southern suburbs. We need to continue, and we need to be part of the solution.”
“It’s really important that, during times of war, we safeguard our culture, our design, our creative community – this is the heart and soul of what Beirut is. If we don’t take care of it, then it will be erased,” adds Hermez, and it is this cherishing of Lebanon’s unique cultural heritage that has remained at the centre of CSB’s mission since it was founded in 2011. The prestigious design school offers an all-expenses-paid (including housing and equipment costs) three-year design and fashion course for talented yet often disadvantaged young people from across Lebanon. The program is selective, with only five to ten students being accepted, but unwaveringly focused on real-world impact, with 94 per cent of students making it into the fashion and design industries.
“The majority of our students are clearly queer in a country that has regressed a lot. They show up as misfits with a lot of trauma and they find themselves beyond just design, they grow as people. It’s about finding their voice in the context of their country and not having to move west” – Waleed Jarjouhi
“There are three core pillars of what CSB has to offer,” explains Jarjouhi, “Obviously, the education. Then, we talk about the design ecosystem itself, and disrupting it in a small way in Lebanon. But the third, which is really important, is alumni support. Some of our students are clearly queer in a country that has regressed a lot. They show up as misfits with their own unique sets of traumas and they find themselves beyond just design, they grow as people. It’s about finding their voice in the context of their country and not having to move west.”
But this trailblazing path hasn’t been straightforward in a country such as Lebanon which, for all its raw talent and individuals who have settled from across the SWANA region, has undergone a significant period of upheaval during CSB’s lifetime. “Every time you take five steps forward, you take ten steps back,” says Hermez, “In the last five years we’ve gone through uprisings, revolution, COVID. When the port explosion happened in Beirut [in 2020]our school was in the centre of the city. We had to move and rebuild everything.”
Asserting creativity in the face of adversity has practically become modus operandi for the CSB team and their students, who are already brainstorming design solutions to the challenges that Lebanon’s recent upheaval poses. “There are a million displaced people in Lebanon, so we are looking to create some sort of utility transformative wear,” Hermez explains. “A poncho that can turn into a blanket, for example, that can then be distributed to thousands of the displaced population. Apart from creative education, it’s very important that, as designers, we adapt to current needs and that we are part of problem solving.”
The school had previously raised funds for operation through throwing events, selling their work and securing international grants, but all of this has had to come to a stop with the latest war that has spilled over from Israel’s onslaught on Palestine. With their new intake of students preparing to begin the course, CSB now faces uncertainty as to how they can proceed. Three of this years’ students have already had to drop out due to fallout from the recent waves of bombing. It is in this context that CSB has issued a fundraising appeal to help continue their work.
In the meantime, however, it is the resoluteness of Hermez, Jarjouhi and the rest of CSB’s team and alumni that shines through. Despite the nationwide terror that had been unleashed only hours before, the pair are still able to tap into the creativity that has already carried them so far. “It’s absurd, you start knowing the difference between the sound of a bomb, the buzzing of a drone, and whether it’s the sound barrier they’ve just broken,” Jarjouhi tells Dazed with a smile that seems hard-fought for. “But, because you’re human, you start poking fun at these things. You make jokes. You make memes. You start naming your neighbourhood drones.”
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